The Oregon Health Authority made the announcement Saturday, a day after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced similar federal guidelines.
The news comes after a weeks-long decline in COVID cases across the state. Case numbers are about half what they were at the peak of the Delta surge in September, and COVID-related hospitalizations are down to about 400 patients. By contrast, there were 1,178 COVID patients in Oregon on Sept. 1.
Nonetheless, state health officials say there’s still a long road ahead.
“While we can feel really good about the numbers having come down, they’re not where any of us would like to be in terms of the level of severe disease and even the level of folks who are getting sick,” said Dr. Dean Sidelinger, Oregon’s state health officer and epidemiologist.
Projections show a continued slow decline in hospitalizations through winter, Sidelinger said, but “what we don’t know is what kind of little surges we’re going to have on top of that.”
Those surges could result from people getting together for the holidays, and they could be surges from both COVID and influenza. Flu-related hospitalizations in the United States last year were lower than they’d ever been since data collection started in 2005.
That trend is likely to change this year, Sidelinger said, because more people are mingling than they were last year, when coronavirus vaccines weren’t yet available.
“So, how COVID behaves, how influenza behaves — as the weather’s colder and people are spending more time inside — will all have an impact on hospital capacity,” Sidelinger said. “Likely, some level of wearing masks will be with us at least into the beginning of the year, if not longer.”