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April 21, 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.
In today’s newsletter you’ll find information about Thursday’s Legislative Emergency Board meeting, about testing, and about the University of Oregon, along with the daily numbers.
I also want to let you know about another video town hall I’ll be doing this Thursday. It’s been a few weeks since Barbara, Alissa, and I had our Zoom Town Hall, and we’re ready to go for it again. Forget about the coffee this time. This time it’ll be a Constituent Happy Hour! You’ll see more details below. We’ll be able to talk about the allocations coming out of the Emergency Fund, the Governor’s 3-phase plan to relax the Stay Home program, and the latest round of federal relief. And of course answering your questions. Hope you can join us, have a drink, and share your thoughts.
TODAY’S CORONAVIRUS AND CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE UPDATE
***Please notice that I’m now using an exponential scale for the Y axis on this graph. Doing it this way allows for a more realistic sense of the upward curves of these three data points (positive cases, hospitalizations, and deaths).
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Positive Cases: OHA has reported that 46 additional Oregonians tested positive for COVID-19 yesterday, putting the total at 2,002
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Total Tests: Today’s reported testing numbers reflect an increase of 1,083 test results from yesterday, bringing the total test results so far to 41,128.
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Ratio: Though the overall numbers are increasing, the percentage of positive results still remains just under 5%. That’s much lower than the national average (coming down a bit, but still just over 19%).
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Deaths: I’m sorry to report that the deaths of 3 additional Oregonians were reported yesterday, bringing the total number of deaths in Oregon to 78.
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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 471. This is an increase of 9 from yesterday.
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Other Hospital Information:
- Available ICU Beds: 346 (an increase of 20 from yesterday)
- Other Available Beds: 2,211 (an increase of 122 from yesterday)
- Patients Currently w COVID-19 Symptoms (who may or may not have received a positive test result yet): 297 (a decrease of 6 from yesterday). Of those, 125 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): 70 (4 fewer than yesterday)
- COVID-19 Patients Currently on Ventilators: 35 (the same as yesterday).
- Available Ventilators: 784 (13 fewer than yesterday)
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Today’s National Numbers:
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PPE:
- The Emergency Coordination Center has sent out 73,760 N95 respirator masks, 13,950 gowns, and 29,000 pairs of gloves to various counties and tribes.
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Other State Updates:
Legislature’s Emergency Board Meets Thursday Morning
As I mentioned yesterday, the Legislature’s Emergency Board will be meeting this Thursday morning at 10 a.m. to approve around $32 million in funding for response to the disease and the economic fallout. You can watch it and see meeting materials once they’re posted at https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2019I1/Committees/EB/2020-04-23-10-00/Agenda.
Here are the tentative plans for COVID-response distributions from the Emergency Fund:
- $12 million for Housing Assistance. Includes hotel vouchers for farmworker quarantine housing and hotel vouchers for the homeless (requested by community action agencies). Rent relief payments directly to landlords through housing agencies.
- $5 million for Small Business Stabilization. Payments to small businesses who aren’t being assisted by federal funds. This will be matched by $5 million in existing Business Oregon funds, for a total of $10 million for this purpose.
- $2 million in Domestic Violence Funding. This will be allocated via the Department of Justice directly to non-profit providers of domestic violence services.
- $10 million in Worker Gap Funding. These will be payments to workers who are excluded from federal assistance via the Oregon Worker Relief Fund (e.g., because of their documentation status).
- $120,000 for a Pandemic Human Resource position to coordinate pandemic response at the Bureau of Labor and Industries.
- $3.35 million for COVID Testing and Training of workers in long-term care and other congregate-care settings. (This may not be needed if we can use federal funds for this purpose.)
These expenditures will leave a little over $18 million in the Emergency Fund.
In addition to these direct allocations from the Emergency Fund, the E-Board will also be granting approval for spending of federal dollars and other fee-based dollars coming to the state. These include some that are COVID related (e.g., $300 million in general federal COVID Relief Funds, $50 million in loans to rural hospitals) and others that were scheduled to be released during the interim related to firefighting ($6 million), Public Defense ($3.875 million), and $20 million in scheduled compensation increases for DHS/OHA direct care workers.
Joint Virtual Town Hall: Thursday
I am again partnering with my house colleagues Barbara Smith Warner and Alissa Keny-Guyer for a virtual constituent event. This time around, we’ll be doing a “happy hour” at 5pm this Thursday (4/23). As we did a few weeks ago, we’ll be using Zoom as the platform for this town hall. Click here to pre-register and submit questions and comments for us to address. I look forward to “seeing you” on Thursday evening and providing more updates on the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I expect we will have plenty to share in the wake of that morning’s E-Board meeting.
Update on Testing
Although we still are facing challenges with access to testing materials, the situation has improved from where it was a few weeks ago. In Oregon we’re currently testing an average of around 1,200 individuals a day in Oregon, pretty much where we’ve been for the last couple of weeks. It’s time for those numbers to go up, an important prerequisite to the reopening of the state.
With increased testing capacity, the OHA has made the decision to loosen up access to testing for those who need it. Although the ultimate decision of whether or not to test has always been in the hands of a patient’s provider, providers were encouraged to restrict testing to those patients presenting serious symptoms, with priority going to medical professionals and first responders. The Oregon Health Authority (OHA) on Monday night issued revised guidelines that among other things extends testing to those presenting mild symptoms.
