By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
Lincoln County recorded its first COVID-19 case on March 24, 2020 – a local woman who came down with the illness while traveling out of state.
But it counted as the first Lincoln County case.
Seventeen months later there have been 2,348 cases in the county, ranging from just a handful during the first months of the pandemic cresting at 306 in June 2020 after the big workplace outbreak at Pacific Seafoods in Newport.
That’s until the Delta variant arrived in force last month.
In August, Lincoln County had 786 COVID-19 confirmed cases – and that number is likely under-reported, health officials said Wednesday. That’s one third of all cases over the past 17 months and seven times the number of cases in July.
And while the vaccination rate in the county is one of the highest in Oregon at more than 77 percent, the sheer number of cases is beginning to affect care at the two small hospitals in Newport and Lincoln City, which are struggling with staffing issues.
There have been 104 hospitalizations since the pandemic began, but 23 – or just over one fourth – came in August. The most serious cases are being sent to hospitals in Corvallis, elsewhere in the Willamette Valley or Portland, where critically ill patients from hard-hit counties in southern and eastern Oregon are also arriving.
“This is the highest they’ve seen at any time during the pandemic,” interim health department director Florence Pourtal told county commissioners Wednesday.
Pourtal told commissioners that Samaritan North Lincoln Hospital was unable to take patients into its four intensive care unit beds Wednesday because it was unable to staff them.
Samaritan Health Systems said eight of its 16 regular, inpatient beds were in use Wednesday at its Lincoln City hospital while 19 of 25 were occupied at Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital in Newport. There were three patients using six of the intensive care beds in Newport.
Just three of all its patients were COVID-19 cases, said Dr. Lesley Ogden, who oversees both hospitals.
In a statement to YachatsNews, Ogden said Samaritan is trying to address the critical shortage of staff.
“Nurse staffing is a nationwide issue and virtually every hospital is experiencing some kind of staffing issues,” Ogden said. “Many issues have gotten us here including an aging workforce, recent retirements and not enough nursing school graduates to fill the holes. Some of this was worsened by the COVID pandemic, with additional people leaving medicine altogether.”
Another impact on nurse staffing levels in Lincoln County is the lack of available short-term housing for temporary or traveling agency nurses. To offset this, Ogden said Samaritan secured apartment space and RV spots in Lincoln City and Newport to sublease to traveling staff and others.
“If there is nowhere for agency staff to live, they won’t come work for us unless we can find a solution,” Ogden said. “We are grateful to have these rental units not only for traveling nursing staff, but also for use by our medical students, medical residents and as a short-term landing spot for new hires in hard-to-fill positions while they look for permanent housing in our community. But the acute need is to find homes for travelers to fill our vacancies.”
On intensive care unit staffing, Ogden said when there are gaps in the intensive care unit nurse schedule the number of ICU patients that can be admitted is reduced. The ratio for ICU care is one nurse for every two patients, she said, while the ratio is one nurse for every four patients in regular medical-surgical units.
“We are making day-by-day decisions based on staffing and our intent is to fill these positions with permanent ICU nurses. We just need time to do it,” she said. “As federally-designated critical access hospitals, we are charged with improving access to health care by keeping essential services in rural communities, and we fully intend to meet that obligation.”
$500 bonuses for county employees
In other business Wednesday, county commissioners voted unanimously to award $500 bonuses to employees who showed they were vaccinated by the end of October. They also gave each employee 80 hours of additional COVID-19 related time off if they needed it by the end of the year.
The county has 600 full- or part-time employees who could be affected by the decision, costing the county up to $300,000 in money it received for COVID-19 relief from the federal government.
While voting yes, Commissioner Claire Hall said she had misgivings over the decision based on feedback she was getting and hearing in the community.
“To take this vote instead of a more pro-active stance troubles me,” Hall said, referring to a mandatory requirement that employees be vaccinated or lose their job – as jurisdictions like the city of Portland or Multnomah County have done.
Commission Chair Doug Hunt and Kaety Jacobson said they thought the bonus was the best method to get more people vaccinated, although Hunt estimated 85 percent already were.
Jacobson said she felt a mandate is “easy to say but hard to implement” and was unsure how successful it would be.
“I’d rather try it with the carrot rather than going directly to the hammer,” she said.
Hunt said if 90 of 600 employees were not vaccinated, maybe half would quit rather than be forced to be inoculated.
“… and suddenly we have 45 openings when everyone is struggling to find employees,” he said.
“Countywide, everybody’s burned out,” Hunt said. “It’s a way to say ‘Thank you’ to our employees who’ve been busting their butts for 20 months.”