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December 30, 2020
I hope that you and your loved ones are doing well, staying healthy, and looking out for your neighbors and friends in these difficult times.
Please stay safe, and let me know if you have any questions about information in today’s newsletter.
TODAY’S CORONAVIRUS AND CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE UPDATE
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New COVID Cases: OHA reports 1,052 new COVID cases today. This count is a combination of positive test results and those who are presumed positive (see definition below). The cumulative number of cases in Oregon since the beginning of the pandemic is 112,260.
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Positive Test Results: OHA reports 1,160 positive test results today. (Individuals may have had multiple tests come back positive, and each is now counted separately.) The cumulative total of positive test results since the beginning of the pandemic is 154,487.
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Total Tests: An additional 18,917 test results were reported today. Our cumulative total of tests is 2,632,475.
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Positivity Rate: The test positivity rate for Oregon today is 6.1%. The national ratio today is 14.3%.
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Deaths: I’m sorry to report 19 additional COVID deaths today. You can read about the Oregonians that we’ve lost further down in the newsletter. The total number of COVID deaths in Oregon is now 1,468.
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Hospitalized: OHA reports 101 new COVID hospitalizations today. The cumulative number of reported hospitalizations since the beginning of the pandemic is 6,455.
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Vaccinations: As of the end of yesterday, a total of 31,380 Oregonians have received the COVID vaccine. For more details, including the demographics of those receiving the vaccine, go to the OHA Vaccinations Dashboard. And here is a link to more information about the vaccine and vaccination protocols.
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Presumptive Cases: OHA is including “presumptive COVID-19 cases” in its 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.
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Other Hospital Information:
- Patients Currently with COVID-19 Symptoms (who may or may not have received a positive test result yet): 570 (7 more than yesterday). Of those, 527 (12 more than yesterday) have already received a positive test back.
- Available ICU Beds: 130 (11 fewer than yesterday)
- Other Available Beds: 551 (58 fewer than yesterday).
- ICU Patients w COVID-19 Symptoms: 117 (10 fewer than yesterday).
- COVID-19 Patients Currently on Ventilators: 61 (1 more than yesterday).
- Available Ventilators: 747 (13 more than yesterday).
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Dashboards:
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Today’s National Numbers:
- Total Tests: 248,766,249 (up 1,578,458 from yesterday).
- Total Cases: 19,493,586 (up 226,353 from yesterday.)
- Deaths: 333,524 (up 3,919 from yesterday).
- These national numbers come from the COVID Tracking Project. You can visit that site here.
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Additional Brief Updates:
- The Oregonian’s Kale Williams provides an update on the COVID situation in Oregon’s federal and state prisons. The situation remains awful. There are currently 500 active infections in Oregon state prisons, and ore than 2,000 adults in custody have tested positive since the beginning of the pandemic. (That’s around one of every seven AICs.) Twenty-two AICs have died of the disease, including one reported just today at the Oregon State Penitentiary, a young man in his 30s. The first inoculations of corrections staff and AICs began this week. It’s clear that this will be necessary if we hope to curb this epidemic in our state facilities.
- The Oregonian also has a story about a new outbreak at the Oregon State Hospital, Oregon’s state psychiatric hospital. Twelve patients and two staff members have been found positive for the disease. Fortunately, more than one thousand staff members have received the Moderna vaccine since Monday, and all 578 patients are eligible to receive it sometime soon.
- The United Kingdom has just authorized use of the third COVID vaccine, produced by AstraZeneca. The country has also decided to try to get one dose to as many people as possible rather than reserve enough doses to guarantee a second dose within a few weeks. People there will need to wait ten weeks or so for their second dose, with the hope that additional product will be available by then. Having just one dose won’t provide as much protection as having two doses, but it should provide some protection to more people. This will be an interesting if controversial experiment. Based on clinical trials, the AstraZeneca vaccine is less effective to begin with than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (70% effective vs. low- to mid-90%), but it is less expensive, easier to produce, and easier to handle and distribute.
