Wednesday, September 30, 2020 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon 11 Commentary... Oregon’s COVID-19 situation needs improvement By Dave Tremblay Columnist In 2020, our lives have been influenced greatly by COVID-19. Unfortunately, many families have experi- enced personal, tragic loss. In every facet of normal life throughout Oregon 4 its 4.3 million residents and 36 counties 4 Governor Brown9s decisions and proc- lamations have a timely, important impact on all of us. In the United States, we just surpassed 205,000 deaths. Following are key facts about Oregon9s COVID-19 situation from the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) web- site, https://govstatus.egov. com/OR-OHA-COVID-19. Note: COVID-19 reporting procedures are dynamic 4 with the objective to capture and use data better. First case: February 28 First death: March 14 Oregon statics (as of 9/27): 32,820 cases, 2,470 hospitalizations, 547 deaths Deschutes County (as of 9/27): 810 cases, 62 hospi- talizations, 12 deaths Sisters, OR (as of 9/25): 25 cases How do we better under- stand COVID-19 and its impact? We look at its past process behavior. Everything is a process. Then, we overlay important events to under- stand cause-and-effect. Our analysis specifically looks for sustainability, predictability, and associated impact(s). An important example of the analysis? There is one hospitalization in 13 diag- nosed COVID-19 cases; the hospitalization rate is 7.7 per- cent to the number to cases. Of course, that is a major health and societal outcome of contracting COVID-19. Within the COVID-19 behavior, we analyzed total cases and resultant hospi- talizations from February 2 through September 19. A key conclusion that was quantified? We need to reduce the current, weekly average case number from 1,564 weekly cases (August 2 - September 19) to the minimal,