OFF PAGE ONE
Tuesday, December 21, 2021
Snow:
Continued from Page A1
Ben Lonergan/East Oregonian
Zack Lipscomb shovels snow Monday, Dec. 20, 2021,
at the Heritage Station Museum in Pendleton.
Strandberg said the most frequent cause
of road closures are drivers losing control
of their vehicles and he urged local drivers
to travel cautiously when navigating East-
ern Oregon’s roads.
“Everybody needs to be slowing down
and drive according to conditions,” he said.
When traveling during the holiday
season, Strandberg said part of their prepa-
ration process should involve checking
road conditions on ODOT’s Trip Check
website. Strandberg said motorists should
check images of Interstate 84 to see if there
is snow and ice on the portions they will be
traveling on. He said travelers should not
be fooled if they see a clear stretch of road
on the website’s camera because it may be
sandwiched between long stretches of free-
ways covered with snow and ice.
Strandberg recommended drivers store
food, water, blankets and cellphone char-
gers just in case they get stuck during a
road closure.
Motorists who see long stretches of bad
driving conditions should stay home if at
all possible, he said, and he encouraged
drivers on I-84 to be very careful when
looking for detours if there are closures or
bad conditions.
“Don’t blindly follow GPS detour
routes,” he said.
Strandberg said many are county roads
not as well maintained as I-84. He also
warned drivers to be on alert for motorists
who may be operating carelessly.
“They should be mindful that a lot of
drivers are anxious and in a hurry,” he said.
2022:
Continued from Page A1
Alex Wittwer/EO Media Group
Linda Page looks through boxes of Christmas decorations and
goods at the People Helping People secondhand store in La Grande
on Friday, Dec. 17, 2021. Thrift stores have seen an increase in cus-
tomers as supply chain issues hamper large chain retailers’ stock of
Christmas goods.
Stores:
Continued from Page A1
She said decorations sold “very
well,” and sales for the decora-
tions made up half of her sales
in recent weeks. Thanks in part
to the sale of Christmas decora-
tions, the store was able to pay its
rent after only two weeks of being
open, Clemons said. She reported
being happy about this success,
because the store benefits the
Outreach Food Pantry.
“The amount of people buying
Christmas (decorations) has
been a lot bigger in the second-
hand stores this year,” said Randi
Stauffer, a manager at People
Helping People, 2635 Bearco
Loop, La Grande. “The cool thing
about secondhand stores is you’re
able to fi nd that vintage Christ-
mas, that antique Christmas and
that retro Christmas.”
The secondhand store’s ware-
house has aisles and boxes full
of ornaments and Christmas
supplies, including retro-looking
bulbs and ornaments. A discern-
ing eye might catch a personalized
snowman ornament engraved
with the name John in its base, or
a red bulb decoration emblazoned
with a family photo from decades
past.
Walmarts in La Grande and
Pendleton were out of artifi cial
trees on Dec. 16. Christmas lights
and decorations that once lined
the shelves in Pendleton also took
a tremendous hit, with very little
supplies remaining. Pendleton,
however, had some trees back in
stock as of Dec. 20. In Hermiston,
the stock of Christmas supplies
remains relatively healthy, though
the supply of artifi cial trees was
dwindling.
The price for consumer goods
— including Christmas decora-
tions — also has increased due
to global problems with ship-
ping costs, labor shortages and
fuel prices, according to numer-
ous reports from The New York
Alex Wittwer/EO Media Group
Christmas decorations sit on the
shelves at the People Helping
People secondhand store in La
Grande on Friday, Dec. 17, 2021.
Thrift stores have seen an in-
crease in customers as supply
chain issues hamper large chain
retailers’ stock of Christmas
goods.
Times, The Washington Post and
Reuters.
Those self-same supply chain
woes haven’t done much to hurt
the inventory of Christmas goods
at secondhand stores, however,
which stock their shelves primar-
ily through donations by individ-
uals and estates. That means as
supplies dwindle at the box chain
retail stores, customers of all ages
fl ock to the secondhand stores in
search of Christmas goods.
