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The Road Ahead

A person in Multnomah County just became the first known case of the UK variant in Oregon. They had no travel history. The significance of this is the variant is 50-60% more contagious than what we are experiencing at the moment. It will likely become the dominant strain of the virus in Oregon within the next month or two. Today, the CDC said it expects it to be the dominant strain in the US by March. Scientists do not believe the strain is more deadly than our existing strain, but the impacts will be greater than what we have seen simply because more people will get infected. More infections mean more hospitalizations and more severe cases and deaths. We need to get vaccinations available to the most vulnerable population as quickly as possible. I believe Douglas County, the DCCRT, DPHN, and our local medical providers are more than capable of getting the vaccine out very quickly once we have an adequate supply. Today, however, it was announced that Oregon's shipment of more vaccine doses would be delayed into February because of a lack of stockpile at the federal level. This is very frustrating, to put it mildly. Douglas County case numbers - They are ticking up. We’ve had another outbreak and several days this past week of 20+ new cases per day. Unless something turns around, we are likely headed back to the “extreme risk” category pretty soon. Impact of new variant on Douglas County - I think we can expect case numbers in Oregon to start rising soon and eventually we will likely see a pretty significant spike. It’s happening in all countries around the world that have a large % of the new variant. We should expect the same to occur here. Our location being remote should give us a natural delay in the variant reaching us. The longer the delay the better as it gives us more time to protect the vulnerable in our community. We can probably expect some increased disruption at least into summer when hopefully we get a boost from seasonality like we did last summer. I’m really hoping this is the case. By then, vaccine efforts should be running at a very high level. In the months ahead, let’s work together to help one another. This is hard on everyone, but the impact is not equally distributed. Our efforts should be focused on helping the vulnerable in our community stay safe until a vaccine is available to them, our hospitals and medical providers stay within capacity, and seeing that our local businesses are thoroughly supported. When we wake up in the morning in the weeks and months ahead we need to look for ways to help each other, not fight one another. There are disagreements all around, but there are significant commonalities that can bind us together. We care deeply for the well-being of our community, we care about the lives of all the citizens that live here, and we care about the businesses that call Douglas County home. Let's see each other through this together.