While Oregon may have passed the peak of its omicron surge, health officials want Oregonians to remember that hospitals are still strained.
Hospitals are relying on help from about 1,300 National Guard members and 1,200 traveling health care workers, state epidemiologist Dr. Dean Sidelinger said at a press conference Friday.
“I anticipate you’ll start to see some redeployment of those staff, some draw-down of those staff, over the next month to month and a half,” Sidelinger said. “And when we get to the end of March, when we predict [COVID] numbers are down, we’re going to see much less outside support in those hospital systems.”
Still, many of those Guard members and traveling hospital workers could remain to help with hospital fluctuations relating to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Sidelinger said newly diagnosed COVID cases fell 71% in the last three weeks. Oregon’s omicron surge reached 1,130 hospitalizations on Jan. 27, just below last year’s surge of the delta variant, which reached 1,178 hospitalizations in September.
Oregon’s COVID hospitalizations dropped last week from 1,072 on Monday to 947 by Friday.
Oregon’s health leaders announced significant changes to statewide masking rules last week, putting a date on when Oregonians can remove their masks in indoor, public spaces: “no later than March 31.”
The same rule applies to school districts, which at that point can make their own masking rules.
Even with the announcement, demonstrators across Oregon, including in Salem, protested against masking and other COVID protocols in front of schools last week. Colt Gill, director of the Oregon Department of Education, asked them to hang tight.
“We have a date; it’s named,” Gill said at Friday’s conference. “And our school leaders who are anxious to move away from universal masking know that that can happen on that date.”
Gill said the education department is asking school districts to work closely with their local health departments to decide when and where to implement masking starting in April.
“We’re transitioning these kinds of decision-making challenges to our local school districts and local public health [offices], but we’re doing it at a time when we know that transmission will be at a much lower level,” Gill said.
Although the state is transferring that authority to districts, public health leaders made the announcement along with a strong reiteration about the importance of masking in schools. Gill said that was to ensure that school leaders and parents stick to the state’s current mask mandate, at least until April.
“This is really not the time to stop universal masking in our schools,” Gill said. “This is a time when omicron can continue to spread rapidly through an indoor setting, when people are spending a lot of time together in close quarters inside a school building.”