By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
The superintendent of the Lincoln County School District warned parents this week to have daycare plans in place should the district need to close some or all of its schools because of the skyrocketing number of Covid-19 cases affecting school employees.
As the omicron variant of the virus sweeps through the county – more than 600 cases so far this month – Superintendent Karen Gray said in a message to parents that the district is “teetering on the brink” of not being able to continue in-person classes.
“I would like everyone to think about having a plan for added daycare in case we have to temporarily go back to another model of instruction until the Omicron surge goes away and we can get and keep teachers in our classrooms,” Gray said in her statement. “I am not saying it will, but it might. It might happen to one area of the district and not another. I don’t know yet but the numbers are increasing and our ability to adjust to it is failing.”
Gray told the school board during its regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday night that 36 elementary and 100 high school students out of 5,000 were in isolation because they had the virus or in quarantine because they had contact with someone with it. While not the highest number during the coronavirus pandemic, five days earlier there was just one student in quarantine, Gray said. It’s an illustration how the omicron variant is racing through the community.
Gray said there were 59 employee absences Tuesday across the district, including 36 teachers. Eighteen teachers were not able to be replaced by substitutes.
“That means 18 times in our classrooms there was a teacher out and no substitute available,” Gray said. “There’s a substitute shortage, there’s a teacher shortage, there’s a bus driver shortage.”
Schools throughout Oregon are struggling with the same issue, with some districts or individual schools — especially in the hard-hit Portland area — returning to online instruction until the omicron surge subsides.
The school numbers are being reflected throughout Lincoln County, with an average of 64 cases a day reported this week, including 85 on Wednesday – with January’s total of 605 already higher than all but one month of the nearly 2-year-old pandemic.
Hospitals filling
As predicted, the county’s two hospitals are also beginning to feel the strain.
On Wednesday, there were four Covid-19 patients in intensive care at hospitals in Newport and Lincoln City and 11 of 12 total intensive care beds were full, according to figures from Samaritan Health Services. On Wednesday, Samaritan Pacific Communities Hospital had 19 of its 25 regular beds full and had seen 48 people in its emergency department the previous 24 hours.
At Samaritan North Lincoln Hospital, 15 of 16 regular patient beds were full, there had been 35 people in the emergency department the previous 24 hours and two people were waiting for beds to open up.
The Oregon Health Authority reported Thursday there was just one of 85 adult intensive care beds available in the hospital region that includes Lincoln, Benton, Linn, Marion, Polk and Yamhill counties.
Boosters lagging locally
Lincoln County Public Health director Florence Pourtal told county commissioners Wednesday that the hospital patients were “either unvaccinated or under-vaccinated.”
“We need people to understand that if they want to be protected against this virus … they need to go get their booster,” Pourtal said. “Your two vaccinations are not enough anymore.”
Pourtal said now that anyone 12 years of age or older is eligible for a booster shot five months after receiving their last Covid-19 vaccine.
While the county’s overall vaccination rate of 78.2 percent of everyone over 5 years of age is one of the highest in Oregon, the rate of booster shots is lagging at just under 38 percent.
And while the county’s official number of confirmed Covid-19 cases is high, the actual number is likely substantially larger, Pourtal said. With the availability of at-home test kits, county and state health officials believe that many positive tests are not being reported.
“It is very likely that our number is very low,” Pourtal said.
The positivity rate of Covid-19 tests taken in the county is 27.5 percent. Just a year ago a positivity rate of more than 5 percent was considered extreme.
On Wednesday, the OHA set up a special program and toll-free telephone number where people can report their positive test results.
With cases of omicron skyrocketing, the OHA announced it was taking a new approach to tracking new Covid-19 infections. Investigators are no longer trying to call those who test positive for the coronavirus. State and county health departments have been using such calls to trace exposures and provide quarantine information.
Now, it’s created a website for people to get information about what to do if they test positive and established a hotline. The hotline – 866-917-8881 – is staffed Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m. and on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Unacceptable on every single level. Our children have lost enough. The school district will have lawsuits filed against it for failure to hold up their end and depriving our children of services. Oregon public schools took millions in federal taxpayer money to bring back in-person learning and we parents will accept nothing less. It’s not the virus. It’s poor leadership, mandates and waste. Don’t threaten us parents.
So BogusOtis, what do you expect schools to do when teachers are sick? Do you want them coming to school with Covid-19 and exposing their students? If people would just get vaccinated, you could keep those teachers working.
It’s mainstream news now — vaccines do not prevent the spreading or contracting of Covid-19. It only is supposed to lessen the symptoms. If you are young and healthy you should be fine. It’s weird to me that people think that the pharmaceutical company is there to help, and that the government cares about our health on this one issue. Chemotherapy is not free, neither is insulin, and they still sell cigarettes in stores. Just saying, trust the science that changes from day to day.