May 5th COVID-19 Update

Oregon State Legislature sent this bulletin at 05/05/2020 10:10 PM PDT
Michael Dembrow

May 5, 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.

Yesterday’s good news about zero deaths, lower infections, and lower hospitalization admissions unfortunately could not be sustained, as you’ll see higher numbers for all three today.  It’s a sad reminder that we can’t put too much weight into the results of a single day or two.  We need to keep our eyes on the longer-term trends. 

Included in today’s news is the announcement of a plan to reopen our state parks and the latest Weekly COVID Report from OHA, which for the first time allows us to see infections by zip code, an important step in advancing our understanding of the spread of the virus.

This afternoon the Governor had her final meeting with local government and local health care people to hear about their readiness to reopen.  It now appears that we’ll be getting the details on the Phase One reopening on Thursday.  That’s perfect timing for our next Zoom Town Hall Thursday 5-6:30 pm!  If you haven’t signed up and submitted your questions yet, it’s not too late to do so.  You’ll find details for signing up below. 

TODAY’S CORONAVIRUS AND CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE UPDATE

a

***Please notice that I’m using an exponential scale for the Y axis on this graph.  Doing it this way allows me to keep all three in a single graph and allows for a more realistic sense of the upward curves of the three data points (positive cases, hospitalizations, and deaths).

  • Positive Cases: OHA has reported that 72 additional Oregonians tested positive for COVID-19 yesterday, putting the total at 2,817.
  • Total Tests: The total number of tests in Oregon now stands at 65,402. That’s an increase of 1,959 tests.
  • Ratio:  The percentage of positive results for today is 3.7%. That remains lower than the national percentage for today, which at 8.6% is continuing to decline significantly.  See below for a graph showing the daily ratio changes over the last month.
  • Deaths: I’m afraid that I have to report that 4 deaths due to the virus in Oregon were reported today. That brings the total number of deaths in Oregon to 113.       
  • Hospitalized: The number of Oregonians who have been hospitalized with symptoms, and who have also tested positive for the disease, is now at 622. This is an increase of 14 from yesterday.
  • Presumptive Cases: OHA is now including “presumptive COVID-19 cases” in its daily reports, consistent with recently amended guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A presumptive case is someone who does not yet have a positive PCR test result but is showing symptoms and has had close contact with a confirmed case. If they later test positive by PCR, those will be recategorized as confirmed cases.  Today the number of presumptive cases is 8.
  • Other Hospital Information:
    • Patients Currently w COVID-19 Symptoms (who may or may not have received a positive test result yet): 219 (an increase of 12 from yesterday). Of those, 93 have already received a positive test back.
    • Available ICU Beds: 266 (a decrease of 10 from yesterday)
    • Other Available Beds: 1,925 (an increase of 13 from yesterday)
    • ICU Patients w COVID-19 Symptoms (who may or may not have received a positive test result yet): 49 (8 more than yesterday)
    • COVID-19 Patients Currently on Ventilators: 25 (8 more than yesterday).
    • Available Ventilators: 798 (6 fewer than yesterday)
  • Today’s National Numbers:
  • PPE:
    • In the last 24 hours the Emergency Coordination Center received another 24,000 face shields.
    • Almost as soon as these PPE items come in, they are distributed from the ECC to local county emergency centers. The Office of Emergency Management has created a set of guidelines for allocating these resources into the field.  You can read about it here.
  • Other Brief Updates:
    • The Governor announced this morning that the process of reopening Oregon’s state parks is beginning tomorrow with a handful of state parks. That number will expand gradually over the coming weeks as local communities indicate they are ready for people to come into their areas.  Here is a very helpful set of FAQs from State Parks with the list of parks that are opening and some good explanation of the process.
    • Decisions around local parks opening will be in the hands of local governments and parks districts. However, the executive order prohibiting access to play structures remains in force for now.
    • The Small Business Administration announced today that thanks to the additional funds provided in CARES 2, it’s able to resume the processing of the applications for its Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL) and EIDL Advance (effectively $10,000 grants-in-aid) that were submitted before its portal stopped accepting new applications on April 15. If you submitted an application before April 15, you may still be able to get your EIDL. Applications will be processed in the order that they first came in. Good luck! And if you’re an agricultural business, you may still be able to apply for the first time.  See the SBA press release for details.
    • Among those hit hardest by the coronavirus are agricultural workers, often Latinx, doing essential, critical work in the fields to get food to our tables. In an effort to provide better protection for these workers, Oregon OSHA has just issued A TEMPORARY RULE to increase protections for workers against the spread of coronavirus in employer-provided housing and in labor-intensive farm operations. You can read about this important new rule here. 

Additional Daily Graphs:

b
c
d
e

Zoom Town Hall: Thursday

I hope you'll join for our latest Zoom Town Hall edition, this Thursday (5/7) at 5pm.  You can pre-register for the town hall here, and include any questions or topics that you want to see covered.  I'm looking forward to it, and I'm thankful we will have someone from the Governor's office on hand to answer questions and give us the latest updates on the reopening plans.

Weekly Report

We’ve just received this week’s OHA Surveillance Summary Report.  It includes the demographic information that I’ve discussed previously: breakdown by age, county of residence, race/ethnicity, gender, and recovery rates.  The OHA is making some progress in getting race and ethnicity information via follow-up interviews with individuals who have tested positive.  You’ll see that the populations being hit particularly hard right now are the Pacific Islander and Hispanic communities, with the Native-American and African-American communities also contracting the virus at high rates. 

You may remember that as of a couple of weeks ago, Harney County had remained infection-free.  This week’s report shows that it has now had its first infection.

The big change in this week’s report is that the OHA is now providing case counts and cases per thousand by zip code.  That is very useful in helping us to identify hot spots for the virus.  Reporting by county is useful, but many of Oregon’s counties are quite large, and there may be significant differences from one part of the county to another. 

Marion County, for example, is as a whole one of Oregon’s most intense areas for COVID.  But if we look at the Salem-area zip codes, we see that the rates are not especially high.  But the two zip codes with the highest concentrations in the state are in the nearby Woodburn and Gervais areas, home to many agricultural workers.  The third highest zip code, by the way, is in East Multnomah County, where the Healthcare at Foster Creek facility is located. 

As you look at the zip code data, you’ll see that not all the zip codes have precise data attached to them.  This is because the counts in those zip codes are so low that they might compromise the privacy of individuals who’ve been affected.  Here’s the explanation from the OHA: As we release this data, we are taking steps to protect privacy of individual patients by combining portions of it. If a zip code’s population is less than 1000, then we will combine all such zip codes and report the aggregate case count. If there are fewer than 10 cases in a zip code, then we will be reporting "1-9."

To help you in your sleuthing, here’s an Oregon zip code map.

What Are Our Neighbors Doing to Reopen?

Governor Brown has provided us with the framework for our three-phase reopening process, and later in the week we’ll be getting more details about it.  In the meantime, of course, our neighboring states are working on their own reopening plans.  If you’re interested in seeing how our process compares to theirs, here are links to articles summarizing their intended processes:

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