DailyAstorian.com // TUESDAY, MARCH 17, 2020
147TH YEAR, NO. 112
$1.50
CORONAVIRUS
County declares emergency
Crab festival off,
museums close
By NICOLE BALES
The Astorian
Clatsop County declared an
emergency over the coronavirus as
the threat of an outbreak disrupted
life on the North Coast.
The declaration, through May
1, enables the county to take emer-
gency actions and helps qualify for
state and federal aid to combat the
spread of COVID-19. Emergency
actions could involve curfews,
limits on public gatherings, mutual
CORONAVIRUS UPDATES
Clatsop County Emergency Management will be sending updates about
the outbreak via Clatsop Alerts. People can text “CLATSOPCOVID” to
888777 to receive updates.
aid agreements and redirection of
county funds.
County Manager Don Bohn
said “there’s a lot of coordinated
muscle movement with this whole
endeavor,” and that the county is
taking direction from the Oregon
Health Authority and the federal
Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
“We’re not only dealing with
the broader public issues, we’re
also dealing with how we want to
conduct county business during
this interim period,” Bohn said
at a special session of the county
Board of Commissioners on Mon-
day afternoon.
Hailey Hoff man/The Astorian
See Emergency, Page A6
Lucia Chambers thoroughly wipes down tables and chairs at the Blue
Scorcher Bakery & Cafe on Monday morning.
Columbia Memorial Hospital
concerned by coronavirus rush
Fire
chief
warns
of gaps
Pagers failed to activate
By NICOLE BALES
The Astorian
Hailey Hoff man/The Astorian
Visits have spiked at the Columbia Memorial Hospital emergency room as fear of the coronavirus has grown.
Testing remains an issue
CORONAVIRUS
By EDWARD STRATTON
The Astorian
S
taff at Columbia Memorial Hos-
pital have seen a spike of people
coming to the emergency room in
Astoria and its urgent and primary care
clinics with upper respiratory infec-
tions, as the fear of coronavirus grows .
Clatsop County had not reported any
cases of COVID-19 by Monday after-
noon, but public health offi cials and
hospital administrators are preparing
for a potential outbreak.
With a tenuous supply of corona-
virus tests and hospitals around the
U.S. and the world increasingly over-
whelmed, local doctors are trying to
prevent a similar run on their limited
resources.
“Of course, we are concerned about
being overwhelmed,” Dr. Kevin Bax-
ter, the chief medical offi cer at Colum-
bia Memorial, said in a statement from
the hospital. “But we are calm and pre-
pared. That is why we are asking people
to self-quarantine and follow the direc-
tions put forth by the” federal Centers
For information on the coronavirus,
call 211 or visit cdc.gov/coronavirus.
If you are having a medical emer-
gency, call 911.
Dr. Kevin Baxter
Judy Geiger
for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC advises people who think
they have been exposed to COVID-19
to call a health care provider for med-
ical advice, rather than showing up
unannounced and potentially infecting
others.
Symptoms of coronavirus include
fever, cough and shortness of breath.
Emergency warning signs include
shortness of breath, persistent pressure
or pain in the chest and blueish lips or
face.
The hospital, required by law to
assess the health of every person com-
ing into the emergency room, has been
examining and sending home patients
to recuperate .
“This is no different from any other
fl u season in that if you are not feeling
well, you should stay away from oth-
ers,” Baxter said.
As of Monday afternoon, Colum-
bia Memorial had only tested 10 peo-
ple for COVID-19 . On Friday, the hos-
pital only had about 350 testing kits
in reserve, with no guarantee of how
quickly they’ll be replenished if used,
CEO Erik Thorsen said.
“We are still maintaining that for a
commercial lab test like that, that there
will still be screening criteria,” he said.
“We’re going to focus on the moder-
ate to high-risk patients until the tests
become more available to us.”
“All we have heard is … whoever
makes the kits is ramping up produc-
tion. But there has not been a defi nitive
ETA on the ‘when’ for those kits.”
CANNON BEACH — At least six pag-
ers for Cannon Beach fi refi ghter s , includ-
ing the fi re chief’s pager, did not activate
for a three-alarm fi re in Seaside in Febru-
ary because of poor reception.
Now, Marc Reck-
mann, the fi re chief, sets
his pager up in a window-
sill where he knows he
will get reception. Other
fi refi ghters do the same in
their homes.
Reckmann said pag-
Marc
ers don’t always go off in
Reckmann
the fi re district’s building,
either. When they do, it
can be diffi cult to understand, so they wait
for a text from dispatch.
The Seaside dispatch center, which han-
dles emergency calls for agencies in Sea-
side, Cannon Beach, Gearhart and Ham-
let, said the text system was created as a
backup for when pagers don’t activate.
Reckmann, however, said a text does
not always wake fi refi ghters up in the mid-
dle of the night when there is a call like a
pager does.
“This system is broken,” Reckmann
said. “This is now a public safety issue and
a fi refi ghter safety issue that our pagers are
not going off … Somebody’s going to die
because our pagers don’t go off.”
See Hospital, Page A6
See Fire chief, Page A2
Heated yoga rises to the top
New studio at
fi refi ghter museum
By EDWARD STRATTON
The Astorian
T
he red brick Fire Station No. 2
building at the corner of 30th
Street and Marine Drive has had
many different lives, from beer
storage and condensed milk pro-
duction to an active fi re station and
a fi refi ghter’s museum.
Now a hot yoga studio has taken
up residence in the top fl oor.
Djordje and Trudy Citovic,
along with Jamie Savva, are the
partners behind Fire Station Yoga, a
new purveyor in the growing trend
of heated yoga classes.
After relocating to Astoria,
Djordje Citovic said, he grew tired
of traveling to the Portland area to
take hot yoga classes. The region’s
other hot yoga studio on Main Ave-
nue in Warrenton closed several
years ago.
He acquired an infl atable dome
from the United Kingdom — inside
which yogis can hold heated classes
— but needed a place to put it.
Fire Station Yoga
See Heated yoga, Page A2
Fire Station Yoga’s classes happen inside a heated, infl atable dome.