Travel, gatherings spurring rise in southern Oregon cases

Dr. Jim Shames says that people traveling to higher-risk areas and then mingling with local friends or family is the major impetus behind new cases.

If you're just joining us -- we wanted to bring you another look at the important details.

Starting on wednesday oregonians be required to wear a face covering in indoor ápublic spaces.

This applies for all oregon counties -- not just the 8 counties previously under a mask requirement.

The face covering must cover your nose and your mouth.

The big question is -- who will enforce it?

Governor brown says oregon occupational safety and health -- or osha -- will take the lead.

Newswatch 12 has reached out them to learn how they plan to enforce it.

At this time we have not heard back -- but we will keep heard him speak about mask requirements.

He also spoke about new case trends.

What are you seeing in the cases we've had recently in the county?

Or are we starting to see any trends or, or any changes in who's getting the virus and how sick those folks might be getting?

Right.

Unfortunately, the trends we're seeing are all the things that would be predictive of a problem.

People who travel from a.

High incident part of the country like arizona or california into our valley, and then having personal parties.

Um, you know, the majority of our recent cases are family get togethers, you know, a party here in a part of there where, you know, one person can come in, incubating the disease, go to party, go to party.

Go visit with a family and all those clusters end up getting infected.

So, you know, the, the unnecessary travel piece, the, if you're going to be indoors around others, keep your distance, wear a facial, covering, wash your hands.

Those things are very relevant.

They definitely stop the spread of the disease.

And when you're asking for what trends are we seeing, we're seeing that people aren't doing that.

And, and so we're seeing a lot of, uh, a lot of covid in the last week, are those folks ending up in the hospital is our hospitalization rate going up at a number that you would expect given the spread of cases in our area.

But that's another one of those things that lags behind, uh, people who end up being hospitalized often or in the second and third week of their illness.

So, um, i don't think we've seen major numbers.

We have seen a few people end up in the hospital and there was a period of almost, i don't know, many weeks where we had nobody in the