Meeting of September 16, 2021

 

Chris Chidester provided our speaker for the day.  She introduced us to her friend Kathy Williams who works for Quest Diagnostics, a company which sells services to physicians and hospitals.  If you have had lab tests, particularly most recently COVID tests, it most likely went through Quest.  Kathy personally joined Quest as a lab tech, then rose through the ranks to sales of their services.  On March 9, 2020, Quest instituted its first COVID testing labs.  Prior to that, the last big thing was ZIKA and SARS1 testing.  Because of the Emergency Use Act, companies like theirs were urged to hurry up and produce testing services to start to get COVID under control.  At the peak of the pandemic, they were processing 250,000 tests per day, and at last count were up to 48,000,000 tests.  Testing is still very active, thanks to summer camps and the Delta variant of COVID surge, and now with people returning to schools and workplaces and large gatherings.  Managing this volume of testing, along with all the other testing Quest performs for non-COVID diagnoses, it is quite the balancing act.  Thanks to bar codes and electronic processing systems, they are able to keep up with demand.  By the way, they are also extremely busy with tick testing, especially in Vermont.  We are so fortunate to have responsible and dedicated companies like Quest right in our own back yard so we can get the test results we need when we need them.

 

 

Please let Helen Goransson know if you have performed any volunteer work on behalf of Rotary, particularly the Pumpkinman Festival so we can monitor their donation to Rotary for our help.  We need to report our members' volunteer hours to the district as part of our club goals monitoring.

 

Next on deck is the Eliot Festival Day this coming Saturday, September 25th, in downtown Eliot.  There will be set-up of our Rotary "wagon" in preparation for our lemonade sales from 6:00-8:00 a.m..  Many thanks to the Dover Rotary Club for lending us their food trailer.  We passed around a sign-up sheet for our needed volunteers throughout the day.  This sheet will likely circulate again at our next Rotary meeting this coming Thursday.

 

We have our Rotary After Hours at Jeremy Fogg's studio on September 30th.  Details will be emailed to you.  This also means no morning meeting next week.

 

There was a Board meeting on Monday evening.  President Brenda will share the highlights at our Thursday meeting.  They were going to take up various subjects, including how to commemorate Polio Day on October 24th, discussing what Interact will be doing, ascertaining whether Rowan Waddell will be sponsored by our club to do a short-term foreign exchange experience, and reviewing the status of our finances and our solar grant funding, among other topics.  They were also going to work through all the logistics and needs of the Eliot Festival Day work we have to do.

 

 

Jeremy Fogg has invited his colleague Bryce Waldrop, Curator of the Wells Historical Society and a historic preservation consultant, who will enlighten us about what that entails.  Historic preservation has been his passion for more than 25 years, and today he provides architectural history and preservation consulting services to clients throughout New England.  As an architect, he brings a well-rounded, technical view to all of his work in this field.  He should be a most interesting speaker.   Come one and all for nourishment and knowledge!
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