Lincoln County sees nearly a quarter of all COVID cases its ever had in just this month

By AUDREY WEIL

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    LINCOLN COUNTY, Oregon (KPTV) — In Lincoln County, nearly a quarter of all COVID cases in the entire two-years of this pandemic happened this month.

Now public health officials there are sounding the alarm that they are overwhelmed, and people need to get their booster shots.

That totals about 1,200 cases.

County public health workers had to stop contact tracing last week because they couldn’t keep up, and now there are so many cases, that they can’t even contact everyone who tests positive.

So they’re trying to spread the word community-wide on who needs to isolate and quarantine and what resources are available.

Susan Trachsel with Lincoln County Health & Human Services said this is a culmination of how contagious Omicron is and how people are feeling about COVID at this point.

“Combine that with an overall sense of fatigue around the state and the county around the world with all of the masking and the various vaccines, it’s just human nature to want to get back to normal. If you put those two together, it’s prime ground for the virus to spread quickly,” she said.

Trachsel said they’re able to manage hospitalizations right now, but they often transfer any severe cases to bigger hospitals like in Portland, which is difficult when those hospitals are already slammed.

Plus they’re worried about healthcare workers in all capacities getting sick themselves.

“We also have an ambulance company here and it struggles at times to get enough people to drive all of the ambulances, so if they go down sick, we can’t even get people out of the county to better care without a LifeFlight helicopter,” Trachsel said.

County health officials are telling everyone to get their booster shots now if they haven’t yet, stressing that will better protect them from getting seriously sick, but also, people who’ve been boosted and don’t have symptoms don’t have to quarantine after close contact to a positive case.

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