TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
Baker City, Oregon
4A
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OUR VIEW
Striking a
balance
with home
delivery
of alcohol
Mix alcohol, businesses, customers, public health
and the pandemic and that is one tricky cocktail. The
Oregon Liquor Control Commission is smack in the
middle, and it’s getting some criticism.
Some is warranted. Some is way off the mark.
The OLCC is working on rules to make permanent
its temporary rules to make home delivery of alcohol
easier. The OLCC can’t keep temporary rules forever.
It can’t extend temporary rules and they expire in
September. So it is preparing to make the rules perma-
nent. Permanent rules can always be tweaked and/or
revoked in the future.
Here’s a key thing to remember: People could get
alcoholic beverages delivered to their homes before
the pandemic. Not many businesses or customers took
advantage of it. The temporary rules made it easier.
More varieties of licensees could do it, such as more
bars, restaurants and distillers.
Sale of alcohol comes with risk. Alcoholism is a ter-
rible addiction, devastating families and killing people.
Underage drinking is also a problem. Home delivery
of alcohol creates additional risks. But it also means
people don’t have to risk more shopping in a store. The
rules helped keep businesses open during the pandem-
ic. It helped satisfy consumer demand. Amen to that.
Groups, such as the Oregon Alcohol and Drug Policy
Commission and Oregon Recovers, would like the
OLCC to, at least, slow down. For instance, the com-
mission suggested in a letter more ways could be found
to reduce the risks of home delivery. Well, if the com-
mission has ideas, the OLCC is taking feedback on its
proposal. The temporary rules launched in March and
April. Where are the ideas?
Oregon Recovers would like to see the OLCC restrict
sales, not find ways to support them. It criticized the
OLCC’s rules advisory committee saying it “purpose-
fully and exclusively limits its deliberations to the best
interests of the industry.”
Yes, that committee is lopsided. It has more member-
ship from industry representatives than from addiction
groups or public health experts. That does not mean the
OLCC only listens to or only acts in the best interest of
the alcohol industry.
One of the most curious pieces of feedback the OLCC
received recently was a letter from a half a dozen Oregon
legislators — Reps. Janeen Sollman, Rachel Prusack,
Alissa Keny-Guyer, Andrea Salinas and Tawna Sanchez.
They are all Democrats.
They took the OLCC to task because: “It has come to
our attention that you recently sponsored a rare alcohol
drawing allowing people the chance to purchase a ticket
to win one of several dozen bottles of limited and rare
whiskies. We are deeply disappointed that during the
time of the COVID-19 pandemic the OLCC would
promote hard alcohol consumption.”
Sounds bad, huh? Except it doesn’t work like that. It
is not a chance to purchase a ticket to win. It’s a chance
to purchase.
Some distillers produce rare, special whiskies and
bourbons. How should Oregonians get a chance to get
those? The OLCC allows people to enter a lottery to get
a chance to purchase. What’s wrong with that?
The OLCC plays a precarious balancing act between
letting it pour and stoppering it up. The proposal to
make the home delivery rules permanent strikes a
good balance. But if you have a suggestion about how
to make them better, let the OLCC know: olcc.rulemak-
ing@oregon.gov
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker City Herald.
Columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions
of the authors and not necessarily that of the Baker City Herald.
Government needs to offer
trustworthy COVID-19 data
One of the greatest outrages in
the U.S. response to the coronavirus
pandemic has been the way the gov-
ernment has failed to offer the people
useful, trustworthy information. That’s
still true, even as President Donald
Trump has restarted his daily CO-
VID-19 briefi ngs.
While some outlets have praised his
more somber tone, the problem with
the previous briefi ngs was not a lack of
pessimism and gloom.
The problem was that the president
offered almost no usable information
about the risks Americans faced, what
was being done with our tax dollars to
fi ght back, or an honest evaluation of
the various efforts on the part of the
pharmaceutical industry.
He has another chance now. But
fi rst, he should stop hogging the micro-
phone. The new briefi ngs have featured
the president standing alone. What we
need is not just more of Anthony Fauci,
a bright spot from the earlier briefi ngs,
but a combination of other doctors
and scientists selected for their work
on specifi c topics — whether that’s
vaccines, drug development, hospital
capacity, epidemiology, virology or
economics.
Trump should also provide data
that’s meant to be useful rather than
manipulative. We need a better real-
time snapshot of what the virus is
doing now.
At an online press conference Tues-
day, epidemiologist Caitlin Rivers of the
Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
said that no states are doing a good job
of telling people anything about the
FAYE FLAM
new positive cases — where they live,
what kinds of jobs they have, or how
they were likely exposed. There’s rarely
information about how long it takes to
get test results back in different parts
of the country, or whether there was
any attempt to track down contacts of
those who tested positive.
