LANE COUNTY, Ore. — The situation in local hospitals is still dire, and as of Monday morning, there are around 8 ICU beds available in Lane County. Public Health is reporting 641 new covid cases and 7 new deaths since Friday.

As concerning as those numbers are, it looks like the very worst might be behind us.

Lane County's healthcare workers are stopping short of breathing a sigh of relief, though.

"It's an improvement, but it's still a significant burden," said Dr. James McGovern, Chief Medical Officer for PeaceHealth Oregon

Data showing the recent surge in covid cases thanks to the delta variant likely peaked a couple of weeks ago.

"We're pretty certain that we are a little past peak but of course you never know when you're past peak until you're looking in the rearview mirror," said Dr. Patrick Luedtke, the Senior Public Health Officer with Lane County Health and Human Services.

That surge forced local hospitals to cancel elective procedures and expand ICU's into other areas.

PeaceHealth Riverbend peaked at around 100 covid patients in recent weeks, for the last week that number has been in the mid-80s.

"We appreciate the slowing down and we'd rather be at 80 than 100," McGovern said. "We're not out of this yet."

Those stats are still very high. and Riverbend isn't getting rid of expanded ICU beds just yet.

"Until we can shrink our covid footprint or covid needs back into a manageable place, we still need those beds to be able to take care of the community."

But this week, McKenzie Willamette Medical Center resumes outpatient elective surgeries, and PeaceHealth is following suit.

"As much as we can manage beds were bringing back as many surgeries as we can," said Dr. McGovern.

While hospitals brace for a potential increase in covid patients from Labor Day gatherings, Public Health says there hasn't been a spike in cases from the season opener for Ducks Football.

"If we're gonna see a bulge from that first home game, It will probably be the first few days of this week," Dr. Luedtke said. "And we haven't seen it yet."

It's a step in the right direction, says Luedtke, but we're not out of the woods yet

"It's gonna be weeks before we get back to what we consider normal," said Dr. McGovern.

Luedtke says we can expect to see a plateau of dozens of daily cases before we start to see a real decline.

So when will we be out of the woods? He says maybe by Thanksgiving. But that depends on a lot of factors, including FDA approval for vaccinating kids 5 and up.

We also asked Luedtke if we should be worried about future surges from other coronavirus variants. He said the "mu" and "lambda" variants *are concerning, as they may not respond as well to the vaccine.

However, he says the good news is no virus can do everything, and these variants are less transmissible.

"Those two variants are not showing the transmissibility at all like delta," said Dr. Luedtke. "So if they coexist with delta, delta's gonna crowd em out. Because delta's gonna infect everyone. So that's a good thing overall but we have to continue to do that surveillance because these viruses mutate."

Luedtke says coronavirus does not mutate as quickly as the flu virus, but labs like the University of Oregon's genomics lab are still doing sequencing to keep tabs on those other variants so we know what's coming.