OAHHS Hospital Voice Spring/Summer 2021

4 » A magazine for and about Oregon Community Hospitals. i f r t r it s it ls. Becky Hultberg President & CEO Oregon Association of Hospitals & Health Systems To find out more about your community hospitals, please visit us online at www.oahhs.org. Confession: Since March of 2020 I’ve been keeping my own COVID-19 epi curve. Every day for the past 15 months, I’ve plotted new cases on a chart that captures the rolling 7-day average. At first, I wanted the data at my fingertips at a time when it was hard to find online. Later, it became almost a ritual, a way of exerting some control over the uncontrollable, of chronicling the unpredictability of COVID-19 and its impacts on our communities. Oregon had four distinct COVID-19 waves—an early one which was difficult to quantify since testing was limited, a summer 2020 wave, the really big one in the late fall/early winter of 2020/2021, and then as more infectious variants began to circulate, an April 2021 spike. Since then, cases have trended down and we’re now at our lowest numbers since last fall. Why? For one reason and one reason only: vaccinations, and the unprecedented effort of hospitals which provided the backbone of the state’s vaccination effort. Rewind to this past December and January. Case counts at one point averaged almost 1,500 per day. We had vaccines that were proven safe and effective. There was reason for hope, except for one small problem. The state’s planning efforts hadn’t adequately covered the last mile—how to get large quanti- ties of vaccines from cold storage into people’s arms. Through conversations with OHA, hospitals iden- tified this deficiency and stepped in, mobilizing an unprecedented effort on an incredibly short timeline. In a matter of weeks, Salem Health stood up the earliest mass vaccination site at the state fairgrounds. Efforts followed in other communities, including in Corvallis, Bend, and Medford. Four hospital systems came together in the Portland area to stand up the convention center site, and OHSU ran drive-through sites in Hillsboro and at the airport. Smaller hospitals stepped up in their communities as well, from Eastern Oregon to the coast. The logistical lift of these efforts has perhaps escaped attention because hospitals deal with complexity every day. They made it look easy when it was anything but. As we quickly learned, the COVID-19 effort was not a flu vaccine campaign. Deploying vaccines safely to hundreds of thousands of people took expertise in staffing, operations, logistics, and technology. Hospitals contributed all types of resources, most importantly human resources. Some staff put their day jobs on hold to manage vaccination efforts with full support from hospital leaders. The results? Through the early spring, hospitals were the primary vaccinators of Oregonians. Now, with over 50 percent of the population vaccinated, large mass vaccination sites are standing down and efforts will become more targeted to vaccine hesitant and vulnerable populations. The vaccine effort isn’t over, and we’re not done with COVID-19, but with this big push it is likely that future outbreaks will be regional and sporadic, and life can gradually return to normal. I’m not sure when I’ll retire my epi curve, but probably soon. We’ve been through a crisis like none in our lifetimes, one that highlighted the vulnerability of our public health infrastructure. When the public health system needed assistance, when it really mattered, hospitals stepped up. You can feel secure, your family can be secure, knowing your local hospital is there to take care of you, and to step into the gap, whatever the community health challenge.