BY KAREN BOSSICK
There’s a new way to support local restaurants and order meals online. You may even get home delivery, in some cases.
5BFlavor.com just launched.
So far, 13 restaurants are listed on the website, which was patterned by Tracy Lyon after similar websites she used while living near Seattle.
Click on the restaurant of your choice, and you will learn what you can order off the menu, as well as wine and beer, pantry staples for purchase if the restaurant is offering those during the coronavirus pandemic.
Each listing tells the current status of pickup, delivery and in-person dining. And each has buttons, of course, to place your order.
Among those listed is Café Della, which is offering free weekly delivery valley-wide for orders of $100 or more, as well as prepared dinners, local produce, eggs, meats, baked goods and grocery staples. The restaurant is also still doing its Family Meal program where customers can buy one for themselves and Della gifts one, said Liza Green.
Another is Wiseguy Pizza Pie, which recently resumed delivering out of all three of its locations in Ketchum, Hailey and Boise.
Wiseguy closed for three weeks at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the Wood River Valley to ensure its employees, their families and their customers were protected and healthy.
The Boise Wiseguy also has donated a lot of pies during the pandemic. It donated 20 pizzas to Interfaith Sanctuary. And in partnership with Old Boise Wiseguy provided meals for 25 people once a week for a month at Ronald McDonald House. Additionally, the pizza company partnered with Wall 2 Wall Commercial Flooring to deliver pizzas to doctors and nurses in St. Luke’s emergency room.
COMMUNITY SPREAD IN GOODING COUNTY
Blaine County did not report any new cases of coronavirus on Tuesday for the fifth day in a row. That's the longest the county has gone without a new case since the first case was noted in mid-March, noted Paul Ries. The county remains at 512 cases.
Idaho reported 27 new cases, bringing its total to 2,933.
At least one case of novel coronavirus with no out-of-state travel and no identified contact with another person with confirmed COVID-19 has been detected in Gooding County. Public health officials caution residents to assume the virus could be anywhere in Gooding and surrounding counties.
Six of the eight counties in the region have confirmed community spread.
ELECTION RESULTS
In Hailey 1,087 voters said Yes to the City of Hailey Local Option Tax. Just 260 voted against it.
Paulette Jordan tallied 72,777 votes to Jim Vandermaas' 12,145 votes in the bid for the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination, and Mike Simpson bested Kevin Rhoades 68,674 to 26,704 for the Republican U.S. House nomination.
SAMPLES ARE BACK!
Costco plans to begin offering free samples in its stores in mid-June. But shoppers will not be allowed to pick ‘em up with their bare fingers. The warehouse chain also will return more menu items to its food courts.
MASS MASK ORDER
San Francisco authorities are requiring residents to wear face coverings any time they’re within 30 feet of anyone who is not a member of their household. That includes while exercising outdoors.
The city will allow outdoor dining and indoor shopping to reopen June 15; barbershops and hair salons will be allowed to reopen in mid-July.
MOAB REOPENS CAUTIOUSLY
Moab, Utah, has cautiously reopened, with the reopening of Arches and Canyonlands national parks.
The resort town’s early closings of businesses and hotels helped confine the number of cases in Grand County, where Moab is located, to four. But the town missed out on a lot of tourist business, considering it gets 50 percent of its tourist business in spring.
Now, residents worry that visitors are showing up without masks. The town is making masks available at grocery stores and national parks, but the manager of the local food bank told writer Joe Purtell that visitors act as if they’re on vacation from the coronavirus.
OPERA GOES DARK
The Metropolitan Opera—the nation’s largest performing arts organization—will cancel its fall season because of the pandemic.
But a world tour of “The Phantom of the Opera” is still running eight times a week in Seoul, South Korea, thanks to the country’s rigorous testing system.
IS CORONAVIRUS LOSING ITS POTENCY?
An Italian doctor who heads up a hospital in the hard-hit region of Lombardy says that the new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal than it was a couple months ago.
Milan doctor Alberto Zangrillo told Reuters that the viral load in swabs performed over the past two weeks is “absolutely infinitesimal” compared with those of a month or two ago. His findings have been supported by a second doctor from Genoa.
But Italy’s undersecretary of health says it’s too soon for Italians to let up their guard. Continue distancing, avoiding large groups, wear masks and wash hands, she said.
MEANWHILE, IN NEW ZEALAND…
New Zealand has nearly eradicated the coronavirus—just one person in the nation of five million is known to be still infected.
The Kiwi nation has had 1,504 people infected; 22 have died. And the country’s not taking any chances. For now, the nation’s borders are closed.
PANDEMIC HEROES COMIC BOOK STYLE
Hector Rodriguez, the creator of “El Peso Hero”--a comic book hero that fights corruption and drug cartels--has penned a special pandemic issue in which nurses and other essential workers are billed as the live action heroes.
According to NBC News, the comic strip features such storylines as a nurse taking medical masks to agricultural workers, along with a message of solidarity and positivity. It also acknowledges that many undocumented Latinos are the glue that holds America together.
TALK ABOUT TESTING….
Health officials in Seoul, South Korea, tested 46,000 people to find 162 cases of coronavirus in order to squelch a major outbreak related to nightclub goers. Health officials said that there were no new transmissions in the churches, call centers and gyms that the virus carriers went to because the churches and businesses were practicing proper hygiene and enforcing physical distancing.