Latest OHA Weekly COVID Report Released: Oregon’s Numbers Going Down
OHA released its WEEKLY COVID REPORT on Wednesday. It is again a very comprehensive snapshot of different aspects of transmission of the disease in Oregon over the past week or so.
This week’s report confirms what we’ve been seeing in our daily reports: an ongoing decline in COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. This is the third week in a row that we’ve seen case counts decline, a trend that seems clearly connected to the increased COVID restrictions that were put in place just before Thanksgiving.
Here are some of OHA’s broad observations of where we are now, based on data from Monday, December 21 through Sunday, December 27:
- We see again a reduction in the number of new cases. OHA has reported 6,790 new cases of COVID-19 infection, a 22% reduction from the previous week’s 8,745. This is the third week in a row whose rate of increase is lower than that of the previous week (following seven weeks of increases).
- The number of COVID tests unfortunately declined to 134,498 (down from the previous week’s 167,365).
- The positivity rate increased slightly from 6.3% to 6.7%.
- The number of new COVID hospitalizations decreased again, this time by 23% from last week, from 437 to 337, an average of 48 per day (down from per day).
- The number of COVID deaths last week declined, from a record high 186 to just 86, the lowest it’s been for four weeks.
- The cumulative death rate since the beginning of the pandemic reached 1,433 on December 27. With a cumulative case count of 109,725 on December 27, this is again a case fatality rate of 1.3%.
- Cases are increasingly classified as “sporadic”—meaning that no single source was identified for them. Through October, 34% of cases were classified as sporadic; since then, more than 50% have been sporadic.
The report again provides information about disease symptoms and risk factors; along with racial/ethnic/age/gender demographics. It provides an update on people with intellectual/developmental disabilities and the number of COVID patients at various hospitals around the state.
It no longer includes information on outbreaks in long-term care, workplaces, child care, and K-12. That information is now included in a separate Outbreak Report.
Racial/Ethnic
The report again demonstrates significant disparities among racial groups. You can see this in the charts below, with data that I’ve taken from the December 16 report, the December 23 report, and from this December 30 report.. It allows you to see at a glance the proportion of case counts within different racial groups and ethnic groups (technically, “Hispanic” is not a race and is counted as an ethnic group, with numbers from a separate chart).
To help you understand the racial/ethnic data reported in the weekly report, I’ve also created a chart that shows the hospitalization and death rates per 100K population, along with the infection rates per-100K population for each racial/ethnic group.
You’ll see again how much higher the case rates per 100,000 are for most racial/ethnic groups compared to White Oregonians. Black Oregonians are 2.4 times more likely to contract the disease than are White Oregonians, Native Americans 3 times more likely, Latinx Oregonians are 4 times more likely, and Pacific Islanders are now 4.5 times more likely. The differences, while still large, have nearly all continued to go down slightly from week to week. (The exception is Native Americans, whose rates have been rising.) The differential rate for Pacific Islanders, while very large, is now a third of what it was during the summer.
You’ll also again see that hospitalization rates among those who have contracted the disease are quite a bit lower for Latinx, and somewhat higher for Pacific Islanders than for the population of White Oregonians. Among those who have contracted the disease, the percentage who ultimately die of it remains somewhat higher for Whites than for people of color.
However, you’ll also see in the final chart that when examined as a proportion of their populations in Oregon, the hospitalization and death rates for Blacks, Native Americans, Latinx, and especially Pacific-Islander Oregonians continue to be disproportionally high. (The hospitalization rate for Pacific Islanders is 6.5 times the rate for Whites, while their death rate is more than three times the rate for Whites.) Looking at these probability rates helps us to see why it’s so important that special outreach needs to be made to members of these racial/ethnic groups.
