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Wellness festival postponed due to illness
The Quincy Valley Wellness Festival, scheduled to be held this Saturday at Quincy High School, has been indefinitely postponed, ironically enough, because Quincy Valley Medical Center, the event’s organizer, is concerned with the town’s wellness.
Due to the large number of sick people in Quincy Valley over the last couple of weeks, the center decided it would not be a good decision to ask large groups of people to come together for the festival.
“Dr. Robert Shelly is the head of (the medical center’s) infectious diseases, and he said, ‘Honestly, what message are we sending if we try to hold this festival in the middle of flu season? Postponing the event, in a way, could serve as a good course of education,’” said medical center spokesperson Michele Wurl. “We don’t want people to panic; this isn’t a hugely dangerous situation, but just like you wouldn’t go to a friend’s house for dinner with a cold, we’re not going to ask people to gather in a large group if there’s a chance some of them aren’t healthy. We just didn’t think it would be prudent. We looked at the trends, and decided that as great as the event was going to be, it wasn’t critical enough to be held.”
Wurl said the flu bug that’s been recently sweeping through the Quincy Valley and Grant County is primarily responsible for the postponement.
“The patient levels have been huge, both from what we’re seeing and the clinics we work with,” she said. “It’s not the severity of the illness; it’s the large numbers. The schools are dealing with it and we’re dealing with it and we’re just going to let the scenarios play themselves out.”
Wurl said as of Monday the center doesn’t have a definite date in mind for rescheduling purposes.
“We really haven’t gone there,” she said. “Originally we were planning the festival taking into mind harvest and the academic calendar and everything else. We were going to have some outdoor demonstrations, and we still want to do those things. I would guess right now that it could be a spring event next year, or maybe next fall. We’ll just have to wait to see how things develop.”
The Great Pumpkin Chase Fun Run and shoe drive, which were scheduled to occur in conjunction with the festival, will still happen, with some changes to the original itinerary.
“The clinic for proper footwear will now be held at the conclusion of the race, with the awards presentation following this clinic,” said event co-organizer Ruth Royer. “The location of this clinic and the awards presentation will no longer be at the Performing Arts Center in Quincy High School and instead be held at Quincy Valley School. We will be awarding ribbons to the top two male and female participants in each age group for both races. We are also accepting any and all kinds of gently used sports shoes; it is not limited to running and track shoes.
“We would also like to add that children under the age of 8 need to be accompanied by an adult or someone that is high school age or older.”
