Gov. Kate Brown said Tuesday that she was “gravely concerned” about a spike in COVID-19 cases across Eastern Oregon with a common factor  — the Pendleton Round-Up. 

Umatilla County, site of the Pendleton Round-Up earlier this month, reported a record-breaking one-day total of 167 new cases, according to the Oregon Health Authority.

The East Oregonian newspaper first reported on Monday that local health officials tied the spike in cases to the Round-Up. 

Umatilla’s new cases on Tuesday was the highest in the state. It accounted for just over 10% of the 1,658 new cases in Oregon. The county of 82,000 accounts for less than 2% of the state’s 4.24 million population.

The OHA report came after Gov. Kate Brown’s morning press call that featured a mostly upbeat update on the state’s efforts to fight the highly contagious delta variant of COVID-19.

“I know this isn’t the fall that any of us had hoped for, or expected,” Brown said. “At the end of June, we were hopeful our communities would be largely free of COVID-19. Unfortunately, Delta changed everything. The good news is that, while we still have a long way to go, it appears things are
slowly getting better.”

Statewide, the COVID-19 surge of late summer and early fall “appears to have reached its peak,” said Deputy State Epidemiologist Dr. Tom Jeanne. Those trends have been reflected in weekly forecasts by the Oregon Health & Science University.

It was only during a question and answer period at the end of the presentation that the Pendleton Round-Up spike was addressed as a sour point in the state’s progress.

The East Oregonian newspaper was the first to report Monday that the spike in COVID-19 cases in Umatilla County had been tied by local health officials to the annual rodeo event held Sept. 15-18.

The East Oregonian reported Tuesday that at least 68 COVID-19 cases have been traced back to the event and all its venues, up from 49 Monday. Health officials across Eastern Oregon reported spikes in new cases, as did some in eastern Washington and Idaho.

State health officials at first said it was too early to know if the Pendleton Round-Up was a superspreader event.

“That was a very large outdoor event,” Dr. Tom Jeanne, deputy state epidemiologist, said of the Round-Up. “And there may not have been great compliance with masking there. We do expect to see some impact on cases from that, but it’s still too early to know the full extent of that.” 

When pressed for her level of alarm amid the outbreak, Brown said first and foremost that she did not attend the Pendleton Round-Up because she was concerned about community spread. Brown has attended in the past, including riding a horse in the annual parade.

Brown said she was well aware of the regional case spike “as a result of the Pendleton Round-Up,” but she still said “it’s a little early,” noting that the Round-Up only ended a few weeks ago.

But the state’s own numbers, along with those from federal and non-government groups, painted a darker picture. Case totals are sharply up in parts of Eastern Oregon, while statewide deaths are nearing another record.

There have been 465 COVID-19 deaths reported in Oregon in September, through Tuesday. That’s the third highest total of the 19-month pandemic that has killed 3,750 people in the state.

Only three more deaths would push it past the second highest month, January 2021, when 476 people died. The deadliest month was December 2020, the last month before vaccines became widely available, when 603 people died.

Oregon’s Hospital Capacity Web System (HOSCAP), which tracks availability of hospital beds in the state, reported Tuesday that only 6 of 89 staffed adult Intensive Care Unit beds located east of the Cascades were available.

The Pendleton Round-Up was canceled in 2020 amid COVID-19 concerns, but plans moved forward in early summer as Brown had dropped many restrictions on activities when COVID-19 cases appeared to bottom out at the end of June.

The event went off as scheduled despite a steep wave of cases linked to the the highly contagious delta variant that swept across Oregon and filled state hospitals to capacity.

It’s still too early to say if cases foreshadow a new spike statewide and health officials are watching closely for that possibility, Jeanne said.

Brown did not voice any regret in not overriding local officials’ decision to go ahead with the event. The Round-Up brought tens of thousands of people into an area with high infection rates and where just 51% of eligible adults were vaccinated. Many of the visitors came from areas in neighboring states where vaccination rates were also low.

Brown said the state had pressed officials across Oregon to encourage safety protocols like mask mandates. She pointed to other states where people are gathering en masse without a mandate. 

