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THE ASTORIAN • SATuRdAy, FEbRuARy 12, 2022
Child care:
Workers are among the
lowest paid in Oregon
Continued from Page A1
Colin Murphey/The Astorian
The Crab, Seafood & Wine Festival is an important community fundraiser.
Crab fest: Other signature events that usually take
place early in the year remain disrupted for now
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“The virtual events in
recent years were as fun
as we could make them
with an online expo, small
pop-up events like the Asto-
ria clowns drive-up and the
inaugural Festival Feast din-
ing passport that helped con-
nect festival patrons with
local restaurants,” David
Reid, the chamber’s execu-
tive director, said in a state-
ment. “However, we are
excited to be planning to
return to the festival format
we have come to love and
be among our friends – ven-
dors, volunteers and attend-
ees alike.”
This year, the crab festi-
val will return to the Clatsop
County Fairgrounds from
April 22 to April 24. Vendor
applications opened earlier
this month, and the chamber
anticipates around 175 ven-
dors selling crafts, food and
drinks.
At past events, the Asto-
ria Rotary Club ran the
crab feed as its main fund-
raiser and source of schol-
arship funding for local high
schoolers.
Thursday’s
announce-
ment of the festival’s in-per-
son return generated some
buzz on the event’s Face-
book page. Within the hour,
the comment section filled
with dozens of people tag-
ging their friends, many with
multiple exclamation points.
Earlier this week, the
Oregon Health Author-
ity projected that hospital-
izations from COVID-19
will significantly decline by
late March. The state has
announced that an indoor
mask mandate imposed as a
precaution against the virus
will be lifted no later than
March 31.
Other signature events
that usually take place early
in the year remain disrupted
by the pandemic.
The annual FisherPoets
Gathering, which will take
place in late February, will
be held virtually. The event
will be free online at fisher-
poets.org.
Fort George Brewery
canceled its Festival of Dark
Arts again this year, and
is instead holding activi-
ties throughout Stout Month
in February, including live
music.
Tickets for the crab festi-
val will be available online
beginning April 1.
Omicron: ‘Important for people to stick with masking’
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“It’s important for peo-
ple to stick with masking
through the next several
weeks,” said Peter Graven,
director of the OHSU Office
of Advanced Analytics.
The trend is backed up by
the averaging of 13 major
medical, university and sci-
entific forecast models sub-
mitted regularly to the fed-
eral Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.
Hitting the peak and start-
ing down does not mean the
wave is over. Each day will
roughly match up with a sim-
ilar point on the curve, with
new infections, severe illness
and death.
Graven’s forecast shows
Oregon is on track to pass the
key number of 400 hospital-
izations per day.
Gov. Kate Brown has said
she will end the indoor mask
requirement when the state
has fewer than 400 patients
with COVID-19 in Ore-
gon hospitals, or March 31,
whichever comes sooner.
In a briefing with state
lawmakers late Monday,
Graven said he was seeing
sustained trends that omicron
is very high, but receding.
“I believe we are at the
peak and we are kind of
bouncing around a little bit
as it comes down,” he said.
Hospitalizations are the
most accurate measure of
the impact and direction of a
virus surge. Graven’s report
showed the state would be
under 1,000 hospitalizations
a day by Feb. 18. It expects
cases to drop under 500
around March 23.
Oregon has fared rela-
tively well so far in the omi-
cron surge with lower than
projected illness and deaths.
Estimates of severe cases
of COVID-19 in OHSU
reports near the beginning
of 2022 showed up to 3,000
people could be hospitalized
in Oregon on peak days in
the wave.
“In the current surge, a lot
more states went up much
much higher than us and
more steeply,” Graven said.
OHSU projected 80% of
the state population followed
the indoor mask mandate
during recent weeks. That’s
a level similar to mask wear-
ing in the Northeastern states
first hit by omicron. Oregon
had its guard up two weeks
prior to the wave moving
across the nation to the West
Coast.
With masking and a rela-
tively high level of vaccina-
tion, Oregon was dealt a less
powerful blow than other
states where the safeguards
were ignored or actively
opposed.
