Fiumara

UMATILLA COUNTY — Umatilla County has its eyes set on May 15 to enter phase one of reopening from the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s trying to do whatever it can to make sure it goes off without a hitch.

“I don’t want to get to the 15th and say, ‘Oops, the county wasn’t prepared,” said Umatilla County Commissioner George Murdock.

In preparation for a potential surge in cases when businesses begin reopening, the county announced this week it’s establishing a center at the Umatilla County Courthouse in Pendleton to answer calls and coordinate COVID-19 contact tracing investigations.

Gov. Kate Brown and state health officials have outlined the need for counties to be able to effectively track and monitor coronavirus cases and their contacts locally when reopening begins. That led the state to announce a plan last week of hiring and training 600 new contact tracers.

“It’s a plan we keep hearing about, but one we haven’t seen yet,” said Joe Fiumara, Umatilla County Public Health director.

Fiumara said the state has indicated each county needs 15 contact tracers per 100,000 residents, which means Umatilla County needs about 12 on staff. With eight employees already assigned as tracers, the county has posted job openings for three additional tracers and Fiumara said they will shift schedules around to fill the final spot.

Fiumara said the hope is eventually the state will provided reimbursement to the county for these new hires once the plan for expanding contact tracing across Oregon is more concrete.

The center is being set up in the county’s former law library on the third floor of the courthouse. Fiumara said this allows the health department to once again welcome in people with other public health needs, such as immunizations and birth control, while staff and tracers dedicated to COVID-19 can be isolated in their new space.

“We need to be able to conduct contact tracing seven days a week, but the worst case for us is if a member of our contact tracing team comes down with the virus,” Fiumara said.

Umatilla County’s preparations to reopen have coincided with its case totals surging over the last 10 days, reaching 79 on Wednesday and putting the county squarely at third in the state for the most confirmed cases per 100,000 people, according to data compiled by Lane County Public Health.

Of those 79 cases, 37 are considered active and 41 are considered recovered. One death has been reported in the county.

While the rising case numbers can be attributed to an increase in local testing access — the county reports 876 residents have been tested as of Wednesday — Fiumara also attributes it to more close contacts of cases receiving tests.

“More of the contacts we’re following up on are actually getting tested,” he said. “When somebody was identified as a contact when we were first getting going on this, that additional testing just wasn’t happening.”

However, Fiumara said the county’s tracing investigations over the last two weeks continue to reveal instances of social gatherings, some with family and some without, that are proving to be a catalyst to the spread.

Umatilla County Public Health also released its weekly locations trend map Tuesday, which indicates early trends that began a few weeks ago of where the virus was spreading locally have continued.

Hermiston remains the county hotspot with somewhere between 26 to 50 cases. Umatilla is second in the county with 16 to 25 cases, the Pendleton area still has between five and nine cases, and the Milton-Freewater area now is identified with five to nine cases.

With a number of factors to consider, Fiumara said the locations of the local confirmed cases doesn’t necessarily mean there’s “more of the virus” in Hermiston than other areas of the county.

“The sense is it’s spread around in those communities,” he said.

Though the confirmed case numbers are rising around the county, only two residents are currently hospitalized. That fact, coupled with the county’s commitment to improving its contact tracing investigations, has the board of commissioners confident in the May 15 target date.

“We have been told that we will get our formal application this week and we plan to have it in the governor’s hands by Friday,” Murdock wrote in a message to local public officials Tuesday. “Last Friday, she told us it looked like our plan was in order and that May 15 is realistic.”

Two local residents who tested positive for COVID-19 have been linked to a party in the Walla Walla, Washington, area where “it was not unknown that some others in attendance had tested positive for the virus,” Umatilla County Public Health Director Joe Fiumara said Tuesday.

According to a Union-Bulletin report Monday, Walla Walla County health officials say their contact tracing investigations are revealing instances of these so-called “COVID parties,” where people are purposefully exposing themselves to COVID-19 with the hopes of recovering and developing a lifelong immunity.

Fiumara said Umatilla County’s investigations haven’t revealed any such parties happening on this side of the border, but conversations with Walla Walla public health and hospital officials indicated two local cases were linked to a gathering in the area.

“That’s a troubling piece,” he said. “Those who aren’t concerned about getting the virus because they don’t have preexisting conditions or feel that they’re physically healthy so it won’t be that bad for them — they may be right. The problem is we see those people carrying the virus back and spreading it to their families and others who aren’t as lucky.”

These parties have been likened to “chickenpox parties” with the same concept of willfully exposing oneself to a disease with the goal of recovering and developing lifelong immunity. Yet there’s no proof that recovering from COVID-19 actually leads to lifelong immunity.

“One major difference is if you get chickenpox and you recover, we know that you’re now immune to it for the rest of your life,” Fiumara said. “We don’t know that yet for COVID-19. We believe there’s some short-term immunity but it’s not known if it’s lifelong, and we probably won’t know that for months if not years from now.”