Florida is being inundated by scantly clad college students looking for some fun in the sun. We are in the middle of the 2021 spring break, the time of year American and Canadian colleges and universities close in advance of their final semester of the school year.

After the enforced confinement of the past year, and the record cold most of the country endured just weeks ago, being able to escape to the Sunshine State must feel awfully good. Old people have been doing it for months. I’ve heard quite a bit of French — and seen the corresponding Quebec license plates — during our weekly outings to a sparsely populated beach on the beach. However, we’re all wearing masks — mandated for indoors in our county — as we walk from the parking lot to the water, and we sit apart from each other. More and more of us have struggled through the crazy vaccine protocols to get our immunizations.

The same cannot be said for what’s happening just a few miles down the road in Ft. Lauderdale, South Florida’s spring break epicenter. Maskless romping in close quarters by unvaccinated youth means these kids will be taking home more than a sunburn when they migrate back to their indoor college life. I can see the t-shirts now: “I went to Ft. Lauderdale and all I brought back was COVID.”

Which is why I absolutely love an idea spun up by my favorite Palm Beach Post columnist, Frank Cerabino: applying the pandemic protocol to spring break activities to make them safe for students this year.

What would spring break be without a hotel swimming pool full of scantily clad college students holding plastic drink cups and grooving to the sounds of a pool-deck DJ? So, let’s do it … but a little differently this year due to gathering restrictions with COVID-19. Just follow these rules:

Frank Cerabino, The Palm Beach Post

• “You must sign up to reserve a time slot to be in the pool.
• And being that it’s Florida, we’re making you sign up through Publix grocery store. Don’t ask. It’s just something we do.
• You’ll have to get up before 7 a.m. and compete with all the other college students across the nation coming here for spring break.
• Once you are successfully allowed into the Publix online portal, you will be able to enter the approximate geographic location of your spring break hotel. Then you will see a list of available pool slots and times that are available in your area.
• With only five people allowed in a swimming pool at any given time, there will be heavy demand for a relatively small number of spots.”

That’s how we roll down here in South Florida. Enjoy!