![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() School boards across the state are considering policies for going forward, including whether to make masks optional after the state mandate lifts. The agency intends to rescind the mask requirement for schools at the end of March, despite what happens with hospitalizations so administrators and educators have time to ensure that they can keep everyone safe. The agency has based its Covid restrictions on Graven’s forecasts. The Oregon Health Authority said that it would lift the mask requirement by the end of March at the latest, and could rescind it sooner if hospitalizations fall more rapidly than expected. Surveys show that 80% of Oregonians are wearing masks indoors and many are refraining from attending large indoor gatherings with people outside their households. Graven said the rapid decline in hospitalizations is due in part to the widespread adherence to Oregon’s indoor mask rule for public places. North central Oregon, covering Gilliam, Hood River, Sherman and Wasco counties, has no free ICU beds, but 10% of other hospital beds were available. In Benton, Lincoln, Linn, Marion, Polk and Yamhill counties on Thursday, only 2 intensive care beds, about 2%, were free, and less than 1% of the 694 non-ICU beds were available. Some regions continue to face a shortage of beds. Graven expects that to fall to about 400 by March 20. That had declined to about 790 as of Thursday. The number of people hospitalized for Covid peaked at 1,130. ![]() The number of cases are still significantly higher than they have been for most of the pandemic, but the decline over the past week provides relief for hospitals operating under severe strain - and will benefit all Oregonians who need timely care in a hospital.” “This doesn’t mean that we’re out of the woods. “We have had a substantial drop in the number of hospitalized patients in Oregon over the past week or so,” Graven said in a statement. Peter Graven, OHSU’s Covid forecaster, said Thursday that he expects hospitalizations to return to the level they were before omicron hit by March 20, about 10 days earlier than expected. And the number of boosters administered over the past 10 days has increased-hitting state officials’ targets for 14,000 a day in Oregon.Hospitalizations of patients with Covid-19 are declining faster than originally predicted, according to the latest forecast by Oregon Health & Science University. The factor that could make the most difference is lots of people getting boosters, a campaign the state launched after Graven’s numbers became public Dec. “The main parameters that changed were, we increased the number of people who were likely to get infected through the immune escape parameter,” Graven says, explaining that last number. They also consider how people respond (like whether they’re traveling) and how many people are getting infected after vaccination or prior infection (between the 3,000 hospitalizations estimate and the 1,250 estimate, that number was increased to 55% from 50%). To project the number of hospitalizations some weeks out, Graven and other modelers take into account how fast COVID is spreading (that estimate stayed the same week to week in Graven’s model), and how many people are hospitalized after contracting a particular variant (based on a new study out of the U.K., Graven revised that downward to 42% from 30%). Omicron is a new variant and experts are learning more about its impacts as other jurisdictions, notably South Africa, the U.K., Denmark and now the East Coast of the United States, experience record-setting numbers of cases. ![]()
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