By DICK HUGHES/Oregon Capital Bureau
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced Monday that she will work with the governors of Washington and California on when to reopen their states’ economies.
“We are announcing that California, Oregon and Washington have agreed to work together on a shared approach for reopening our economies – one that identifies clear indicators for communities to restart public life and business,” the three governors said in a statement issued Monday afternoon.
The eventual lifting of social distancing and other interventions will require systems for testing, tracking and isolating individuals with COVID-19, according to Brown, Gavin Newsom of California and Jay Inslee of Washington.
They did not give a timeline. Brown is scheduled to hold a press conference Tuesday.
Earlier Monday, President Donald Trump had tweeted that it was his decision, not governors’, as to when to reopen state economies. In response, Inslee said no president has the legal authority to countermand a state’s health-based order to stay home.
In their statement, the West Coast governors said: “COVID-19 has preyed upon our interconnectedness. In the coming weeks, the West Coast will flip the script on COVID-19 – with our states acting in close coordination and collaboration to ensure the virus can never spread wildly in our communities.”
Inslee described the compact as a general state of principles. States will share strategies but their timelines may differ.
Charles Boyle, a spokesman for Brown, said the governor’s medical advisory panel will be involved in reviewing the public health components of decisions on lifting of various social distancing orders.
“While each state will have its own specific plan, our office is coordinating with the governor’s offices in Washington and California to develop common criteria for this framework and a way for our health departments to coordinate on an ongoing basis,” Boyle said.
Boyle said that reopening Oregon would happen neither overnight nor statewide all at once.
“Health outcomes will be the ultimate metric guiding decisions to reopen communities,” he said. “We will only reopen Oregon if the data shows we can do so without jeopardizing public health.”
The West Coast governors said their common goals included:
- Protecting vulnerable populations at risk for severe disease, including long-term care facilities.
As of last week, COVID-19 cases involving residents or staff had been reported at 32 of Oregon’s more than 2,200 long-term care facilities, a category that includes nursing, assisted living and residential care facilities and adult foster homes
- Ensuring adequate hospital capacity and supplies of personal protective equipment. As of Monday, Oregon had 153,000 N95 masks on hand to ship to counties and tribes, along with 7,000 surgical masks, 77,000 face shields, 125,000 gloves and 2,500 gowns.
Dr. Bob Dannenhoffer, the Douglas County public health officer and a member of Brown’s medical advisory panel, said he expects the shortage of PPE to become “one of the major pinch points in Oregon.”
- Mitigating the non-direct COVID-19 health impacts, particularly on disadvantaged communities.
The governors of New York, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island announced a similar regional compact on Monday. That was a coincidence, Inslee said during his own televised press conference.
Inslee said the West Coast governors had not asked Idaho Gov. Brad Little about including that neighboring state in their compact.
Each state has made progress on flattening the curve and slowing the spread of COVID-19, the governors said.
New projections, which the Oregon Health Authority released over the weekend, estimated that the state’s aggressive social distancing measures had prevented up to 18,000 additional cases of COVID-19, including 500 hospitalizations.
The Institute for Disease Modeling projected that, under current social distancing and business restrictions, the number of active infections would stay at more than 2,000 cases per day through mid-May, then gradually drop. If schools remained closed non-essential businesses were allowed to reopen, there would more than 17,000 active cases each day.
The economy has been hit hard. In three weeks, nearly 270,000 Oregonians filed initial claims for unemployment. That compares with about 149,000 net job losses during the two-year period of the Great Recession.
The Oregon Capital Bureau in Salem is staffed by reporters from EO Media, Pamplin Media Group and the Salem Reporter to provide state government and political news to their newspapers and media around Oregon, including YachatsNews.com