After obsessing over this disaster for the better part of 5 weeks I’m cautiously predicting that Oregon will be one of the safest states to have lived in.

This is partly because Portland closed up early. We are mentally between Seattle and San Francisco.

Oregon apparently managed to shut down public life weeks earlier than other places. Oregon is relatively small.

People here put a lot of emphasis on community and prosocial behavior. People took social distancing seriously in early March.

The scary part is that Oregon also just has a very low capacity to deal with this crisis in any other way other than the lock-down approach.

I don’t think of the state as having a strong government presence in our lives. There are very few hospital beds.

Now that the first month of the crisis is behind us we are just getting started.

I think Oregon is doing extremely well dealing with the virus because of the early shut down.

But how do people eat and pay bills in the weeks to come? Is more help on the way or not?

Poor people in Oregon have access to government funded health care.

The homelessness and housing crisis in Oregon has been getting worse year after year.

How things go in April of 2020 will decide whether I will regret this thread of local optimism.