Oregon’s top epidemiologist and hospital officials on Thursday joined the chorus of politicians and health officials asking Oregonians to wear masks indoors to ease what they say is a crisis in some hospitals due to a trifecta of multiple respiratory viruses.

“The situation facing our hospitals is extremely serious,” Dr. Dean Sidelinger, the state epidemiologist, said in a monthly coronavirus briefing with reporters.

The combination of flu, RSV and COVID-19 cases has prompted officials to label the situation all but unprecedented, even though hospitals were swamped with record-setting levels of coronavirus patients and related deaths during the delta wave of summer 2021.

Officials began sounding the alarm about the respiratory viruses a month ago. An early spike in RSV cases prompted one of Sidelinger’s deputies to say Nov. 10 that the state faced a “concerning picture” and “we need to work together to protect hospital capacity.” Last week, Dr. Jennifer Vines, the Multnomah County health officer, called this a “historical moment” and called for voluntary masking through year’s end. And on Wednesday, Gov. Kate Brown steered $25 million to hospitals to help with staffing shortages.

“Stay home if you are sick, stay up to date on your vaccinations, and consider wearing a mask in crowded indoor situations––especially if you are at higher risk for severe illness from RSV, the flu, or COVID-19,” Brown said in a statement.

But despite the prolonged pronouncements, public health officials remain weary of taking some more aggressive steps used during earlier phases of the COVID-19 pandemic to help reduce the spread of respiratory diseases, such as mandating masking in public places.

Sidelinger said asking Oregonians to put on masks has worked in the past, and that he hopes efforts to tell the public about the impact of the health emergency on families would suffice, preventing the potential need for enforced masking. Asked to say what specific factors would inform a decision to instate a mandate, Sidelinger demurred.

“I don’t have specific criteria or data points out there,” Sidelinger said. “I really am pleading with individuals to wear a mask.”

None of the three hospital executives at Thursday’s media session answered a question regarding whether they thought a mandate would theoretically reduce the burden on the hospitals that one of them described as “historic and new.”

A surge in RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, cases among children and infants prompted the first alarm bells in November, when entire pediatric intensive care units filled up with patients. Cases of that virus have already peaked, officials say, but the decline will be slow and gradual.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 hospitalizations had a previously unforecasted increase, topping out most recently at 370 hospital beds occupied by patients who have tested positive for the coronavirus, although that number has since receded to 322. And the flu season is getting started at an extremely fast clip, with 30% of tests for the flu during the week ending Nov. 26 coming back positive.

During Oregon’s worst run of COVID-19 fatalities, nearly 1,200 people were hospitalized with coronavirus, including 330 who required intensive care.

While Oregon’s COVID-19 hospital loads are now a fraction of those numbers, health care providers continue to struggle with short staffing. Brown on Wednesday announced an emergency declaration that expands on one she put into effect weeks earlier, giving the same staffing and resource flexibility to adult hospitals as the original one did for pediatric hospitals. Hospitals will also get $25 million from the state to bring in more health care staff, such as traveling nurses.

The union representing Oregon’s nurses has blasted the state’s approach, saying Brown’s action is “embarrassingly late and lacking in strong solution-driven policy directives.” Among other things, the union called for immediately halting elective surgeries performed at hospitals, saying “respiratory therapists, nurses and other frontline health care workers should not be tied up in non-essential, high-profit surgeries while pediatric units are unable to provide care to ill children.”

Asked if official calls for people to voluntarily mask up will work, Sidelinger said he believes he’s already seen some potential impact from other officials’ recent statements.

“I think that this is starting to have an impact, and will have an impact in the coming weeks,” Sidelinger said. But, he added, “things will get worse before they get better.”

— Fedor Zarkhin