UMATILLA COUNTY — The timing of when Umatilla County will be permitted to move back to Phase 2 of reopening is up in the air after the state denied its appeal this week.

“I no longer have any forecast on when Phase 2 will happen,” Umatilla County Public Health Director Joe Fiumara said on Wednesday, Sept. 2. “We were aiming for that three-week mark, which was next week. I can no longer tell that to anybody with any confidence.”

Umatilla County Commissioner John Shafer confirmed the county’s appeal was denied during a Sept. 2 conference call with Oregon Health Authority Director Pat Allen and state epidemiologist Dr. Dean Sidelinger.

The county had appealed to the state to move into Phase 2 starting Friday, Sept. 4., but Fiumara said the state presented the county with a set of requirements before any appeal for Phase 2 will be granted.

“Where my understanding is for where we are right now, they are not going to allow Umatilla County to move to Phase 2 until such time that we meet all six public health indicators and our case rate for that week is less than 100 per 100,000,” Fiumara said.

In a Sept. 3 press release announcing the county’s appeal was denied, Gov. Kate Brown confirmed that due to higher case counts than earlier in the pandemic, no county will be permitted into Phase 2 without a case rate below 100 per 100,000 people.

“The original prerequisites for Phase 2 were based on trend-based metrics,” the release stated. “At that time, counties had a relatively low infection rate.”

In Phase 2, indoor and outdoor recreation and entertainment venues, such as movie theaters and pools, are able to reopen, in addition to youth clubs and playgrounds.

Umatilla County by the numbers

According to a Sept. 3 update of the Oregon Health Authority’s public data dashboard, Umatilla County is not meeting three of the six metrics being used to evaluate a county’s status during the pandemic. Those metrics are uptrends in hospitalizations over the last 14 days, uptrends in positive test rate in the last week and an uptrend of more than 5% in new cases over the last week.

There were eight county residents hospitalized with the virus as of Sept. 3, according to Umatilla County Public Health. The Oregon Health Authority doesn’t publicly provide the numbers it uses to determine that there’s been an uptrend in the last 14 days, but Umatilla County Public Health reported there were seven hospitalizations in an Aug. 20 press release.

The Oregon Health Authority also calculated a case rate of 180 per 100,000 people in Umatilla County for the week of Aug. 23-29, along with a positive test rate of 13.3% that same week.

Those calculations see-sawed from reports the week prior, which listed the county at a case rate of 113 per 100,000 (representing a fourth consecutive week of declining numbers) but a positive test rate of 16.3% from Aug. 16-22.

While those numbers suggest a downtrend in positive test rate from one week to the next, Fiumara said the Oregon Health Authority indicated the metric was determined as showing an uptrend because the rate increased from the beginning of the week to the end of the week from Aug. 23-29.

“I’m not going to lie, it makes me sit here and think if we’re going to do a testing event, whether I do it early in the week or late in the week needs to be based on whether I think there’s going to be a lot of positives or negatives,” Fiumara said. “And I don’t think that’s the good public health response.”

According to the county’s written appeal sent to the state, 19 of the 20 long-term care facilities in the county have completed at least a round of facility-wide testing, while three targeted testing events were held for “hard to reach populations” that included agricultural workers.

The appeal highlighted that between those three events, only 8 of the 290 — or roughly 2.75% — of the people tested were confirmed positive.

The county reported it must also lower its per capita case rate to below 100 cases per 100,000 residents for a seven-day span, which means Umatilla County must report approximately 81 or fewer new cases of the virus over seven days.

Umatilla County hasn’t had a seven-day stretch that would have met that metric since the week of June 6-12, the first week the county and others in the state entered Phase 2 the first time around.

Fiumara said Sept. 2 that his department is still evaluating next steps toward reaching Phase 2, but any plan to get back there will include the entire community continuing to buy into health and safety guidelines.

“It’s all about the community response,” Fiumara said.

Prison outbreaks included in Umatilla County numbers

As an outbreak of the virus has spread at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton over the last two months, Umatilla County has advocated for the state to remove those numbers from the county’s case totals and metrics, which would undoubtedly make meeting the standards for Phase 2 and reopening schools easier.

According to the Oregon Department of Corrections, over half of the EOCI inmates tested for the virus have been confirmed as positive for a total of 252 cases among its roughly 1,700 inmates as of Friday, Sept. 4. An additional 24 employees at the prison have tested positive.

In Umatilla, 41 inmates and 23 staff members have tested positive for the virus inside Two Rivers Correctional Institution. However, those inmates have tested positive at a rate of just over 5%.

In a statement provided by the Oregon Health Authority, state epidemiologist Dr. Dean Sidelinger indicated these numbers won’t be universally included or excluded when evaluating an individual county’s case metrics.

“OHA is not routinely excluding prison populations from county-based COVID-19 reporting. We will not routinely be doing so for school metrics,” Sidelinger stated. “We may consider the effect of prison populations on county-based COVID-19 metrics on an as needed basis if they are not associated with community spread and a county would otherwise meet the metrics.”

Fiumara said Umatilla County Public Health will continue to report all cases from within the two prisons because they are by definition within the department’s jurisdiction. However, he agreed there needs to be a nuanced evaluation of the county’s numbers that accounts for how representative those numbers are of the virus’s spread in the community.

“I would agree that what’s happening in the prison is not an apples to apples comparison for community spread, but I would also make the argument that it had to get there somehow,” he said.