Oregon is now recording more cases each day than at any point in the pandemic, and hospitalizations, now averaging 968 a day, have reached a new peak.
Health care workers in Portland pleaded for action at a news conference this week. Levi Cole, an I.C.U. nurse at Portland Providence Medical Center, said he had measured the ages of some of the people he has recently put into body bags: 20, 37, 42, 45, 52.
“The enemy has gotten meaner, and society as a whole sort of let its guard down,” Mr. Cole said. “We are all pretty overwhelmed and pretty exhausted and are running out of the available will and faith in society to do its part.”
Ms. Brown, in the interview, said part of the challenge in states such as Oregon that largely contained the virus early in the pandemic was little natural immunity in the population, allowing the more contagious variant of the virus to run rampant.
The Delta variant began sweeping across the country just after Ms. Brown eased the last remaining restrictions at the end of June. Dr. Renee Edwards, the chief medical officer at Oregon Health & Science University, said the timing of the variant’s arrival was unfortunate. To prevent the crisis the state is now in, she said, the state would have had to return to serious restrictions at least two weeks ago.
New mandates may not help much now, she said, and projections show that cases are likely to reach a peak sometime next week, with or without them.
To help curtail the virus, she said, it is important for people to consider voluntarily restricting activities such as going to restaurants and attending concerts, especially if they are unvaccinated.
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