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April 14, 2020
Dear Neighbors and Friends:
I hope that you and your loved ones are doing well, staying healthy, and looking out for your neighbors and friends.
The Governor held a press conference today in order to articulate her planning process for moving the state away from Stay Home, Save Lives. Here is a PowerPoint of her presentation.
In line with what we’ve already heard from the OHA, the order will most likely be lifted gradually and in phases, perhaps geographically, probably industry by industry, as certain metrics are met. These metrics include the following:
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A Sustained Decline in New Cases. We’re probably a few weeks away from that. The modelers that OHA is using believe that we’re at the beginning of a plateau that will likely last a few weeks, then begin to decline.
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Adequate Personal Protective Equipment. As you know, this is still a national problem. We need to make sure that we have enough PPE for our first responders and medical caregivers, including those who are providing care in long-term care settings and group homes, as well as homecare. Only then can we see a resumption of elective medical procedures, dentistry, and other occupations requiring close personal contact. For many of them, PPE will be required where it never was before.
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Adequate Testing. We’ll need to increase our testing capacity to at least 15,000 tests a week. We’re getting close to 10,000 a week now, and the commercial labs have at last been able to catch up with their backlog. Ideally, we’ll soon be replacing the current tests with rapid testing.
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Contact Tracing. Our public health infrastructure and personnel needs to be ramped up so that they can trace the contacts of those who have tested positive for the virus, thereby allowing public health to identify and then test potential carriers. Once our number of new cases comes down, this kind of intensive approach becomes manageable.
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A System for Isolating/Quarantining: This will be difficult, as what will then be needed is complete isolation of identified carriers for short periods of time. But it will be necessary to ensure that we’re protecting the most vulnerable Oregonians, including the elderly and those living in congregate care, whose vulnerability will extend even as others are returning to more normal ways of life.
As you’ll see, the Governor didn’t provide any clear timelines today. Frankly, that would be premature at this point. We’re likely a few weeks away from the first steps being taken. But she indicated that the necessary planning will begin immediately. She’ll be relying on members of her Medical Advisory Panel to help with this. She’ll be bringing together medical professionals with representatives of key industries heavily affected by the closures—e.g., restaurants, close personal services (e.g., hairdressers, nail salons, massage, gyms), child care—to talk about the kinds of changes in their operations would be required before they could reopen.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this over the next week or two, and I’ll be happy to report what I learn.
On another note, in responding to a question at the press conference, the Governor announced that she currently has no plans to issue a broad release order for adults in custody at our state prisons in order to free up space and allow those close to release to transition to a safer environment. Her focus, she said, is on improving systems within the institutions and making sure that all AICs are safe.
I continue to believe that there is a place for targeted, expedited releases at this time. I’ll be getting a better understanding of the rationale for this decision in the next day or two, along with options moving forward, and will let you know what I learn.
TODAY’S CORONAVIRUS AND CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE UPDATE
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Positive Cases: OHA has reported that 49 additional Oregonians tested positive for COVID-19 yesterday, putting the total at 1,633.
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Total Tests: Today’s reported testing numbers reflect an increase of 1,242 test results from yesterday, bringing the total test results so far to 32,363.
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Ratio: Though the overall numbers are increasing, our ratio of positive results still remains right at 5%. That’s much lower than the national average (now over 20%).
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Deaths: I’m sorry to report that 2 additional Oregonians died from the disease yesterday, bringing the total number of deaths in Oregon to 55.
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Hospitalized: The number of Oregonians who have been hospitalized with symptoms, and who have also tested positive for the disease, is now at 381. This is an increase of 12 from yesterday.
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Other Hospital Information:
- Available ICU Beds: 328 (a decrease of 4 from yesterday)
- Other Available Beds: 2,134 (an increase of 40 from yesterday)
- Patients Currently w COVID-19 Symptoms (who may or may not have received a positive test result yet): 311 (a decrease of 10 from yesterday). Of those,150 have already received a positive test back.
- ICU Patients w COVID-19 Symptoms (who may or may not have received a positive test result yet): 88 (8 fewer than yesterday)
- COVID-19 Patients Currently on Ventilators: 44 (a decrease of 6 from yesterday).
- Available Ventilators: 794 (an increase of 10 from yesterday)
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Today’s National Numbers:
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PPE:
- In the past 24 hours, the Emergency Coordination Center received the following shipment of PPE: 7000 surgical masks, 153,028 N95 respirator masks, 2,564 gowns, 77,100 face shields, and 125,028 gloves.
- The Emergency Coordination Center is now posting daily shipments of PPE out to the County Emergency Centers, where they are then distributed to local hospitals and providers. You can follow these distributions here. The postings may not always be current to today, but they should be close.