The hospitals have filled
up during the omicron wave
with mostly unvaccinated
people either suffering from
severe cases of the virus, or
hospitalized for other rea-
sons — surgery, accidents,
heart attacks — but blood
tests showed they were pos-
itive for COVID-19.
The omicron wave was
far less damaging for those
who were vaccinated, and
especially had the booster
shot, Graven said.
“Once you get boosted,
you pretty much get removed
from the possibility of get-
ting hospitalized for much,”
Graven said.
The overall result in Ore-
gon has been a lower peak
but a flatter curve that spread
new cases over a longer
period of time.
Graven said the typical
wave behavior pattern of
“fear and fatigue” was again
showing up, with residents
taking strong action as the
virus numbers mounted, but
now tiring of the effort and
being quicker to spend time
indoors with others, going
to restaurants and indoor
events.
“That is kind of a true
metric of fatigue,” Graven
said. “People getting through
a surge and trying to get back
to normal.”
The Oregon Health
Authority,
meanwhile,
reported 27 new virus cases
for Clatsop County on Thurs-
2021
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day and 23 new cases on
Wednesday.
Since the pandemic
began, the county had
recorded
4,361
virus
cases and 38 deaths as of
Thursday.
The Oregon Capital
bureau is a collaboration
between EO Media Group
and Pamplin Media Group.
departments that deal with
child care. The Early Learn-
ing Division in the Depart-
ment of Education sets
learning standards, while
the Department of Human
Services handles child care
subsidies.
Legislators last year
directed that the two func-
tions be combined into a
single new state department,
and legislation under con-
sideration this year will give
extra time to form the new
Early Learning and Care
Department.
Pending
legislation,
introduced by the House
Early Childhood Commit-
tee, also would increase
subsidies to move closer
to paying the actual cost of
child care needed by low-in-
come families. Legislative
fiscal analysts haven’t esti-
mated that cost yet.
While her committee is
working on policy changes,
Power said the problems
with child care come down
to money and how society
thinks about the need to care
for young children.
Once children are 5,
they have access to free
K-12 education. In the two-
year budget cycle, the state
spent $9.3 billion on K-12
education.
State and local govern-
ments pay teachers and
other school staff and build
and maintain school facil-
ities, but there isn’t simi-
lar spending on child care
facilities. As a result, child
care remains unaffordable
for many families, while
those providing the care
are among the lowest-paid
workers in Oregon.
“I often think, ‘What if
each family was expected to
pay the full cost of sending
their kid to school?’” Power
said. “I think most people
would look at me like I’m
nuts if I said something like
that, because it just isn’t
something that we would
expect. Public education
is such a core tenet of our
nation, but we don’t extend
it to littler kids.”
Staff shortages
Researchers at the Uni-
versity of Oregon have run
two ongoing national sur-
veys of families with young
children and child care pro-
viders throughout the pan-
demic. In November, the
team reported that nearly
60% of child care providers
experienced significant staff
shortages, compared to just
36% before the pandemic.
More than 85% of child
care center directors said
they struggled to recruit and
retain qualified workers, and
nearly 40% said they were
ready to leave their jobs or
the child care field entirely
within the next year.
“These numbers are
likely an underestimate,
as there have been many
reports showing that a large
number of providers have
already left the child care
workforce before we asked
these questions,” the report
said.
Jessica Boyd, a child care
worker and mother of two
in Eugene, told the House
committee she’s been work-
ing in child care for 10 years.
More than half her monthly
income went to paying for
her older son’s child care
when he was young, and
she left work for two years
when her younger child,
now 8, was born because she
couldn’t afford child care.
Over the past two years,
Boyd said, her child care
center has struggled to hire
workers and reduced the
number of children it accepts
because there aren’t enough
workers to care for them.
“If it wasn’t for my hus-
band, I wouldn’t be able to
get by on a child care pro-
vider’s wage,” she told the
committee. “I could not be
self-sufficient on my own
income. It’s really discour-
aging when the people at
Taco Bell are making more
than me.”