BAKER CITY HERALD — 5A
TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 2021
Brown defends plan to lift mask mandate
■ Governor acknowledges that most of Oregon’s counties have vaccination rates lower than what’s needed for herd immunity
By Erin Ross
Oregon Public Broadcasting
SALEM — Oregon Gov. Kate
Brown acknowledged Friday, June
11, that ending a statewide mask
mandate will place greater risks on
already-vulnerable people and com-
munities. But during a contentious
news conference, she stood fi rm on
her decision to lift the mandate once
the state reaches its vaccination
goal.
Oregon currently plans to lift
most restrictions once 70% of the
state’s adults have received at least
one COVID-19 vaccination. As of
Sunday, June 13, 67.9% of eligible
adults were vaccinated.
At the June 11 briefi ng, Brown re-
iterated that she is “very concerned”
about communities and populations
that have not yet had suffi cient
access to the vaccine. Although
progress has been made closing the
vaccine equity gap, the percentage
of people vaccinated varies wildly
from county to county — and even
ZIP code to ZIP code.
Lane County passed a vaccina-
tion milestone this week: Over 65%
of its eligible adults have received
a fi rst dose. Clackamas County is
not far behind, Brown said. Once
that benchmark is passed, Lane and
Clackamas counties can move into
“lower-risk” restrictions. Benton,
Deschutes, Hood River, Lincoln,
Multnomah and Washington coun-
ties are the only other counties to
have reached that goal.
That means 29 of Oregon’s 36
counties have not yet reached that
particular benchmark. But when
the state hits the 70% vaccination
rate benchmark, which is expected
to happen sometime in the next
few weeks, they will also reopen,
regardless of vaccination levels and
the amount of COVID-19 spreading
locally.
“We still have more work to do to
ensure all Oregonians are healthy
Jaime Valdez/Oregon Capital Insider
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, seen here in June 2020.
“We still have more work to
do to ensure all Oregonians
are healthy are protected from
COVID-19.”
— Oregon Gov. Kate Brown.
and protected from COVID-19,”
Brown said.
Governor Kate Brown wears
an orange traffi c safety vest and
a mask that has the words “Get
covered 2021” printed on it.
Brown announced additional
incentives to encourage the vac-
cine-hesitant to go get their fi rst
shot. Anyone who received their
fi rst vaccine dose June 11 at the
drive-through vaccination site near
Portland International Airport was
be given a $100 gift card, while sup-
plies last. The same offer was avail-
able Saturday, June 12 at the mass
vaccination clinic at the Oregon
Convention Center.
Although many businesses could
soon reopen fully, the economic
damage from the COVID-19 pan-
demic still lingers. Brown said she
has extended Oregon’s foreclosure
moratorium until Sept. 30.
She was unable to extend the
eviction moratorium, which will
expire at the end of June.
Oregonians currently have until
next year to pay off any late rent ac-
crued between April 2020 and June
2021. But all renters will need to
pay their July rent, or face eviction.
Brown encouraged those who might
be unable to pay rent this July to
apply for federally funded rent
assistance, through oregonrentalas-
sistance.org.
The number of new COVID-19
cases went down across Oregon for
the sixth straight week. Deaths and
hospitalizations have also continued
to decrease.
Critical questions about
ongoing risk
Many of the reporters’ questions
at Brown’s June 11 press confer-
ence focused on her decision to lift
Oregon’s mask mandate once 70%
of adults in the state have received
their fi rst dose.
When that benchmark is reached,
only about half of all individuals in
the state will have received their
fi rst vaccine dose, and fewer than
half will be fully vaccinated. And
16 Oregon counties — including
Baker — have yet to give fi rst doses
to half of their adult residents. The
mask mandate and social distanc-
ing measures that have been
credited for helping limit disease
spread for much of the pandemic
will be removed, and it will still be
some time before enough people will
have been vaccinated to reach herd
immunity. That’s the threshold at
which enough people have become
immune to COVID-19 that it is
unlikely to continue spreading.
Although masks do provide some
protection to the wearer, they are
much better at preventing someone
from spreading disease than they
are at preventing someone from
contracting it. Without a mask
mandate, unvaccinated Oregonians
will need to trust that the maskless
around them have been vaccinated
and do not have COVID-19.
Brown and State Epidemiologist
Dr. Dean Sidelinger both acknowl-
edged that reopening will increase
risk for unvaccinated people — in-
cluding those who are not willingly
in this category.
“I have a friend who is struggling
with cancer right now,” Brown said.
“They are extremely vulnerable,
and they wear a mask because
it is their best protection against
COVID-19.”
But right now, those individuals
are also protected by social distanc-
ing measures and masks, which
reduce the amount of virus a person
exhales. When mask mandates lift,
Sidelinger suggested, vulnerable
Oregonians might simply choose not
to enter crowded indoor spaces with
unmasked people. As more grocery
stores roll back their mask rules
and rely on the honor system, the
list of safe indoor spaces continues
to shrink.
