By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
A coronavirus outbreak at a second Lincoln City hotel is worrying health officials that the virus is spreading rapidly through younger hospitality workers in north Lincoln County.
Lincoln County Public Health announced this week there is a workplace outbreak at the Inn at Spanish Head, where five of 97 employees tested positive the past few days for COVID-19. That follows a similarly-sized outbreak last week at the Surftides Hotel complex, also in Lincoln City.
“We just getting going with something up there,” Public Health director Rebecca Austen told county commissioners during a meeting Monday scheduled to discuss reopening plans and lodging restrictions. “It’s safe to say there’s something going on in hospitality that’s affecting our number of cases.”
The latest outbreak occurred among staff in the resort’s Fathoms restaurant, prompting its closure Monday. A company spokesman said the restaurant will be cleaned, infected staff will quarantine, face masks will be required of everyone, and all employees will be tested regularly.
Austen said the Lincoln City outbreaks started with an employee at the Hillside Place, a long-term care facility, testing positive. It spread to seven more staff and 10 residents, three of whom died, including one this week.
It then appeared to spread to hotel workers through social contacts, Austen said.
Austen told commissioners that hospitality workers contracting COVID-19 are young and “very active socially” which is making it harder for the county’s tracers to notify others they may have had contact with. In most cases, the ill person had more than 20 contacts with other people.
“That’s huge,” she said. “That’s a lot different than in Newport where people were reticent to tell us who they had contact with.”
The result is more work for a diminishing number of county contact tracers and a corresponding rise in the length of time to notify everyone.
Austen said the majority of new cases are among young people and that the county cannot determine where 45 percent of those cases originated.
Austen also said health department workers are also “hearing stories” about people in the Lincoln City area refusing to wear masks.
Debate over Phase 2 criteria
Austen’s news and warnings came as commissioners were trying to sort out communication with the office of Gov. Kate Brown and the Oregon Health Authority.
The county had applied to enter Phase 2 of the state’s reopening protocol on Monday, Aug. 24 — even as commissioners were having second thoughts about proceeding. But Brown told commissioners the county was not meeting a key coronavirus metric and would have to wait until at least Sept. 8, the Tuesday after Labor Day.
Last week the county was not meeting two of six OHA “health indicators.” Brown said the reopening metric it is missing is the percent of positive tests over the last seven days. The county’s positive rate has dropped from 9.4 percent for the week ending Aug. 8, said commissioner Doug Hunt, to 7.1 percent for the week ending Aug. 15. On Thursday, the latest data from the OHA said Lincoln County’s rate of positive tests for the week ending Aug. 22 had dropped to 3.6 percent.
The state’s goal for Lincoln County is 5 percent.
Hunt asked Austen if 5 percent was acceptable.
“I’d like to be at 1-2 percent, but I don’t know if we’re going to get there,” she said.
Austen also said she felt it was important for the county to meet all of the state’s “health indicators” before moving to Phase 2.
“There is ample evidence to show that when we use caution and not rush into things we keep our counts low,” she said. “We know if we move into Phase 2 we’re going to have more cases.”
But it was confusion over whether the county had to meet either or both the metrics and health indicators before the state would allow it to move into Phase 2 – no matter when that might be – that confounded commissioners this week.
County Counsel Wayne Belmont said the governor and OHA had allowed several counties to go into Phase 2 despite not meeting certain standards. They just had to be confident that everything was headed in the right direction, he said.
Commissioners directed Belmont to write a letter to the governor’s office and OHA seeking “complete clarity” on how the metrics and indicators played into the state’s decision.
Hunt – who has pushed unsuccessfully for a late-September date for Phase 2 – asked if commissioners were willing to go ahead Sept. 8 if the county was still not meeting the health indicators.
“No,” said commission Chair Kaety Jacobson.
The county may have also gotten good news in the OHA’s weekly report on health indicators Thursday. It showed that it was now meeting standards for contact tracing and that it was within one percentage point for meeting the percentage of cases classified as “community spread” — or which have no known origin.
Lincoln County is one of seven Oregon counties still in Phase 1. The others are Multnomah, Washington and Clackamas in the Portland area, and the eastern Oregon counties of Umatilla, Morrow and Malheur counties, which were pushed back after outbreaks there.
The differences in allowed activities between Phase 1 and Phase 2 were once significant, but not so much since the governor in July re-instituted statewide restrictions on restaurants, bars and indoor and outdoor social gatherings.
The biggest change would be to allow entertainment venues to resume operation with capacity limits of 100 indoors and 250 outdoors, and allow theaters, cinemas, pools, bowling alleys to reopen.
Phase 2 also allows more professional offices to reopen, with precautions for keeping workers separate. And, cities could reopen their community facilities like offices, libraries and community or recreation centers.
Commissioners extend ’24-hour hold’
Commissioners did decide Monday to extend its 24-hour hold rule for vacation rentals and motels in unincorporated areas until Sept. 29. It was due to expire Tuesday.
The county is the only jurisdiction requiring a motel room or vacation rental sit for 24 hours before cleaners or new guests go into it. Newport has a 3-hour rule, Yachats a 1-hour rule, and no other city has any restrictions.
The motion passed 2-1, with Jacobson voting no. She said while she supports the regulation, it was unfair to lodging operators in unincorporated areas when no one else was held to that standard.
Lincoln City has no cleaning hold on rooms. Jacobson said she would call city officials to see if they were – and possibly urge them to – thinking about reinstating some kind of lodging regulation.
Commissioners did respond to complaints to the sheriff’s office alleging that vacation rental operators were ignoring the 24-hour hold, urging Sheriff Curtis Landers to come up with ways to augment his two code enforcement deputies. The issue, Landers said, is that deputies have to witness the violation, which is nearly impossible to do.
But Belmont said he had “some additional ideas” and that he and Landers would try to come up with a solution.