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Other State Updates:
No “Legislative Days” This May
Under normal circumstances, the Legislature would be meeting during the third week of May for “Legislative Days,” a time when interim committees meet to get updates on work being done by the agencies, start to hear from various work groups, explore topics that will require legislation, and for senators to confirm executive appointments.
Well, these are not normal circumstances. To hold that many committee hearings simultaneously and remotely would be beyond the capabilities of the Legislature right now. So, the announcement was made today that there will not be Legislative Days in May this year.
Legislators will begin discussing ways in which individual committees can meet remotely at staggered times over the next couple of months.
We already know that the House and Senate Revenue Committees will be meeting jointly (remotely) on May 20th to receive the quarterly revenue forecast. This will be an extremely important meeting, as this next forecast will give us a sense of whether (or more likely by how much) we’ll have to begin cutting state budgets this year in the face of plummeting tax revenues.
The Latest from the Employment Department
Legislators received a long status report from the Employment Department on what’s happening on a number of fronts, including the volume of claims, the error messages and the effort to correct them, new staff hires, locating the new staff, reprogramming the computer system to process the new $600 payments and the new categories of workers who can now access benefits, and successive projects for computer reprogramming.
You can read it here.
One of the things that I realized from this communication is that unlike many state workers now, the new claims processors cannot work from home. Given the confidential financial information that they are accessing and communicating, via phone and computer, this work needs to be done in a location with secure phone lines and computer networks. So, space, particularly given the requirements around safe distancing, is another challenge that the department is dealing with as they ramp up from 100 claims processors to the current 450, with the goal of hitting 600.
On another note, the department is now providing charts on its COVID website showing the current numbers for claims and benefits paid. Go to the website and scroll down.
Multnomah County Offers Information in 24 Languages
The coronavirus, its effects, and the response to it affects people of all nationalities around the world and in this state. It’s important that information about it is in a language that people can fully comprehend. Given the richness and diversity of Multnomah County’s immigrant communities, translation into a number of languages is essential. It’s therefore gratifying to see that Multnomah County’s COVID-19 page includes information in twenty-four different languages. I copied the links to these pages for you to check out:
አማርኛ | العربية | Burmese | Español | 中文 |
繁體中文 | Chuukese | فارسی | Français | 日本語 |
KajinMajōl | Kishwahili | ကညီကျိ | 한국어 | Kosrean | नेपाली | Palauan |
Pohnpeian | русский | Soomaali | ภาษาไทย | กริญญา | Tiếng Việt | Tongan
I’m going to guess that you’re like me and don’t recognize all these different languages. If you hover your cursor over each one, you’ll see the English word for this language. Or you can go to their foreign language gateway page to see them all listed.
Work Systems Inc. Issues Another Round of Grants to Community-Based Organizations
Work Systems, Inc., Multnomah and Washington Counties’ local workforce investment board, has just announced another round of layoff aversion funding. Round 2 provides grants to 24 additional community-based organizations on top of the 19 organizations given grants in Round 1. The total funding distributed so far under this program is $430,000, with the average grant just under $10,000.
You can see the full list of awardees and more information about the grants here.
Not only are these grants helping these community-based organizations avoid layoffs of vital staff, but they are in most cases working directly with various communities to help them deal with the effects of the pandemic, both medically and financially.
Which Credit Unions Are Offering Paycheck Protection Small-Business Loans?
We just received a list of the Oregon credit unions that have been processing the Small Business Administration PPP loans. Want to know if your credit union is on the list? Check it out here.
Again, these loans are ideal for those businesses that want to keep their workers employed and on the payroll. If they do maintain their payroll, the loans become forgivable and essentially turn into grants. If not, they’ll need to be paid back over time, but with an extremely low interest rate.
If you have had success in securing one of these PPP loans, by the way, I’d love to hear from you and hear how the process went. And if it hasn’t gone well, I’d like to hear that as well.
Want to See Past Newsletters?
If there was COVID-related information in a past newsletter that you want to go back to, but find you’ve deleted it, you can always go to my legislative website (www.senatordembrow.com), click on “News and Information,” and you’ll find them all there.
A Couple of New Graphs Re: Testing in Oregon
For you data wonks out there, here’s a visual representation of what’s been happening in Oregon with testing over the last few weeks. (Thanks, Tom!) The first shows the number of tests, the second the number of positive results.
Do remember, though, that there have been many more individuals out there with the virus who have never been tested.
AND FINALLY,
Here again are some resources that you will find useful:
If the above links are not providing you with answers to your questions or directing you to the help that you need, please consider me and my office to be a resource. We’ll do our best to assist you or steer you in the right direction.
Best,
 Senator Michael Dembrow
District 23
email: Sen.MichaelDembrow@oregonlegislature.gov
web: www.senatordembrow.com
phone: 503-986-1723
mail: 900 Court St NE, S-407, Salem, OR, 97301
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