“If you watch an Ohio football game in Ohio, those stadiums filled with 100,000 people, there is hardly a mask there,” Brown said. “That is very different here in Oregon.”

Prior to the mid-September event in Pendleton, Brown had said it was up to local officials to ensure the safety of the crowd. As for those who attended, she said they should mask up, follow social distancing guidelines, but otherwise “let ‘er buck,” the Round-Up’s slogan.

But masks were few and far between throughout the Round-Up, even though organizers were offering thousands of them and had posted signs encouraging masking and distancing. 

Umatilla County Public Health Director Joe Fiumara has said the number of COVID-19 cases tied to the Round-Up is an undercount, as many people who have tested positive, and are aware of others who have, are not cooperating with health officials. The reported cases include people who had COVID-19 symptoms prior to the event and yet still chose to come, officials have said. 

“When so many people come together in one location, it is inevitable,” Umatilla County Commissioner George Murdock said in an email. “The same thing has happened each time restrictions in Oregon have been lifted.”

No county or state officials voiced any interest publicly in stopping the Pendleton Round-Up from happening. 

Until this past week, COVID-19 cases had declined statewide for three consecutive weeks.

But state officials acknowledged in the press conference that cases had flat-lined over the previous week. They cited the Pendleton Round-Up outbreak specifically as one of several factors contributing to this trend. 

Last week, Umatilla County reported 505 new COVID-19 cases, the county’s second-highest total since the pandemic started.

On Tuesday, the county’s average daily cases reached a new pandemic high, topping its previous record set in August, a month when more county residents died with COVID-19 than any other month — 22. 

But public health directors in Umatilla County and the Umatilla Indian Reservation have voiced alarm in recent days about the speed with which the outbreak has unfolded.

Umatilla County officials have said they are preparing for the surge to continue for several weeks. In response, tribal officials quickly reinstated pandemic restrictions that hearken back to those from the pandemic’s early stages, including limited social gatherings. 

Brown said she was “very, very concerned,” adding that rural communities generally have less access to health care than counties in Western Oregon.

“Honestly, I’m very concerned about the capacity of health care workers themselves,” Brown said. “They have been working day in and day out for the last several weeks providing incredibly valuable patient care, life-saving care. And to have an additional surge on top of it is incredibly frustrating, I’m sure, for them after they have worked so hard.” 

In August, Brown announced a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for teachers and health care workers with an Oct. 18 deadline, citing the alarming rise in cases driven by the delta variant.

Besides Wheeler County, more than a quarter of health care workers in every county in Eastern Oregon county are unvaccinated, according to state data. All would be fired or forced to resign under Brown’s current mandate. 

Last week, Umatilla County’s public health officer, Dr. Jon Hitzman, said if a COVID-19 surge were to follow the Pendleton Round-Up, its peak would occur right around the mandate’s deadline, placing a greater strain on hospitals that are already short-staffed. 

In the press conference, Brown said she was “pushing forward on our vaccine requirement for health care workers because we have a really stark choice right now: a vaccinated workforce that can continue to work through our COVID surges like the one we’re likely to see again from the Pendleton Round-Up, or an unvaccinated workforce that’s depleted by quarantines and illness.”

Much of the briefing was taken up with mostly upbeat news of overall drop of statewide cases, approval of booster shots for some Pfizer vaccine recipients, and the usual requests for continued voluntary masking and social distancing.

The rising numbers in Umatilla County led the independent pandemic monitoring group COVID Act Now to raise the county’s risk rating to its highest level: Extreme.

Since first appearing in Wuhan, China at the very end of 2019, COVID-19 has infected 232.6 million people worldwide and killed 4.76 million, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

In the United States, 43.2 million cases have been reported and 692,058 have died, the center reported Tuesday.

As of Tuesday, OHA has reported 326,191 cases and 3,750 deaths.

The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, a top COVID-19 forecaster advising the federal government, projects that on  more than 5.47 million people will have died by Jan. 1, 2022, two days after the two-year anniversary of the pandemic.

The estimate for the United States is 783,845 deaths on Jan. 1, including 4,855 in Oregon.

Bryce Dole is a reporter with the East Oregonian. Gary A. Warner is a statehouse reporter for the Oregon Capital Bureau.