Wake up to Covid reality, fellow Oregonians

I'll be blunt.

If you're wearing a mask every time you're in a public place, are physically distancing, wash your hands regularly, and aren't socializing often with strangers or with large numbers of people you know -- good for you! 

But if you're not doing some or all of these things -- shame on you! 

You are either clueless about the skyrocketing Covid cases and hospitalizations both in Oregon and the United States as a whole, or you're so selfish, you don't care if you're helping prolong the suffering of this pandemic.

Here's a chart of the depressing reality here in Oregon, courtesy of the Washington Post. 

Oregon did really well following the March 23 stay-at-home order by Governor Brown. But the order only lasted for about six weeks. After that, there was a mid-summer spike in cases, then a moderate decline. 

Cases started rising again in mid-September. In late October they began to skyrocket far above anything seen since the beginning of the pandemic. Today Oregon had the all-time record of new cases, 1,122. Here's the Oregon Health Authority report.

It looks like a Covid vaccine will be widely available sometime in the first half of 2021. So this is a horrible time to be letting down our guard against the virus. 

I've read stories about how many American soldiers were killed in the last few days of World War I. It was painful to visualize people being so close to celebrating victory, only to die needlessly. 

Equally painful is reading about the Covid deaths in Oregon.

These are the most recent deaths. They include a 62-year-old man without underlying conditions. I'm 72. This man easily could have lived to my age, and likely beyond. Yet his life was cut short, as was the 35-year-old man who died from COVID-19. Think about this: almost everybody would do whatever they could to save the life of someone drowning. We value life. We fight premature death. Yet a disturbing number of Oregonians refuse to wear a mask and do the other things necessary to save lives from COVID-19.

Yes, deaths in Oregon haven't risen as rapidly as cases. But deaths lag cases and hospitalizations by several weeks. That's why Governor Brown said this today.

Here's the Washington Post Covid death chart for Oregon.

Note at the bottom of the chart that new daily reported cases rose 49% in the past week, while the number of tests reported rose only 16%. This shows that more testing isn't the reason for more cases being reported. Also note the high positive test rate of 13%. It should be below 5%.

Comments

[Rain Trueax]

I do not understand people who refuse masks. It seems such a simple thing to do an somehow has become some kind of political agenda for some.

About the vaccine, I wonder what the side effects will be and how long will the immunity last. Some vaccines have been great like polio, smallpox but others, like the flu vaccine less impressive. It varies from 35% effective to more but for some people, like me, the side effects are bad.