Six months ago this Friday, the governor announced reality had finally hit Oregon: After months of the epidemic raging in China, the first person in the state had tested positive for COVID-19. (1/14)
Since then, Oregon public health officials have reported more than 25,000 known cases and more than 400 coronavirus deaths, marking a grim and ongoing chapter in the state’s history. (2/14)
But Oregon has fared far better than many others -- ranking 45th in the number of overall infections per capita and 43rd in the number of deaths per capita since the pandemic began.
Why? (3/14)
Public health experts credit a mixture of geography, demographics, public health orders, the willingness of a substantial number of Oregonians to abide by them and even a bit of luck.(4/14)
“Overall, we have done really well,” said Dr. Renee Edwards, chief medical officer at Oregon Health & Science University. “An important piece is we had some time to prepare and in large measure we’ve treated this like a public health emergency.” (5/14)
To be sure, Oregon is not Texas, Florida or Arizona – three of the states hit especially hard by the disease. Oregon also doesn’t have the international connections and population density of New York or New Jersey. (6/14)
Conversely, Oregon has a lot more in common with sparsely populated places like Montana and Wyoming than neighboring states, which have all been hit much harder by the coronavirus. (7/14)
Washington has seen 66% more per capita cases and two and a half times the rate of deaths than in Oregon. (8/14)
Idaho has reported nearly triple the cases per capita and 60% more deaths per capita than in Oregon. (9/14)
“Idaho is kind of on fire right now, from a case standpoint,” Pat Allen, director of the Oregon Health Authority, said earlier this month. (10/14)
But Oregon is performing well only relative to the rest of the United States, which overall has floundered in its response. The country accounts for about 25% of cases and 22% of deaths in the world, but only about 4% of the world’s population. (11/14)
Oregon, for example, has seen more cases and deaths than the entire country of South Korea, which is 12 times more populous. (12/14)
So it comes as no surprise the pandemic still holds a tight grip over Oregon as well as the rest of the nation -- shuttering schools and businesses, forcing millions into unemployment or to work from home and altering nearly every other facet of daily life. (13/14)
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After Aron Christensen was found dead on a remote trail in Washington’s Cascade Mountains – next to his dead 4-month-old puppy – his grieving family say they were given confusing, conflicting information by law enforcement. (1/10)
One detective said it was probably a heart attack, claiming that the Portland musician had a “widow-maker’s heart” despite the fact a forensic autopsy had not been completed. (2/10)
Another detective theorized that Aron – who was hiking the Walupt Lake Trail alone with his dog during a camping trip with friends – could have died from marijuana they found among his belongings. “What if it was laced?” (3/10)
While examining The Oregonian’s history of racism, we found several editorials that supported the World War II incarceration of people of Japanese descent and news coverage that denigrated those targeted. (1/11)
In 1942, Ted Nakashima, a second-generation Japanese American, penned a searing view from inside the Puyallup Fairgrounds near Tacoma. (2/11)
It was one of the prison camps that collectively housed 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II. The majority of those imprisoned were U.S. citizens. (3/11)
Oregon was the last state in the country to allow a jury to convict someone of a felony other than murder by an 11-1 or 10-2 vote. 1/7
For decades, just two states – Oregon and Louisiana – allowed split jury convictions. The Oregonian helped lead the charge to give the state its discriminatory system. 2/7
A 1933 nonunanimous decision in a murder case led the paper to blame southern and eastern European immigrants for an “increasingly unwieldy and unsatisfactory” jury system. 3/7
“Reporter @robwdavis began his deep examination of the newspaper’s history more than a year ago. 1/6
@tbottomly@robwdavis He and editor @_Brad_Schmidt spent months reviewing the archives, assessing the evidence and talking to historians and Oregonians whose communities were affected by the coverage. 2/6
I thought we would find the newspaper had missed stories, ignored major cultural movements, been behind the times. And, yes, we found sins of omission, to be sure.
But the gravest mistakes were sins of commission. 3/6
On the first day Henry Pittock printed The Morning Oregonian as a daily in 1861, the owner and publisher said he aimed for his newspaper to be “useful and acceptable to our people.” 1/5
Through what it covered and what it ignored, in landmark editorials and harmful stereotypes, the newspaper left no doubt in the decades that followed who Pittock’s “people” were: white men. 2/5
Prompted by the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the nationwide protests that followed, we started to examine the newspaper’s racist legacy, reviewing what it said and omitted in news coverage and editorials throughout its history. 3/5
The southern Oregon dad who ended a Christmas Eve call with President Joe Biden by declaring “Let’s go Brandon” told Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Donald Trump, this week that he believes the verifiably false claim that “the election was 100 percent stolen.” 1/5
Despite telling @Oregonian on Saturday that he was not a “Trumper,” and the comment was in jest, Jared Schmeck said Monday he’s “proud” of taunting Biden during a live Christmas event for children. 2/5
Schmeck made the new remarks on Bannon’s show, War Room, where he wore a “Make America Great Again” hat and struck a defiant tone.
Bannon was indicted by a federal grand jury in Nov. after he defied a subpoena for the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. 3/5