EUGENE, Ore .– Lane County Public Health is warning the public not to let their guard down after an increase in cases this week.
Friday was the first day that Lane County entered the lowest risk category, the first county to do so in western Oregon. But it may be short-lived.
24 cases were reported on Wednesday and 34 cases were reported on Friday. Public health officials are attributing this increase in cases to an increase in social gatherings. On Thursday, officials said two separate social gatherings resulted in 17 new cases.
Dr. James McGovern, vice president of Medical Affairs at PeaceHealth, said the increase in cases is worrying.
“You have the variants that are definitely in the community and we’ve opened them up,” said McGovern. “So, you have more people coming together, you are indoors, there are more infectious variants, and we still vaccinate only less than 20 percent of the population of Lane County.”
Although cases are slowly returning, Dr. McGovern said hospitalizations have been consistently low at PeaceHealth. He said they have an average of four to seven people in the hospital with COVID-19 in a single day. This is a dramatic decrease from the PeaceHealth peak in November, when the hospital was on average between 30 and 30 years old every day. Dr. McGovern said that in order to keep the number of cases low, the public needs to continue to follow all health guidelines.
“It’s just how far they go and whether they stabilize again and at what level they stabilize again,” said McGovern. “I don’t think we have a good sense of that right now. There are a lot of variables, so we are just looking closely and emphasizing that people continue to do what they are doing with the things they have done over the past year.”