A18
NEWS
Blue Mountain Eagle
Pandemic
Continued from Page A1
march into 2022 with a tally of
273 million infections world-
wide and 5.4 million deaths —
led by over 800,000 in the United
States.
In January 2021, some fore-
casts predicted the virus would
be under control by June. It felt
that way in July, 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 bot-
tom out in October. No, Thanks-
giving. 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 lev-
els 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 south-
ern Africa on Nov. 22 and was
oﬃ cially in Oregon by Dec. 13.
Attempts to calculate when
Wednesday, December 22, 2021
the pandemic was slowing or
receding have led to futility.
After 612 people died in
December 2020, the tally slowly
dropped with the arrival of vac-
cines late that month. The worst
seemed over.
When delta broke the record
with over 900 reported deaths in
September, then slid to 640 in
October and 249 in November,
the path forward looked much
brighter.
‘A gut punch’
But the virus is a living, mor-
phing shape-shifter. What it is
today, it isn’t tomorrow, much
less a month 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 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 omi-
cron 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old and out-of-date very quickly.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 Centers for Dis-
ease Control and Prevention said
it was ﬁ ne for people with two
vaccine shots to meet in small
groups with others whose status
was the same.
Delta was tagged as “the pan-
demic of the unvaccinated” —
and was in the most severe cases.
Grant
Dean Guernsey/Bulletin ﬁ le photo
Volunteer Lauren Tolo carries ice at a cooling station on Hunnell
Road in Bend during a heat wave in June 2021.
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
dominance of the delta variant.
Instead, it is pushing it aside.
“Fully vaccinated” meant two
shots of Pﬁ zer or Moderna vac-
cine or one of Johnson & John-
son. Now a booster of the ﬁ rst
pair is the marker for maxi-
mum protection, while the John-
son & 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 cel-
ebrate the ﬁ rst COVID vacci-
nations in Oregon,” Brown said
Friday. “We watched with excite-
ment, 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.
“A gut punch,” said Dr. Renee
City-county feud
Continued from Page A1
“It was totally unaﬀ ordable on a
$300,000 tax base,” Green said at the
meeting.
Several councilors voiced their
agreement.
“It’s not feasible” for John Day to
maintain a police department, Gregg
Haberly said. “We don’t have the money.”
“We put it to a vote of the people, and
the people told us they were not willing to
pay for a police department,” Dave Hol-
land added. “We gave them the opportu-
nity to make the decision for themselves,
and they made it.”
Even though the councilors seemed
to agree that John Day can no longer
aﬀ ord its own police department, they
also seemed to agree that the Sheriﬀ ’s
Oﬃ ce needs more funding to provide
adequate law enforcement services both
within the city limits and in the county
as a whole.
Asked what it would take to do that,
Sheriﬀ McKinley responded he would
need to add at least three more patrol
deputies. To match what the John Day
Police Department had at full strength,
he pointed out, he would need to add four
deputies and a secretary.
The city has oﬀ ered to provide some
additional money for the Sheriﬀ ’s Oﬃ ce
through a fund exchange but has not yet
received a response from county oﬃ -
cials. The other unanswered question
hanging over the Dec. 14 City Coun-
cil meeting was whether the county will
ever respond.
The city’s proposal goes like this:
John Day will pay the county $300,000
a year for three years (essentially all of
the city’s property tax revenues) for law
enforcement services in the city limits. In
exchange, the city wants the county to
pay it the same amount from the county
road fund, to be used for street improve-
ments to serve new housing develop-
ments that could broaden the tax base for
the whole county.
Green delivered the proposal in per-
son at the Oct. 13 session of the Grant
County Court, a contentious meeting that
Green stormed out of after County Judge
Scott Myers insisted on having the pro-
posal in writing.
The city submitted a written version
of the proposal on Nov. 8, but the matter
still has not been taken up by the County
Court. In an interview with the Eagle late
last month, Myers called the proposal
“terribly one-sided” and said there was
no point discussing the idea until the City
But health workers across
the state say inside hospitals,
exhausted doctors, nurses and
other medical and health staﬀ
deal with an undulating but
never absent stream of sickness
and death. Now, they must pre-
pare 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 gen-
Etc.
The COPS grant was just one item on
a packed agenda at the Dec. 14 meeting.
In other action, the council:
• Approved an amendment to the
urban renewal agency’s budget that adds
a $2.3 million loan from Business Ore-
Continued from Page A1
from our family to yours!
May your holidays be filled with
laughter and joy this season.
Health workers prepare
for more
Council had decided what to do with the
COPS grant.
At the Dec. 14 City Council meet-
ing, McKinley said he didn’t think the
county would agree to a fund exchange
but added he’s been trying to get county
oﬃ cials to at least discuss the matter with
the city.
Multiple councilors expressed their
frustration with the county’s silence on
the issue.
“I am so sick of hearing it is both par-
ties’ fault when they refuse to talk to us,”
Shannon Adair said. “You can’t have
a conversation when one party won’t
come to the table.”
For his part, McKinley made it clear
he was tired of being “stuck in the mid-
dle” of the policing debate.
“We are such a small area. We’ve got
to get past this stuﬀ or it’s not going to
work,” he told the council.
“I think these two bodies are going
to have to solve it, and that’s what they
were elected to do.”
Horses
Merry Christmas
Edwards, chief medical oﬃ cer of
the Oregon Health & Science
University.
In the streets and stores of
Oregon, the sign of the pandemic
as of late has been, at most, peo-
ple wearing masks. In some parts
of Oregon where going mask-
less is a sign of skepticism of the
science or political belligerence,
even that symbol is absent.
occurs in areas of gentle slopes
that most foraging species,
including wild horses, permit-
ted livestock and wildlife, pre-
fer,” she said.