“There are new faces we’ve
never seen before,” Stauffer
said. “We’re having the younger
generations come in and get more
Christmas stuff too.”
A manager with People Help-
ing People in Pendleton corrobo-
rated the increase in businesses
as seen at the La Grande store,
stating the staff has also seen an
influx of customers filling the
store looking for Christmas deals.
That trend has only increased in
the run-up toward the holiday.
“And still — people are still
getting Christmas trees, they’re
still getting the supplies — the
Christmas lights (sales) have not
stopped,” Stauff er said. “We’ve
probably sold the most Christmas
lights we’ve ever had over the
year, this year.”
East Oregonian
As 2022 is about to dawn, there
is little swagger that the worst is
over. The cornerstone of crisis —
the COVID-19 pandemic — began
on the last day of 2019 with a trickle
of infections in China. It was world-
wide — a pandemic — by the end of
2020 with more than 300,000 dead
in the United States.
Through 2021, the virus threw
off variants — most little more than
scientifi c curiosities. But a few —
“Variants of Concern” — would
start a roll call of names taken from
the Greek alphabet. Delta brought
contagion to a new level. Omicron
capped the year as the biggest and
fastest, though hopefully less lethal,
of them all. The cases in one city in
one country that could be counted
on two hands at the end of 2019
would march into 2022 with a tally
of 273 million infections world-
wide and 5.4 million deaths — led
by more than 800,000 in the United
States.
In January, some forecasts
predicted the virus would be under
control by June. It felt that way in
July 2021, when Oregon reported
92 deaths — the fi rst monthly total
to fall below 100 since June 2020,
at the beginning of the crisis. A
two-week respite around the Fourth
of July gave a glimpse of what could
pass for normal life.
Delta quickly crushed the hope.
By Labor Day, delta peaked. The
spike would bottom out in Octo-
ber. No, Thanksgiving. Christmas.
March 2022. The steep line plotted
on a graph that took two months to
peak became a stretched out slope
with bumps back up on the way
down.
This time, there would be no
hiatus. Delta dropped, then at the
beginning of December surged in
parts of the nation — driven by
crisis fatigue of people who now
gathered more often indoors, in
larger groups, with varying levels of
the offi cial guidelines for masks and
social distancing. Delta took two
months to jump from where it was
fi rst seen in India to all 36 counties
in Oregon. Omicron was reported
in southern Africa on Nov. 22 and
was offi cially in Oregon by Dec. 13.
Attempts to calculate when the
pandemic was slowing or receding
have led to futility.
After 612 people died in Decem-
ber 2020, the tally slowly dropped
with the arrival of vaccines late that
month. The worst seemed over.
When delta broke the record with
over 900 reported deaths in Septem-
ber, then slid to 640 in October and
249 in November, the path forward
looked much brighter.
Oregon’s infection rate,
deaths among nation’s
lowest
But the virus is a living, morph-
ing, shape-shifter. What it is today,
it isn’t tomorrow, much less a month
He also urged motorists to be patient
if they get behind snowplows and do not
attempt to pass them. He said snowplow
operators are aware of traffi c behind them.
“They will pull over,” he said.
And Strandberg said drivers should stay
at least four car lengths behind snowplows
to avoid being hit by the snow and rocks
they kick up.
While weather conditions are expected
to warm up and dry out midweek, Solo-
mon said another system is approaching
the region at the end of the week. While it
should mostly result in a mix of rain and
snow in the lower elevations, it could create
hazardous conditions for drivers traveling
through the Blue Mountain or Cascades.
— Reporter Dick Mason with
The Observer in La Grande contributed
to this article.
or a year from now.
Today, nearly three out of four
people in Oregon are vaccinated
— the 12th highest rank among 50
states.
A New York Times survey on
Saturday, Dec. 18, of federal, state
and local data showed that since the
pandemic began, Oregon has had
the third lowest rate of infections
and sixth lowest rate of deaths of the
50 states.
But forecasts come with more
caveats this December. The omicron
variant may be less lethal. May be
milder in most cases.
But new information can make
current information grow old and
out-of-date very quickly.