You can read the new guidelines here.
You’ll see that the new guidelines seek to increase testing among what are being called “frontline workers.” Those are people working in close contact with large numbers of the public, such as grocery and pharmacy workers, bus drivers, and delivery workers. It also calls out those giving direct personal care (including homecare, hospice, physical and occupational therapists). And it calls out individuals from communities of color and people with disabilities as well, since we’re seeing more seriously harmful effects of the virus in people from those groups. Anyone in these categories who shows symptoms should be able to be tested if their medical provider orders it.
In addition, if supplies allow, and under some circumstances, some people who are not showing symptoms (i.e., are asymptomatic) within the congregate care or group living systems can be considered for testing in order to protect the vulnerable individuals living in those settings.
In a briefing yesterday and a conversation with the state epidemiologist this morning, I was able to learn a few other things of interest as well:
“The Ratio”: I’ve been including as part of my updates the percentage of tests that have come back positive each day. That number has hovered right around 5% for the last few weeks, moving from slightly above to slightly below over that time. I asked OHA to comment on the meaning of that.
Their response was that this is a good sign. Since the number of tests has remained roughly the same, using roughly the same criteria for access to testing, that stability suggests that the infection rate has remained stable over the last few weeks (perhaps declining slightly). If the percentage of positive results were increasing over this period, that would be concerning.
As we increase the ability to access testing in the coming weeks, so that people being tested are less symptomatic (and potentially less likely to be infected), and increase the number of tests overall, we should expect to see the percentage go down. That will be something to watch.
We also learned that Oregon is currently the 5th lowest state in the nation for the number of positive infections per million residents and 13th lowest for deaths per million.
New Types of Tests:
As the various labs are increasing their ability to process more tests, we’re seeing wait time for results come down as well. The tests themselves are becoming less intrusive (and painful) too—the CDC has changed the protocols so that samples can now be taken from the front of the nose rather than from the far back. We are starting to see some Abbott Rapid Tests machines coming into the state, but our public health department has still not received much in the way of supply cartridges to make them able to test at high rates. (We did hear that at least one individual hospital has been able to secure machines and cartridges on its own.) We were told that because of our relatively low infection rate, Oregon is low on the priority list to receive the needed rapid-testing materials.
We did hear that the state is close to approving pharmacy-based testing. I’ll let you know when we hear more about that. Also, just today it was reported that the CDC has approved the first self-administered, at-home tests, which are then mailed to a national lab, LabCorp. For now, only medical professionals and first responders will have access to them, and they still will require a doctor’s order.
Finally, everyone is looking forward to the day when we will have a good test available to see if individuals have acquired antibodies to the virus, suggesting that they have recovered from the disease and are immune to it. A number of different types of these “serological” tests have been rapidly developed. Because we’re in an emergency situation, the CDC is allowing these tests to be deployed before they’ve been fully validated, and there have been reports of uneven performance. The OHA is looking at them carefully, following the results in cities and counties that are experimenting with them, and will be recommendations for their use soon. It’ll likely be several weeks to a month before we’ll see them widely available and in use here.
Update from the University of Oregon
Last week I wrote about an update that we had received from Oregon State University. Yesterday it was the Ducks’ turn to let legislators know how things are progressing down in Eugene in the time of COVID.
Their report was quite similar to what we heard from the Beavers. UO enrollment for spring quarter has held up surprisingly well overall. Faculty members had to work hard to get their courses reformatted for distance learning in just a couple of weeks, but they appear to have pulled it off.
As at OSU, while the instructional challenges have been managed so far, the university is being hit hard by the loss of revenue from student housing and other on-campus auxiliary services. Only a couple hundred students, mainly international, have remained in the dorms.
The immediate financial picture for the university is grim. As a result of the loss of auxiliary revenue, the university is projecting a net loss of $30 million at this point for the current year. They have already had to lay off or furlough (with health benefits extended) around 280 auxiliary services staff. Senior administrators have taken voluntary 10% pay cuts, and the president has reduced his salary by 12%. Discussions are happening with the various unions on campus (there are five) about potential alternatives to layoffs.
While these are very serious challenges, an even bigger challenge is uncertainty about the future. If the university must remain closed for summer quarter, you might expect the losses to be less significant because fewer UO students use the dorms during the summer. But in fact the university hosts a number of summer programs of various sorts that will likely need to be cancelled or substantively changed. And if the disease is still around or returns in the fall, the hit to the university will be substantial.
The university is receiving a little over $16 million in CARES Act funding, half of which must be spent on direct payments to support students in need. Like OSU, they will be looking at replacing wages lost by student workers, along with other emergency needs. They have not yet received guidance from the U.S. Department of Education as to how those CARES dollars can be spent. They will also want to hold on to some of that student funding to provide future assistance if this continues into the fall.
We’re also at the point where students who’ve been accepted for next year are deciding which schools to attend. The university was in fact expecting a record first-year class for next year, but now it’s unclear what will happen. Faced with the possibility of the pandemic returning, will students want to hold off starting college until they can be sure of having face-to-face classes? Will students want to stay closer to home? Will they want to stay away from dorm living even if the all-clear is given? Only time will tell. (June 1 is the deadline for students to make these decisions.) For now, university admissions staff are continuing to be in touch with these potential students via telephone, email, videoconferencing, and virtual tours, hoping for the best.
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.
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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