Kern also noted that sheep
are permitted to graze in the ter-
ritory for a portion of the year,
but the permittee has not grazed
sheep on the allotment in several
years “because of a lack of for-
age availability.”
The coalition ﬁ led the suit
after the May approval of the
Ochoco Wild Horse Herd Man-
agement Plan, said Kern.
“The government will ﬁ le a
der 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 iden-
tity, the daily list of names, faces,
stories and suﬀ ering of the dead
remain unknown to all but fam-
ily and hospital staﬀ who watch
as they pass.
Dr. Dean Sidelinger, the
state’s chief epidemiologist,
gave a mournful 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, suﬀ ering and death
that the numbers represent,”
he said. “A mother, a father, a
son or daughter, brother or sis-
ter, grandmother or grandfa-
ther, a best friend, a neighbor, a
beloved co-worker. Every one
of them was loved and every
one of them leaves behind griev-
ing loved ones.”
Sidelinger said he longed
for the day the pandemic is over
and hoped people would not for-
get what it had extracted from
everyone.
Since he spoke, more than
2,000 more people have died in
Oregon.
The Institute for Health Met-
rics and Evaluation, a top fore-
gon. The money will be used to ﬁ nance
land development costs to incentivize the
construction of 100 homes in three hous-
ing projects: Holmstrom Ranch, Iron-
wood Estates and The Ridge.
• Accepted the urban renewal agen-
cy’s annual report.
• Adopted a supplemental budget to
appropriate grant funds received by the
city.
• Heard a presentation on the city’s
audited ﬁ nancial statements. Auditor
Robert Gaslin said he found no signs of
fraud or any other issues with the city’s
ﬁ nances.
• Authorized the city manager to
solicit design proposals for a new aquatic
center at the Seventh Street Sports
Complex and discussed an appeal ﬁ led
against the project (see related story on
Page A2).
• Reviewed design concepts for the
Pit Stop, a development proposal for a
city-owned lot on the southwest corner of
Main and Canton streets. New restrooms
have been built on the lot, but there was
a lively debate on what else should go
there. Sherrie Rininger, owner of Etc.
boutique and president of the Cham-
ber of Commerce, argued that the space
should be used to provide oﬀ -street park-
ing for oversize vehicles. Other compet-
ing potential uses include bike lockers,
response to the complaint later
in December,” said Kern. “No
schedule for brieﬁ ng the mer-
its of the case with the court has
been set.”
Gayle Hunt, president and
founder of the coalition, a non-
proﬁ t, said the smaller-sized
herd won’t have enough genetic
diversity and the herd numbers
will drift lower due to preda-
tion by cougars and wolves. A
larger population will overcome
predation and severe weather
events, she adds.
According to Hunt, a retired
employee of the Forest Service,
higher numbers of wild horses
will absorb predation, beneﬁ t-
ing other wildlife. She added
that the horses help to create and
caster of the pandemic at the
University of Washington, said
Friday that the reports will con-
tinue past Jan. 1.
It reports that 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, histori-
ans will likely see that deaths in
the United States topped 1 mil-
lion in mid-February.
The ﬂ ow of reports to
Sidelinger’s desk in Oregon each
morning won’t stop either. IHME
puts the likely oﬃ cial count on
March 1 passing 6,400 reported
deaths. The real number will
eventually 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 let-
ters tagged to COVID-19 vari-
ants in 2022 is in a future that
won’t be known until next year
this time.
Whether the pandemic will
die out — or ﬁ res 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.
food carts, picnic tables, seating areas
and a ﬁ re pit.
• Heard an update on the wastewa-
ter treatment plant project, including a $3
million provisional grant from the state
to fund the “purple pipe” water reclama-
tion system.
• Heard an update on the Airport
Industrial Park and Innovation Gate-
way Business Park. The council also
voted 6-0 to accept a letter of intent from
Councilor Adair to purchase 2.5 acres in
the Innovation Gateway Business Park
(Adair recused herself from voting on
the matter). Adair and her husband, Jer-
emy, want to build a distillery, brewery
and hotel on the property. The matter will
come back before the council at a later
date for a ﬁ nal decision.
• Heard an update on the sale of the
city’s Gleason Park and Gleason Pool
property to the Oregon Parks and Rec-
reation Department for expansion of the
Kam Wah Chung State Historic Site. The
state has agreed to pay the city $22,000
for the 3-acre property. Green noted that
the Oregon Parks Commission recently
approved $3 million-$5 million in bonds
to fund the new Kam Wah Chung Inter-
pretive Center and the Legislature has
given the city $1 million for infrastruc-
ture and site connectivity improvements
in connection with the project.
maintain additional water and
mineral access shared by other
animals in the national forest by
pawing at the ground.
“The horses have made
water available in winter and
summer when other sources
have dried up or frozen over,”
said Hunt. “They paw very
skillfully and relentlessly. They
not only enhance sites as part
of their own necessary habi-
tat components, they also do
the work for many, many other
animals.”
When asked whether or
not predators could endanger
the herd, Kern said that while
wolves, cougars and bears do
occur in the territory, preda-
tion on horses would be a “rare
or abnormal occurrence” and
likely to occur only on young,
sick or injured horses.
“There is little evidence of
predation on the herd as a factor
aﬀ ecting population growth,”
said Kern. “There have been
no conﬁ rmed cases of preda-
tion on horses by wolves to
date.”
The Forest Service had
planned to start the gather-
ing and removal of horses
in October, but plans were
shelved because of supply
chain problems. Kern said she
hopes the work can begin in
early 2022 and the litigation
against the Forest Service is
not delaying plans to remove
horses.
Solutions, CPAs
101 NE 1st Ave.
John Day, OR 97845
541-575-2717
S273138-1
S273652-1