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On Friday, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced she is lifting COVID-19 restrictions statewide on June 30.
Dr. Jennifer Vines can’t imagine another full lockdown happening in Oregon. But she also knows COVID isn’t really over.
“I don’t know that COVID is going to control our lives for the next year the way it has this past year,” says Vines, the health officer for three Portland metro-area counties. “But I suspect we are still going to be feeling it, especially as we head into this fall and winter season, which is the traditional respiratory season when people head indoors.”
Her advice? “You know, it’s never wrong to wear a mask.”
In an interview with the Dive podcast, Vines reflected on more than a year of triage on a pandemic that killed thousands of Oregonians and restricted our lives for months on end.
Here are a few notable things she said:
She realized the gravity of COVID-19 when cases emerged among people who hadn’t traveled out of state. “At the time, we were looking for sick travelers. So things really turned on their heads when we started discovering community-based cases. That meant we were discovering the virus in people who had not traveled and then started discovering cases among people who really had few cases.…And so I would say it was early March when we had our first case locally that it became apparent to me that we were in a global pandemic.”
Health officials tried to guide the public through immediate decisions, but didn’t convey the duration of shutdowns. “I just remember a process of trying to bring people along and conveying the gravity of the situation that we were in. And so I think rather than slamming people with this idea of, okay, schools are going to close for months and we’re in it...there was a sense of incrementalism now in hindsight, but I think it was necessary.”
Vines doesn’t think Oregon will be locked down again. “Hard for me to imagine a full shutdown given what we know now, which is that masks work, that vaccines work. So I think that we would have to have a pretty fast, pretty serious global development around COVID-19 to find ourselves back in that position.”
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