PORTLAND, Ore. — In the state of Oregon, COVID-19 cases are once again on the rise. Though the state reports nearing a summer peak of cases, health officials said the good news is that cases aren't rising at an alarming rate like we've seen before.
"Four-and-a-half-years into this, no one wants to be talking about COVID, but here we are," said Dr. Dean Sidelinger, Oregon's top health officer. "Welcome to summer and welcome to COVID. There's plenty of things we can do to protect ourselves, but right now, there's plenty of COVID circulating in our community."
Dr. Sidelinger said that the virus now spreading is a variant of the omicron virus that was discovered more than three years ago. This summer, state health officials are also seeing a spike in cases of FLiRT variants, a series of variants named after the technical names for their particular mutations.
"These omicron variants have proven to be very contagious, but also (do) not cause more severe disease — and that our vaccine, which was developed before the current omicrons variant came out, is still offering some protection in the short term." Sidelinger said.
Health officials are using various means to track the virus these days, including testing wastewater to determine how prevalent the virus is and what strain of the virus is spreading. Sidelinger said that the state isn't seeing a rise in hospitalizations due to the virus spreading but said positive test results have been trending upward for the last few weeks. He said 11.8% of all tests recently are coming back positive.
"In that sense, it's good that we're not seeing an increase in hospitalizations, but we know that people who have not been vaccinated and perhaps people who have never been sick before can still get fairly sick," Sidelinger said.
In southwest Washington, Clark County's health department said that they, too, have seen an increase in cases recently, but said that things have started to slow down.
Sidelinger said it may be a few more weeks before things slow down in Oregon, going into the fall.
"The indicators of COVID spread in Oregon, as they are in many other states particularly on the West Coast, are still going up, but they're not going up at a very fast rate. So, hopefully we will start to see a peak and then a coming down over the next several weeks," Sidelinger said.
In the fall, the CDC expects to release an updated COVID-19 vaccine for everyone ages 6 months and older.