In June, the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention
said it was fine for people with
two vaccine shots to meet in small
groups with others whose status
was the same.
Delta was tagged as “the
pandemic of the unvaccinated” —
and was in the most severe cases.
The vaccinated made up less than
5% of the hospitalized and about 1%
of the dead.
Omicron could be held at bay
in the United States by the domi-
nance of the delta variant. Instead,
it is pushing it aside.
“Fully vaccinated” meant two
shots of Pfi zer or Moderna vaccine
or one of Johnson & Johnson. Now a
booster of the fi rst pair is the marker
for maximum protection, while the
Johnson & Johnson vaccine has
been shelved amid caution over its
eff ectiveness and side eff ects.
“Exactly one year ago this
week, we came together to cele-
brate the first COVID vaccina-
tions in Oregon,” Brown said Dec.
19. “We watched with excitement,
and frankly a huge sigh of relief, as
health care workers from across our
state received their fi rst dose.”
One year later, the New Year
opens with omicron.
Preparing for more illness,
death
“A gut punch,” said Dr. Renee
Edwards, chief medical officer
of the Oregon Health & Science
University.
On the streets and stores of
Oregon, the sign of the pandemic
as of late has been, at most, people
wearing masks. In some parts of
Oregon where going maskless is
a sign of skepticism of the science
or political belligerence, even that
symbol is absent.
But health workers across the
state say inside hospitals, exhausted
doctors, nurses and other medical
and health staff deal with an undu-
lating but never absent stream of
sickness and death. Now they must
prepare for more.
Cloaked by privacy laws, the
state daily issues a ticker of deaths
— people reduced to which county
they lived in, when they became
sick, when and where they died,
their gender and age and if they had
the catch-all “underlying condi-
tions” that made fatality more likely.
With a few exceptions that
attract a public obituary or a level
of fame that makes it impossible to
conceal their identity, the daily list
of names, faces, stories and suff er-
ing of the dead remain unknown to
all but family and hospital staff who
watch as they pass.
Dr. Dean Sidelinger, the state’s
chief epidemiologist gave a mourn-
ful soliloquy on Sept. 16 when
Oregon passed 3,500 deaths from
COVID-19.
Each morning he would look at
the internal reports of new deaths
coming in from around the state.
Some made him cry. Some made
him angry. Some made him feel
something worse.
“Some mornings I am numb to
the pain that the suff ering and death
that the numbers represent,” he said.
“A mother, a father, a son or daugh-
ter, brother or sister, grandmother or
grandfather, a best friend, a neigh-
bor, a beloved co-worker. Every one
of them was loved and every one of
them leaves behind grieving loved
ones.”
Sidelinger said he longed for the
day the pandemic is over and hoped
people would not forget what it had
extracted from everyone.
Since he spoke, more than 2,000
more people have died in Oregon.
Oregon looks to surpass
6,400 deaths
The Institute for Health Metrics
and Evaluation, a top forecaster
of the pandemic at the University
of Washington, said Dec. 19 the
reports will continue past Jan. 1.
It reports the offi cial worldwide
death toll will hit 6.26 million by
March 1 — though postmortems in
months and years ahead will show
deaths at double that number.
In the United States, IHME
expects fatalities to reach 880,000
nationwide by that date. When
statistics catch up, historians likely
will see deaths in the United States
topped 1 million in mid-February.
The f low of repor ts to
Sidelinger’s desk in Oregon each
morning won’t stop either. IHME
puts the likely official count on
March 1 passing 6,400 reported
deaths. The real number will even-
tually be closer to 9,100 after the
review of fatalities is done after the
pandemic ends.
When that will be, is unknown.
The forecast stops at March 1. The
list of variants ends for now at
omicron.
How many more Greek letters
tagged to COVID-19 variants in
2022 is in a future that won’t be
known until next year this time.
Whether pandemic will die out
— or fires burn, smoke billow,
political violence fl are — won’t be
known until this time next year.
The past three years show that
predicting the future of this era of
trouble is diffi cult and often foolish.
Check back next December to
fi nd out.
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