![]() I see that at the same time that the mask wearing rate got up to over 80%. I’m kind of doing that casually, in the sense of saying Oregon peaked earlier than we would have expected and we saw other states peak given how we’re increasing. And the reality is you’re gonna want to do comparisons across lots of states. Graven: Doing a good causal study is hard. But how do you then say that to some extent the drop in new infections is directly tied to Oregonians wearing masks? I mean obviously, the mask mandate went into effect, and I suppose that anecdotally or maybe with data, you’re able to know or approximate how many Oregonians are following it. Miller : If I could stop you, I’m just curious how you are able to make that causal link. Our mask rate went up, and we also got the corresponding decrease in transmission. So, the mask policy, we did see a good impact from that. I know none of us wanted to, but when Delta hit, it turned out we weren’t at the vaccination level we needed to be, and we needed to put our masks back on because there’s just too many susceptible people. One is that we did take some real actions here in the state to slow down transmission. Miller : What is responsible, if you can identify it, for the slight drop that you are seeing? Unfortunately, some of those discharges because people are dying as well, and that’s, and that’s part of the equation. And it’s just that you’re having a little bit more discharge than admission. And really what that means is, when the census is coming down, it means that there’s new admissions happening every day and there’s people being discharged every day. And then another few weeks after that until we get down to the spring surge, which was another high level of census. And that was from the fall and winter surge. I don’t see us coming down to even the previous peak for another few weeks at least. Miller : And is it fair to say that we’re still then, and for the coming weeks it’s likely that we’re still going to be at a higher rate of hospitalizations than we have been at any other point in Oregon in the pandemic? If you ask them, they’re going to feel like they haven’t felt much relief yet. And so we know that there’s a lot of pent up demand for what’s needed in our hospital. And a lot of other care has been kind of put to the side. ![]() And because of that, a lot of procedures have been postponed or delayed. But in the meantime what we’re really looking at is a whole bunch of beds that have had COVID patients that haven’t had other types of patients there. Hopefully towards the end of November we would expect to get to lower levels that we’d seen prior to the surge. Graven: Well we are hoping to see some improvement throughout October. Miller : So what’s your sense for what hospital capacity will look like in the coming weeks? Now, that still means there’s a lot of transmissions happening to even maintain that level of census, but it is certainly not getting worse and it appears to be declining. We did see a peak that arrived around September 1st, and we’re seeing a decline in the primary metric that I look at, which is that hospital census, the number of people in hospital beds across the state of Oregon. Graven: You know, the forecasting has been pretty pretty accurate here. Miller : Is it safe to say that the delta surge is easing? Peter Graven: It’s a pleasure to be here. Graven to get a sense for what he is expecting next. Now that the surge in cases driven by the delta variant seems to be slowing down, we thought we’d check in with Dr. Throughout the pandemic, his modeling about COVID-19 case rates and hospitalizations has been singled out by policymakers as one of their reasons for imposing or reimposing various public health measures, like mask mandates and restrictions on public life. He’s the Director of the Office of Advanced Analytics and the Lead Data Scientist at OHSU. We start today once again with Peter Graven. This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.ĭave Miller : This is Think Out Loud on OPB, I’m Dave Miller.
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