September 5th COVID-19 Update

Click to edit this placeholder text.

September 5, 2020

Friends and Neighbors,

I hope that you and your loved ones are doing well, staying healthy, and looking out for your neighbors and friends.

Since it’s Saturday, you’ll find only partial reporting on some of the metrics tracking coronavirus in Oregon.  Instead of giving us the positive test results alone, over the weekend OHA combines those numbers with the relatively small number of those who are presumed to be positive based on their symptoms and close proximity to someone who has tested positive, but whose test results have not yet come back.  But it still gives us a good idea of what’s going on. 

Because this is a long holiday weekend, we won’t get the full picture till Tuesday.

We also don’t get hospitalization numbers over the weekend, so we won’t know what the rate of increase is till Tuesday.  Deaths are reported, however, and today OHA reported the death of five Oregonians of different ages from around the state.

As I’ve been doing on Saturdays for a while, I’m also taking the opportunity to look back at what’s going on in our individual counties on a week-by-week basis over the last month.  The number of new cases and positivity rate has slowly, gradually been going down for the state as a whole in recent weeks, but we continue to see wide variation from county to county.

TODAY’S CORONAVIRUS AND CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE UPDATE

• Positive Cases: OHA reports that 261 additional Oregonians have tested positive or are presumed positive (see below for definition) for COVID. OHA does not report positive test results alone over the weekend. I’ll be able to readjust the numbers on Tuesday (since Monday is a holiday) to remove the presumed positives. The cumulative total for those testing positive and presumed positive is 27,856.
• Total Tests: The number of reported tests has increased by 4,511. Today’s increase in total results also includes presumed positives in the total results, so may be a little high. I’ll readjust the numbers on Tuesday. The cumulative total is now 580,107.
• Ratio: The percentage of positive cases in Oregon is 5.8% of total results, just under the statewide threshold for in-person school reopening. The national percentage today is 5.6%.  
• Deaths: I’m sorry to report 5 additional deaths due to the coronavirus today. You can read more about the Oregonians we lost further down in the newsletter.  The total number of COVID deaths in Oregon is now at 480.
• Hospitalized: OHA does not report on hospitalizations over the weekend. The cumulative number of those who have been hospitalized with COVID thus remains at 2,161.
• Presumptive Cases: OHA is 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 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.
• Other Hospital Information: OHA DOES NOT REPORT hospitalization information over the weekend, so the numbers below are the same as Friday’s.
  • Patients Currently w COVID-19 Symptoms (who may or may not have received a positive test result yet): 147 (14 more than yesterday). Of those, 91 have already received a positive test back.
  • Available ICU Beds: 145 (26 fewer than yesterday)
  • Other Available Beds: 681 (28 fewer than yesterday).
  • ICU Patients w COVID-19 Symptoms: 45 (2 more than yesterday).
  • COVID-19 Patients Currently on Ventilators: 23 (3 fewer than yesterday).
  • Available Ventilators: 775 (same as yesterday).

• Dashboards
  • Oregon (OHA)
  • Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, & Yamhill Counties

• Today’s National Numbers:
  • Total Tests: 81,521,063 (up 802,252 from yesterday).
  • Positive Tests: 6,213,630 (up 44,636 from yesterday).
  • Deaths: 180,655 (up 915 from yesterday).
  • These national numbers come from the COVID Tracking Project.  You can follow their updated numbers for each state and the nation as a whole here.
• Additional Brief Updates
  • The Governor, in consultation with OHA, has removed Baker County from the County Watch List. Though their numbers remain high (as you can see in today’s county update below), with help from OHA they have managed to bring down their numbers of untraced cases. Counties still on the list now include Jackson, Jefferson, Malheur, Morrow, and Umatilla.  In her press release on this subject, the Governor also announced that Umatilla and Morrow Counties will remain in Phase One because of high case counts and that counties that want to move from Phase One to Phase Two will need to get their weekly per-100K infection rates below 100.

• The Oregonian’s Eder Campuzano has an article on what’s going on with in-person K-3 instruction in the state (bottom-line: not much for now). Seventeen counties have currently met the threshold where they can reopen in-person instruction for younger children. Children under the age of ten are arguably most in need of an in-person format and are safest to do so, according to recent research and the experience of child care centers here in Oregon. Yet very few districts are opening for K-3 in-person instruction right now.  Why is that?  Here's the article.

More On School Reopening

I mentioned last weekend that there was going to be a Facetime Live on Wednesday with OHA and ODE regarding school reopening.  If you missed it, you can watch the 40-minute video on OHA's Facebook Page..

For an idea of the questions that were asked, here are the time stamps for each question:

10:30 – Where can we report school reopening violations?

11:45 – What are the guidelines for tutors? Can tutoring take place in public with social distancing or does it have to take place online?

13:30 – How is it safe for large groups of young children to get together for K-3 in-person learning?

15:40 – What is the 5% statewide positivity rate metric based on?

