Eleven Oregon counties, up from seven last week, are failing to contain COVID-19

OSPIRG has been tracking critical public health metrics around the containment of COVID-19 in Oregon, building on the work of COVID Exit Strategy, a group of national public health and crisis experts. Currently, Oregon is rated “Yellow” overall – while Oregon has fared better against the coronavirus than many states, so far, keeping it that way will require quick intervention to avoid spiraling out of control. 

This blog post uses a color scale (below) to show how Oregon’s 36 counties are performing against benchmarks for containment, COVID testing, and contact tracing over the last week. This week, we began factoring contact tracing success rates into our grade, resulting in many more counties  moving into “yellow” status – reflecting statewide failures.

ewide failures.

NOTES AND CITATIONS

• Cover photo Credit: Skeeze, from www.Pixabay.com.

• Color ratings for case positivity & testing capacity adapted from COVID Exit Strategy, www.covidexitstrategy.org.

• Map graphic from Free Vector Maps, www.freevectormaps.com.

• Data for daily COVID+ by county from USA Facts, at https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spread-map/.

• Per capita case counts calculated using 2019 US census projections for Oregon counties. www.census.gov. 

• Policy recommendations are derived from Key Metrics for COVID Suppression, released by Harvard Global Health Institute. URL:  https://ethics.harvard.edu/files/center-for-ethics/files/key_metrics_and_indicators_v4.pdf 

• County level testing data and sporadic case rate from Oregon Health Authority: https://public.tableau.com/profile/oregon.health.authority.covid.19#!/vizhome/OregonCOVID-19PublicHealthIndicators/COVID-19Burden.

• A county’s overall grade is calculated through an unweighted average of our three metrics. Each metric is assigned an integer value between 1 and 4 (1=green, 2=yellow,3=red, 4=failing), and the average of a county’s scores is rounded to the nearest whole number, and the corresponding color grade overall.

• This report is available as a PDF on OSPIRG’s website: https://ospirg.org/sites/pirg/files/resources/ORP%20County%20COVID%20Fact-sheet%20-%207-23%20%281%29.pdf