I recently had a writer/journalist tell me that Oregon never shut down non-emergency health care in 2020. He doesn’t live in the U.S. and had no idea what he was talking about.
Here is the text of the actual Executive Order issued by the Oregon Governor in March of 2020 – posting this here for the record.
This public health message was promoted in the media, telling us that you should only seek health care if you had chest pain, difficulty breathing, an obvious fracture, uncontrolled bleeding or were in intense pain (I was not usually in intense pain, just pain).
“Some examples of when procedures would not be delayed: if there is a threat to a patient’s life if the procedure is not performed, threat of permanent dysfunction of an extremity or organ system, risk of metastasis or progression of staging, or risk of rapidly worsening to severe symptoms,” Boyle said in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive.
More here: Don’t wait for emergency care, OHSU physicians urge | OHSU News (people having strokes and heart attacks stopped going to the ER – the public health messaging was a disaster that killed people.)
This shutdown was prompted by the erroneous output of a UW IHME Institute of Disease Modeling model that projected vast numbers of Covid cases and deaths – which never occurred. The model had never been validated, and its output, in the spring of 2020, was off in space. By summer, OHA discontinued using their disease model. By the fall of 2022, the CDC announced it would no longer publish the ensemble disease model projections because they were found to have low reliability.
I had to wait 2.5 months to get a broken foot diagnosed – far too much time to wait. In the confusion of this public health fiasco, nothing was done for my foot. I spent about 7 months mostly sitting, in pain.
That led to muscle wasting and weakness which exposed that I had osteoarthritis in my right knee, which I kept at bay for a long time, unknowingly, due to weight training and jogging. Everything fell apart once I couldn’t walk.
By early 2021, I could only walk 200 feet before I was in severe pain. An MRI confirmed OA of the right knee (since then, a CT scan found OA in the right hip as well.) Months of physical therapy (paid out of pocket due to very expensive but covers nothing ObamaCare health insurance) got me walking within in a few months.
But soon I encountered more problems. To self-treat another unrealized foot fracture, I found using a strong arch support helped reduced the pain. BUT unknown to me until the spring of 2024, my foot and ankle have been misaligned, probably since I was born. The result was supination of the left foot, and frequent ankle sprains. In the fall of ’22, I stepped in a pothole and sprained my ankle – I thought. But I had done much worse damage. I developed chronic pain on the left side of my foot, it would get better then would spontaneously get much worse – several times from late October 2022 to early 2024.
By early 2024 it was chronic and my doctor referred me to a podiatrist.
An x-ray showed I had a previous avulsion fracture of the 5th metatarsal which sort of healed on its own (sightly misaligned but not a serious problem). However, the peroneus brevis tendon had also been torn and never fully re-attached to the bone (as seen in an ultrasound exam). The thin attachment was repeatedly being torn. During this time, I also tore/split the tendon where it runs behind the ankle. Thus, I had effectively two tendon tears. I was in a world of pain. The podiatrist told me this sprained ankle –> avulsion fracture –> torn tendons is surprisingly common. And it is common to try and wait it out as it often heals on its own.
The podiatrist treated the tendon injury with 3 stem cell injections directly into the tendon, plus 5 shockwave therapy sessions. Shockwave is basically an impact hammer on the injury site – the goal is to create inflammation which restarts the body’s self-healing to regrow the tendon. All this worked!
I also got a $600 pair of orthotic inserts (not covered by insurance) which reposition my foot and takes the load off the 5th metatarsal. This also fixes the supination problem that was causing my frequent ankle sprains.
Walking weird for so long may be the cause of the hip bursitis diagnosed in early 2024 (we do not know the specific cause, but this is a real possibility, two PTs have told me). I am now at 4+ months of being unable to do much – walking was very painful. Only in the past two weeks have I seen significant improvement. I had one doctor’s visit, then 5 PT visits – but was unfortunately abandoned by my excellent PT due to a practice appointment scheduling error that didn’t get me scheduled for future appointments and they had no more openings for 8+ weeks out. After a month on hold, I resumed PT via a chiropractor that my doctor referred me to as he said I could not wait 8+ weeks – now about six visits into that and making good progress. I can now walk pretty well (on the level) and in just the past week or so, I can finally walk downstairs again (classic problem with hip bursitis). Now we begin strengthening the hip muscles – will likely take me out to early fall before I am fully recovered.
Update: It took doing daily PT exercises until early 2025 before the hip had healed.
Second update: but within a few months, the hip problem returned. As of June 2025, back in PT.
Basically, I went through 4 and half years of hell because of public health quacks in Oregon who really did shut down health care, contrary to the revisionists pretending this did not happen.
The closure was based on the output of a flawed disease model whose disease projections were off in space. If this had been a financial model, we would have correctly labeled it for what it was: fraud.
By July of 2020, OHA stopped using fraudulent models for Covid projections. The models were useless as their output had no practical application – none of the NPI’s we were forced to do had any impact to stopping disease spread (by late 2022, almost everyone had had Covid at least once, per CDC estimates).
This 4+ years of pain was brought to me by public health quacks and arrogant disease modelers.
Their actions were wrong and had no effect on the spread of Covid but caused actual harms to many people.
I no longer listen to public health – it is a fraudulent field of study that has no idea what is doing. They have zero credibility and trust in public health will not be restored in my lifetime.
Now in 2024, each time I mention this actual closure of health care, Orwellian public health fans tell me Oregon never shut down health care – which is a lie. Go read the Executive Order text, above.
Oregon did indeed shut down health care – one of the larger failures in public health history. The public was told only to go to an ER (and an ER only) if you had an emergency or life-threatening condition – a decision you were supposed to discern on your own. Hence, the news reports that said you should only seek care if you had chest pain, difficulty breathing, obvious bone fracture, uncontrolled bleeding – and a few added if in significant pain (which was not defined).
Oregon also shut schools among the longest duration in the country and today ranks 2nd to last among all states in terms of the negative impact on children’s learning from the public health shutdown, and as of 2025, the state’s Governor is tied at #49 for lowest approval rating in the nation.
At the time of the Executive Order shutting down health care, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown was the lowest ranked governor in all 50 states, based on public opinion surveys at the time.