When asked what steps the
Oregon government can take to pro-
tect those people, Sidelinger gave a
HOMELESS
OREGON LEGISLATURE
House wants to delay paid family leave
■ Bill, which moves to the Senate, would move starting date from 2022 to 2023
By Peter Wong
Oregon Capital Bureau
Oregon’s new program of
paid family leave would be
delayed under a bill that has
cleared the House.
A vote of 33-19 on Tuesday,
June 8, moved House Bill
3398 to the Senate.
The starting date for con-
tributions by employers and
employees would be put off by
one year, from Jan. 1, 2022, to
Jan. 1, 2023. The starting date
for benefi t payments would be
Sept. 3, 2023, instead of Jan. 1.
The 2019 Legislature ap-
proved the program. Eight
other states and Washington,
D.C., have started or are pre-
paring similar programs.
“This is an important
program that had some pretty
aggressive timelines to begin
with,” Majority Leader Barba-
ra Smith Warner, D-Portland,
said in presenting the bill.
“It’s really important that we
get it right. It’s important for
employers and employees.”
Employers would contrib-
ute 40% and employees 60%
of a new fund based on payroll
deductions. Workers who earn
at least $1,000 during the pre-
vious year would qualify for
up to 12 weeks of paid family
leave, the maximum benefi t
set at $1,215 per week.
Oregon’s program is more
generous than a proposal
by President Joe Biden for a
federal program, which would
offer up to $4,000 per month.
Congress has not acted on the
federal program, which is part
of Biden’s American Families
Plan.
Acting Director David Ger-
stenfeld said the Employment
Department sought the delay
because it intends to integrate
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collections of employer and
employee contributions into
its computer modernization
project, which will start its
long-awaited fi rst phase in
July. The fi rst phase also
involves updating the col-
lection of payroll taxes that
employers pay into the state
unemployment trust fund for
benefi ts. Employees do not
pay into that fund.
Though preparations for
the new program have pro-
ceeded since the Legislature
passed it in 2019, Gersten-
feld said staff — including
himself — were diverted to
handle new and expanded
federal unemployment benefi t
programs since the onset of
the coronavirus pandemic in
March 2020.
“This bill would place residents in our communities
at risk by restricting local government’s power to limit
homeless camps,” commissioners Kevin Cameron,
Danielle Bethell and Colm Willis wrote.
Legal experts testifi ed that the bill’s standards are
consistent with recent federal case law.
The Oregon Law Center noted that the U.S. 9th
Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that homeless people
cannot be punished for sleeping outside on public
property in the absence of adequate alternatives, or
unless the law imposes “reasonable time, place and
manner” restrictions on regulated activities in public
space.
“Passage of (the bill) will preserve the important
pieces of the cases in state law, written in a way that
has been agreed upon by key stakeholders,” said Becky
Straus, staff attorney with the Oregon Law Center.
If Brown signs the bill, it will take effect on July 1,
2023.
Straus said it
would force local gov-
ernments to review
their camping and
related ordinances “in
a way that recognizes
the reality of Or-
egon’s rising rates of
homelessness.”
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“The original statutory
timelines were created before
a lot of work had been done
to see what would be needed
to built the technology and
the work processes to make it
successful from the day it be-
comes available to the public,”
Gerstenfeld told the House
Rules Committee on May 27,
when it heard the bill. “Also
importantly, it was before the
pandemic.”
Until Gov. Kate Brown fi red
Gerstenfeld’s predecessor and
named Gerstenfeld as acting
director of the agency on May
31, 2020, Gerstenfeld led the
new paid family leave pro-
gram. He was shifted into that
job in 2019, after eight years
as director of its unemploy-
ment insurance division.
Continued from Page 3A
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number of suggestions people could
take to protect themselves, and
requested people wear masks and
“be kind to each other, and think
about the actions we are taking if
we’re not vaccinated,” echoing past
pleas for Oregon residents to mask
up and socially distance when those
safety measures were voluntary, not
required by the government.
Brown also acknowledged that
those risks will fall primarily on
already-vulnerable people and com-
munities.
“We’re not seeing a huge uptake
of vaccinations, and I am gravely
concerned. What we know is that
many of these communities tend
to be both medically and economi-
cally vulnerable, and it will be very,
very challenging for the health care
systems in these local communi-
ties if COVID-19 spreads rapidly,”
Brown said.
When asked if it was equitable to
remove masks, which have been a
crucial tool that protects the unwill-
ingly unvaccinated from vaccine-
hesitant people, Brown stated she
was following guidance laid out by
the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention.
CDC guidelines currently recom-
mend that unvaccinated people
wear masks indoors, and experts
have pushed back against the
Biden administration’s decision
to remove the mask mandates for
people who have been fully vac-
cinated.
When asked at the news confer-
ence to explain her decision not to
follow this part of the CDC’s guid-
ance, Brown deferred to Sidelinger,
who again encouraged people to
wear masks.
Brown was pressed further to say
if she would permit unvaccinated
individuals to not wear masks in
most situations indoors.
“Honestly, she said, “it will be up
to folks who are unvaccinated.”
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