16:55 – Does the state need to go below the 5% positivity rate for three weeks or is one week enough for K-3 to resume in-person classes if the county meets the metric?

17:50 – Are cases from congregate living settings excluded from the school metrics? If not, why not?

19:45 – What has OHA done to require trial runs of in-person education for K-3 before school districts roll out in-person school on a large scale? What tools or resources does OHA have to make sure schools are following guidelines?

23:30 – Why can places operate all-day childcare centers but schools aren’t able to reopen?

28:00 – What happens when a child tests positive for COVID-19?

30:48 – Will kids be tested if they attend school physically and how will that work?

32:00 – How are the Individual Education Plans (IEP) being handled? Are they being adjusted or amended due to the change in education style? What will education look like for special needs children?

33:47 – Why are private schools opening for in-person learning when public schools aren’t?

34:30 – What about school buses?

35:10 – Are the complaint forms available in languages other than English?

35:50 – What’s being done for school’s that don’t have good ventilation?

37:14 – How are you addressing the lack of access to college testing for the class of 2021 in Oregon?

38:13 – What services are being offered to support student mental health during this time?

What’s Going On In the Counties?

Each Saturday I’m tracking how individual counties are doing, especially now that we’re seeing big increases in cases around the state. The key metrics that OHA is watching are the number of positive test results (per 100K residents) and  the percentage of positive test results among all tests administered; the latter will be the more important way for us to see if the infection rate is increasing as a result of reopening and increased testing. (They also are looking at hospital capacity and changes in hospitalization rates, but I don’t have that information by county.)

But first, I want to reproduce the current Interactive County Dashboard. that the OHA has on its website.  It shows case counts and total testing by county since the pandemic, scaled to cases per 100,000, so that we can see how the infection is penetrating the various counties, irrespective of their population size.  This is what we see as of September 4: 

Looking at the tables below, you’ll again see increases this week both in the numbers of new cases and in the percentages of new cases for some counties and not for others.

The percentage increases in positive test results may seem inordinately high when working off of a small base or when overall testing goes up rapidly in a county. Again, the more accurate way to gauge the penetration of the disease in a given county is by the percentage of positive test results each week.  In order to make the current trends in positive percentages more obvious, I’m again showing you the week-over-week percentages, along with the overall percentage of positive cases for each county since the beginning of the pandemic. 

As you’ll see, the proportion of positive test results for the state as a whole is going back down now.  This week’s positivity rate is again the lowest it’s been since the end of June.

Where Are Today’s New Cases?

If we put together the positive test results and new “presumptive” cases reported today, the overall number of new cases is 261. Two-thirds of today’s cases are again from outside the Portland Tri-County region, with Marion County again with the highest count.  Here is the breakdown by county for today:

Benton (2)

Clackamas (23)

Columbia (2)

Coos (3)

Deschutes (1)

Jackson (18)

Jefferson (2)

Josephine (3)

Klamath (1)

Lane (6)

Lincoln (2)

Linn (1)

Malheur (31)

Marion (49)

Morrow (1)

Multnomah (43)

Polk (5)

Tillamook (1)

Umatilla (17)

Union (2)

Wasco (5)

Washington (33)

Yamhill (1)

And the Deaths

Oregon’s 476^th COVID-19 death is a 53-year-old man in Marion County who tested positive on Aug. 17 and died on Sept. 3, at Salem Hospital.

Oregon’s 477^th COVID-19 death is an 80-year-old woman in Multnomah County who tested positive on Aug. 3 and died on Sept.2, at her residence.

Oregon’s 478^th COVID-19 death is a 68-year-old man in Umatilla County who tested positive on June 21 and died on July 16, at his residence.

Oregon’s 479^th COVID-19 death is a 70-year-old man in Clackamas County who became symptomatic on Aug. 4 and died on Aug. 15, at Providence Willamette Valley Medical Center.

Oregon’s 480^th COVID-19 death is a 78-year-old man in Washington County who tested positive on Aug. 22 and died on Sept. 4, at his residence.

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 (senatordembrow.com), click on “News and Information,” and you’ll find them all there.  Also, if someone forwarded you this newsletter and you’d like to get it directly, you can sign up for it there.

.

AND FINALLY,

Here again are some resources that you will find useful:

• Multnomah County has a status report on reopening.
• You can view the reopening status of all 36 counties here.
• Here is the OHA’s coronavirus page, with links to a number of resources. 
• Oregon's Office of Emergency Management now has a website for information about COVID-19.
• You can sign up here for regular coronavirus updates from OHA.
• Multnomah County has an excellent website with lots of really important advice and guidance.
• Here’s one from the Governor’s Office.
• The Employment Department has put together a webpage with Q&A’s on a number of employment issues related to COVID-19 (e.g., eligibility for Unemployment Insurance benefits).
• The Oregon Education Department has a new site for COVID-19 updates.
• The Department of Corrections has a COVID tracking website.

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: 503-281-0608
mail: 900 Court St NE, S-407, Salem, OR, 97301