A tip of the hat to Oregon State University’s TRACE COVID-19 project that offered free COVID-19 testing to a few hundred Hermiston residents last weekend.

Information gathered from the project, which estimates 17% of Hermiston residents were positive for COVID-19 on those days, will help public health officials better understand how our county can put the brakes on this outbreak.

The TRACE project provides a one-day snapshot of COVID-19 in one community, but in order to continue to work on this problem we need testing to be more widely available. That doesn’t just mean doctor’s offices making testing available to their patients at $125 a pop. It means working to establish options for free testing, available even to those without insurance or an established primary care provider.

With that in mind, we also want to give a kick in the pants to long testing turnaround times. It is taking 7-10 days for many people in the county to get their results back.

Telling someone, “By the way, 10 days ago you were exposed to COVID-19 and you may be an asymptomatic carrier” does little good. The person can choose to isolate for a few more days at that point, but it won’t undo all of the infections they may have already caused as they went about their usual routine over the past week and a half.

To stop a virus from running rampant through a community, that community has two options to cut off the virus’s opportunity to spread to new hosts: Have everyone isolate from each other, or quickly identify those who are carrying the virus and isolate them and anyone they may have spread it to.

In the early days of the pandemic, countries around the world temporarily chose Option 1 to buy time to build up testing and contact tracing capabilities so that they could implement Option 2. Countries from Australia to South Korea have done so successfully, allowing businesses to reopen with customers and staff feeling confident they are at very low risk for contracting COVID-19 there.

In Umatilla County, as in most of the United States, we reopened our businesses despite the fact that our testing capacity remains woefully inadequate to protect employees and customers, leaving people to gamble with their life and the lives of their household members in order to earn a paycheck or buy food.

We’re paying the price now, as the governor feels there is no option but to return to a full shutdown. The frustrating thing is that it didn’t have to be this way.