At the same event, former CDC
director Tom Frieden noted that CO-
VID-19 is not like AIDS, where people,
once infected, remain infectious for life.
There’s a window of time when people
are most infectious — from a couple of
days before they get symptoms to fi ve
or six days afterwards. If test results
take too long, people have already
transmitted the virus to most of the
people they were ever going to transmit
it to.
Too much data now focuses on cumu-
lative cases. The Northeastern states
hit hard early in the pandemic often
still top the charts or appear dark red
on maps even if infection rates there
have now plunged.
Rates of change are also not informa-
tive on their own. If a state has two
cases and one day it doubles to four,
that’s a fast rate of increase; but it’s
very different from a place that has
5,000 cases and doubles to 10,000 in
the same period of time.
What we really need is some infor-
mation on the likely number of active
cases in our regions — what percent-
age of the population of a city or county
is likely to be infected or infectious right
now? That’s the kind of information
that should go into decisions such as re-
opening schools or restaurants, and the
kind of “COVID weather report” people
need to make their own wise decisions.
Of course, there’s more to national
leadership than data. These new White
House press briefi ngs could bring
people together by sharing specifi c goals
— such as making sure no hospital gets
overwhelmed, or setting some number
of deaths we will try to stay below. The
notion of getting the virus “under con-
trol” is too vague and too slippery.
Specifi c, science-based guidelines for
good citizenship would help all of us
make better choices. They may espe-
cially help motivate many younger,
healthier people who face a relatively
low risk of dying. Some have decided
that any personal risk is outweighed
by the benefi t of human contact or a
paycheck or both, but their behavior is
helping to keep the pandemic going.
If the president wants to be uplift-
ing and inspiring — or even just get
better ratings — what better way than
to showcase the country’s scientifi c
talent, share useful information people
are hungering for, and offer the kind
of concrete guidance that has been so
sorely lacking?
Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion
columnist. She has written for the
Economist, the New York Times, the
Washington Post, Psychology Today,
Science and other publications. She has a
degree in geophysics from the California
Institute of Technology.
OTHER VIEWS
Reinvigorate Voting Rights Act
Editorial from The Los Angeles
Times:
Republicans in Congress, including
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McCon-
nell, effusively eulogized Democratic
Rep. John Lewis of Georgia after the
civil rights legend died last week. Mc-
Connell, R-Ky., rightly described Lewis
as an “American hero” who “put his
life on the line to fi ght racism, promote
equal rights and bring our nation into
greater alignment with its founding
principles.”
Now Senate Democrats are press-
ing McConnell to match actions to his
words by calling up a long-stalled bill
to reestablish protections for voting
rights that were eviscerated by a 2013
Supreme Court decision. Referring to
McConnell, Sen. Kamala Harris said:
“If he wants to make clear his honor
for the life, the legacy, the sacrifi ce, the
heroism of John Lewis, put that on the
fl oor for a vote, and let’s name it the
John Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2020.”
This isn’t just partisan point-scoring.
Securing the right to vote for African
Americans and other victims of dis-
crimination was the cause of Lewis’ life,
the cause for which he was marching
in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 when he
was brutally attacked by police. But it’s
also vital to American democracy.
The landmark Voting Rights Act of
1965 required, among other things,
that states with a history of discrimina-
tion “pre-clear” changes in election pro-
cedures with the U.S. attorney general
or a federal court in Washington, D.C.
But seven years ago, in Shelby County
v. Holder, the conservative majority
of the Supreme Court struck down a
formula that determined which juris-
dictions were subject to pre-clearance.
It was a disastrous ruling that made it
easier for states to take steps, such as
requiring photo IDs and eliminating
polling places, that made it harder to
vote.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice
John G. Roberts Jr. noted that “things
have changed dramatically” in the
South and other jurisdictions covered
by pre-clearance. Yet, he said, the
Voting Rights Act continued to rely on
“decades-old data and eradicated prac-
tices” in determining which jurisdic-
tions would be subject to pre-clearance.
The court was wrong and reck-
less in second-guessing the judgment
of Congress, which is entrusted by
the Constitution with enforcing the
15th Amendment prohibiting racial
discrimination in voting. Still, Roberts
made it clear that Congress could
restore the pre-clearance mandate by
establishing a new formula based on
more recent data.
That is what would be accomplished
at long last by the Voting Rights
Advancement Act, which would require
pre-clearance in states with numerous
voting rights violations over the last
25 years. (Attempts by any jurisdic-
tion to require more proof of identity
from would-be voters than the federal
government requires could also face a
pre-clearance requirement.) The bill
was passed by the House in December,
but a similar proposal has languished
in the Senate. If McConnell and his
Republican colleagues want to honor
Lewis, and cement his legacy, they will
stop their stalling.