  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 reported for is 1,052. Here is the breakdown of cases by county today:
The new confirmed and presumptive cases reported today are in the following counties:
Baker (4)
Benton (14)
Clackamas (104)
Clatsop (12)
Columbia (12)
Coos (15)
Crook (14)
Curry (3)
Deschutes (47)
Douglas (18)
Gilliam (2)
Hood River (19)
Jackson (59)
Jefferson (9)
Josephine (27)
Klamath (29)
Lake (1)
Lane (80)
Lincoln (2)
Linn (20)
Malheur (31)
Marion (121)
Morrow (9)
Multnomah (168)
Polk (20)
Tillamook (10)
Umatilla (57)
Union (3)
Wasco (21)
Washington (103)
Yamhill (18)
And the Deaths:
Oregon’s 1,450th COVID-19 death is a 92-year-old woman in Clackamas County who tested positive on Dec. 25 and died on Dec. 28.
Oregon’s 1,451st COVID-19 death is a 74-year-old man in Coos County who tested positive on Dec. 18 and died on Dec. 20 at his residence.
Oregon’s 1,452nd COVID-19 death is an 88-year-old man in Coos County who tested positive on Dec. 23 and died on Dec. 24 at his residence.
Oregon’s 1,453rd COVID-19 death is an 86-year-old woman in Coos County who tested positive on Dec. 24 and died on Dec. 25 at her residence.
Oregon’s 1,454th COVID-19 death is a 93-year-old woman in Hood River County who tested positive on Dec. 1 and died on Dec. 28 at her residence.
Oregon’s 1,455th COVID-19 death is a 66-year-old woman in Hood River County who tested positive on Dec. 13 and died on Dec. 28 at her residence.
Oregon’s 1,456th COVID-19 death is a 67-year-old man in Jackson County who tested positive on Dec. 10 and died on Dec. 28 at Asante Rogue Valley Medical Center.
Oregon’s 1,457th COVID-19 death is an 84-year-old man in Jackson County who tested positive on Dec. 15 and died on Dec. 27 at Asante Rogue Valley Medical Center.
Oregon’s 1,458th COVID-19 death is a 100-year-old woman in Lane County who tested positive on Dec. 15 and died on Dec. 24 at her residence.
Oregon’s 1,459th COVID-19 death is a 73-year-old woman in Multnomah County who tested positive on Nov. 29 and died on Dec. 14 at Adventist Hospital.
Oregon’s 1,460th COVID-19 death is a 72-year-old man in Multnomah County who tested positive on Dec. 8 and died on Dec. 28 at Legacy Mt. Hood Medical Center.
Oregon’s 1,461st COVID-19 death is an 86-year-old woman in Marion County who tested positive on Dec. 16 and died on Dec. 19 at her residence.
Oregon’s 1,462nd COVID-19 death is a 92-year-old man in Multnomah County who tested positive on Dec. 14 and died on Dec. 25 at his residence.
Oregon’s 1,463rd COVID-19 death is an 85-year-old woman in Polk County who tested positive on Nov. 27 and died on Dec. 23 at her residence.
Oregon’s 1,464th COVID-19 death is a 79-year-old woman in Polk County who tested positive on Dec. 12 and died on Dec. 28 at Salem Hospital.
Oregon’s 1,465th COVID-19 death is a 67-year-old man in Union County who tested positive on Dec. 15 and died on Dec. 28 at Grande Ronde Hospital.
Oregon’s 1,466th COVID-19 death is an 83-year-old man in Washington County who tested positive on Nov. 28 and died on Dec. 26 at Oregon Health Science University.
Oregon’s 1,467th COVID-19 death is a 45-year-old woman in Washington County who tested positive on Dec. 11 and died on Dec. 18 at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center.
Oregon’s 1,468th COVID-19 death is an 87-year-old man in Wheeler County who tested positive on Nov. 28 and died on Dec. 26 at Pioneer Memorial Hospital—Prineville.
Additional Graphs:
      **You can find a breakdown of regional availability here.
 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:
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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