April 27th COVID-19 Update

Oregon State Legislature sent this bulletin at 04/27/2020 06:58 PM PDT
Michael Dembrow

April 27, 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 bulk of today’s newsletter is an extended update from the Oregon Health Authority, with the latest thinking on testing, tracing, and a variety of other issues.

TODAY’S CORONAVIRUS AND CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE UPDATE

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***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).

  • Positive Cases: OHA has reported that 43 additional Oregonians tested positive for COVID-19 yesterday, putting the total at 2,354.
  • Total Tests: The total number of tests in Oregon now stands at 51,198. That’s an increase of 2,234 tests, quite a large increase (more on that below).
  • Ratio: The percentage of positive results still remains under 5% (4.6% to be exact!).  That’s much lower than the national average (coming down, but still at 17.5%). And if we just look at yesterday’s tests (with the big increase in tests), yesterday’s one-day ratio came in at a very low 2%.
  • Deaths: I’m afraid I have to report that 1 additional Oregonian has died from the disease, so the total number of deaths in Oregon is now 92.
  • Hospitalized: The number of Oregonians who have been hospitalized with symptoms, and who have also tested positive for the disease, is now at 554. This is an increase of 8 from yesterday.
  • Other Hospital Information:
    • Patients Currently w COVID-19 Symptoms (who may or may not have received a positive test result yet): 247 (a decrease of 2 from yesterday). Of those, 123 have already received a positive test back.
    • Available ICU Beds: 296 (an increase of 16 from yesterday)
    • Other Available Beds: 2,034 (an increase of 20 from yesterday)
    • ICU Patients w COVID-19 Symptoms (who may or may not have received a positive test result yet): 67 (4 fewer than yesterday)
    • COVID-19 Patients Currently on Ventilators: 32 (1 more than yesterday).
    • Available Ventilators: 790 (5 fewer than yesterday)
  • Today’s National Numbers:
  • PPE:
    • No new PPE received by the Emergency Coordination Center. However, we’ve learned that many of the larger hospital systems and even some of the smaller rural hospitals are beginning to successfully obtain PPE through their usual channels.
    • See below for PPE news from the U of O.
  • Additional Quick Updates:
    • The Governor reported today that the governors of Nevada and Colorado have asked to become part of the Western States Pact, joining Oregon, Washington, and California in sharing plans, research, and data about reopening state and local economies and communities. You can read about it here.
    • The Paycheck Protection Program, which received an additional injection of several hundred billions of dollars for small business loans and grants last week, reopened for applications at 7:30 morning. By the time afternoon rolled around, the SBA was reporting that it had already processed more than 100,000 loans via more than 4,000 lenders. They also reported that their systems were under tremendous strain because there were double the number of users accessing compared to any day during first (and only) week it was open previously.  The bottom line:  if you’re a small business and want to access PPP this time, you’d do well to apply ASAP.  I doubt that the new allocation will last a week.
    • Last week I reported on the new directives from the U.S. Department of Education regarding the student share of the distributions to colleges and universities. We now have the guidelines for half that colleges and universities can use to meet their corona-generated needs. If you’re interested, here is a copy of the attestation that institutions must file, which gives the program requirements.
    • You may have heard about new studies showing that opening windows for ventilation creates less risk of spread of the COVID-19 virus than air conditioning does. (They’ve also published findings suggesting that the virus survives for shorter periods of time when exposed to direct sunlight or UV.) You may not know that the research team included researchers from the University of Oregon (Leslie Dietz, Patrick F. Horve, Mark Fretz, and Kevin Van den Wymelenberg).  You can read more about it here.
    • As we approach May 1, when medical providers will begin reopening their offices and surgeries for non-emergency procedures, it’s going to be crucial that the relevant professional organizations provide practitioners with guidance on how to do so safely. An optometrist in my district just sent me a copy of the guidance from her organization, the Oregon Optometric Physicians Association, has just produced. If you’re interested in seeing the kind of advice being given, here it is.
    • If you’re like me and have been taking advantage of time at home for mixing, kneading, rising, proofing, shaping, baking and eating—i.e., making bread—you know that local grocers have been having a hard time keeping flour on the shelves. Why is that?  Here is an article from the Register-Guard taking you behind the scenes of an overrun supply chain.

Additional Daily Graphs:

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UO Partners with State for PPE Decontamination Site

The UO is partnering with the State of Oregon to host a PPE decontamination facility on campus in Eugene. The Battelle PPE Decontamination system will receive, sanitize, and return PPE to hospitals and health care facilities from south of Portland to Medford and Coos Bay to Bend. FEMA is covering the expenses and it will come with staff to operate it. The UO is providing the Department of Administrative Services with the DAS for the Battelle system. This came as a request from the State’s Emergency Coordination Center.  Here is a video as to how it works, and here is a press release about the system.

Update from the Oregon Health Authority

Legislators received a lengthy update this afternoon from OHA Director Pat Allen.  Here is a potpourri of highlights:

  • As reported above, more than 2200 tests were reported today. If this keeps up, we will hit soon be hitting our reopening target of 15,000 tests a week.
  • Pat attributes the increase to a combination of factors:
    • The new, more extensive protocols for testing eligibility that I reported last week.
    • The study being conducted by OSU in the Corvallis area, where 1,000 people are being randomly tested each week. (We’re halfway through the four-week study.)
    • The beginning of pharmacy-based testing.
    • Greater capacity by hospitals and commercial labs.
  • OHA is planning on doing increased testing, including testing of those currently without symptoms, of individuals in shelters and homeless camps.
  • Unfortunately, we are still having tremendous difficulty obtaining testing resources from the federal government for deployment by the state, especially when it comes to rapid testing. We did receive 10,000 traditional test kits last week, the first in the last 3-4 weeks.
  • Even though we are testing more, we are not seeing the percentage of positive results go up. Obviously, that’s a good thing.
  • The percentage of tests that are positive is something that will be tracked carefully as reopening begins. If the percentage starts to rise in an area, a reopening slowdown may be required there.
  • It’s likely that face coverings will be a mandatory part of reopening businesses in enclosed spaces both for workers and the public. It’s likely that transit riders will be required to have a face covering in order to ride the bus.
  • As part of their regular hospital bed report, hospitals are now reporting to the OHA on their level of PPE.
  • We heard more about the plans for testing/contact tracing/tracking/isolating that will be key to our future efforts to control the spread of the virus:
    • There have been around 80 individuals around the state doing this work.
    • Around 200 state and local health workers whose workload has dropped (e.g., restaurant health inspectors) will be deployed to assist in this effort.
    • OHA is coordinating with organizations that work with immigrants and communities of color in an effort to insure that the workers contacting individuals who have been infected are from those communities and have the necessary language skills and cultural competence to be trusted, especially when isolation/quarantine will be required.
    • The workers will be a mix of state and local public health workers.
    • Plans are being made to insure that individuals who must be quarantined receive the housing, food, income, and social support that they will need.
    • Director Allen and his colleagues are still thinking about how they might supplement these workers with retired physician volunteers.
  • Once the guidelines for medical facilities choosing to restart their non-emergency procedures have been finalized this week, the Governor’s medical advisors will move to extend reopening of non-emergency services to veterinarians. That decision should come within the next week.

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,

dembrow signature

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