The COVID pandemic has required most of us to make some difficult choices. Some of you may have seen my comments in a front page article in the Altoona Mirror last Tuesday. It is in this context that the Altoona Lung Specialists needed to make a difficult decision given the rise in COVID cases in Blair County. We elected not to present our annual lectures and cooking contest in person at Health-O-Rama held last Friday at the Logan Valley Mall. The preparation for this event, including the marketing, occurs weeks and months in advance. When our decision was made there was no time to pull all the newspaper and radio ads. I am sure some were disappointed when they came to the event only to find we had elected not to appear in person, but to record our talks and place them on our website. (They should be available in the next several weeks.) The COVID antibody testing did occur. We called each of the first 100 people that registered first and directed them to the Lung Disease Center at 800 Chestnut Avenue to get their test. We also called each of the people who registered but could not be tested. I thank my staff for their efforts in this regard.
As I expressed in the Mirror article last Tuesday, we all need to live up to our personal responsibility and the conspicuous absence of the Altoona Lung Specialists at Health-O-Rama this year is an expression of that responsibility.
