Mask-wearing, social distancing, working from home, remote learning — concepts that were once unfamiliar became part of daily life when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.

Now, five years to the month since Oregon and many other states first started issuing shutdown orders and widespread restrictions in an attempt to contain the virus, Lane County is still wrestling with the pandemic's lasting economic and social effects.

Between the start of the pandemic and May 2023, when the Oregon Health Authority stopped tracking cases, 549,626 Oregonians tested positive. The virus claimed 10,772 lives in the state, including 740 in Lane County .

Beyond the loss of life, the pandemic altered nearly every aspect of society — healthcare, politics, education and business were forever marked by the qualifiers "pre-pandemic" and "post-pandemic."

Education: 'It was an enormous shift'

When Brown ordered all K-12 schools to close their doors on March 16, 2020, most students and educators had no idea how long they'd have to stay away.

Tina Leaton, a fifth-grade teacher at Edgewood Elementary School in Eugene, said those first days brought an abrupt transition to remote learning.

"It was an enormous shift," Leaton said. "Here we were a week before spring break, and everybody was in fear and in lockdown, and then by the end of spring break, you have one week to figure out how you're going to teach 25 children online."

Edgewood performed admirably — the school had a remarkable 95% attendance rate during remote learning, partly due to its access to technology — but Leaton said she could only watch as many of her peers at other schools, especially those with lower-income populations and marginalized groups, struggled. Even at Edgewood, Leaton still noted daily challenges, saying she would not want to teach children online again.

Her tech-savvy fifth graders quickly figured out how to manipulate Zoom, setting up private chatrooms to send each other messages, some of which weren't exactly kind. Leaton also found it hard to connect with her students, having little opportunity to work with them one-on-one in the online environment.

"I can't leave the group, so I had to find ways to be creative with moments, but it was never enough," Leaton said, noting that for some students, individual interaction in the classroom is essential. "Some of them had zero support (at home), or they hit the unmute button, and there's Mom and Dad yelling at another child in the back. There were so many distractions."

Oregon schools would not return to in-person classes until spring 2021. Springfield Public Schools returned to the classroom in February 2021 while Eugene School District 4J and Bethel School District returned in March, a full year after distance learning began .

K-12 education continued to see the impacts of that remote period, commonly referred to as “learning loss.”

Leaton, who has spent her entire 27-year teaching career at Edgewood, has observed a sharp spike in "astonishing" behavioral issues that she had never experienced before. She said these behavioral issues lead to in-classroom disruptions, which may play a role in the lasting learning loss.

"It's hard to wrap your brain around the amount of children who will hurt you, hurt each other, destroy a classroom," Leaton said. "If we have disrupted learning, how would we not have disrupted progress?"

Half a decade later, proficiency assessments in English and math are still about 10 percentage points lower than what they were pre-pandemic .

On the other hand, Leaton said there have been silver linings, from increased participation in professional development opportunities to increased social-emotional resources for students. Graduation rates are also at a near all-time high , with the classes of 2023 and 2024 graduating at the second highest rates recorded in Oregon’s history.

Squeeze on small businesses, arts and culture

The economic toll of the pandemic was immediate and severe. Businesses closed, unemployment soared, and entire industries were upended. Even now, some business owners are just getting back on their feet.

Rachel Rossi is one of them. She owns Estelle , a gluten-free bakery moving into Lovely's old location on Main Street in Springfield.

Rossi has been baking since she was young and found out she was celiac when she was 21. After completing her master's program in Australia, a country that has a high population of celiac people, she decided to start experimenting with cooking in a gluten-free bakery.

During the pandemic, she was forced to shut down her mobile bakery cart as funds dried up. Unable to keep up with Portland’s rising costs, she moved back to Eugene to restart her business.

It took two years to get back up and running, facing labor shortages and pandemic-era health inspection delays. In 2022, she finally reopened. Now, with a loyal customer base, she’s preparing to open her first brick-and-mortar shop.

"One of the scariest things ever was driving the food truck down from Portland on the I-5," Rossi said. "I remember going like 45 on the freeway for five hours."

She ended up waiting out the pandemic and reopened Estelle in 2022. After working in markets and gaining customers around Eugene, she has stabilized her business enough to open a new location.

"I'm so excited, I've been wanting a space like this for so long," Rossi said. "I'm so glad I didn't have a space before COVID, because that would have been a disaster. The timing feels right now."

Rossi hopes that Estelle will open in mid-April, but does not have a specific date in mind yet.

Housing: Ballooning prices and lack of units

Nationally, remote work offered employees location flexibility, which led to a surge in home purchases — and prices , which went up about 45% from five years prior. After hitting record lows in 2021, mortgage rates surged, pricing people out of communities as inventory lowered due to opportunist buyers growing unwilling or unable to leave their homes.

Oregon was not immune, and in places like Lane County, median sale prices ballooned, housing stock failed to keep up with population needs and the state has struggled with providing services and options to individuals and households experiencing homelessness.

The 2024 State of the State’s Housing Report produced by Oregon Housing and Community Services found the median sale price of a home had grown by $269,000 from $294,000 at the end of 2012 to $563,000 a decade later. The 2023 average rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $1,254.

The report found that for every dollar an Oregonian earned in wage increases, the median sales price of a home increased by $7.10, showcasing how average wages have failed to balance out with the increasing cost of housing. Housing in Oregon has grown so unaffordable that the state ranked first nationally in the percentage of unsheltered families with children.

Housing in the state has been underproduced since the mid-2010s, leading to a deficiency of housing options available to new residents, forming households and aging populations. To address housing supply shortages, the state must produce 500,000 housing units in the next 20 years. Eugene’s housing needs for the next 20 years call for the production of 26,273 units, according to the 2025 Oregon Housing Needs Analysis Housing Production Dashboard .

The state has focused on supporting greater housing accessibility and affordability in legislative sessions. Gov. Tina Kotek has supported bills aimed at expanding the types of allowable housing and additional legislation has been proposed to cap rent increases at certain types of affordable housing types to help them remain affordable.

Healthcare: Exposing a lack of preparedness

On the front lines, nurses, doctors and caregivers faced the unknown. Early shortages of personal protective equipment, postponed elective procedures and visitation restrictions made an already challenging job even harder.

Registered nurse Matt Calzia remembered the uncertainty at the time, using words like "frustration," "anxiety" and "fear."

"A lot of these things (like lockdown) had to happen because the healthcare system could not sustain the influx of patients that we were seeing elsewhere in the world and country, and especially in Oregon, where we have fewer beds per capita," Calzia said.

Calzia, who works now as a nurse at a Lane County hospital, wasn't "at the bedside" at the start of the pandemic, working for the Oregon Nurses Association as a nurse practice consultant, but he was in contact with nurses who faced the disease daily. In Sept. 2021 during the surge that led to the National Guard being deployed to Eugene/Springfield hospitals , Calzia took a leave of absence to work in the ICU.

The emotional burden was especially heavy. With hospital visitations limited or prohibited, healthcare workers, mostly nurses, were responsible for supporting patients emotionally.

Calzia recalled one patient who had been living in a retirement community. That patient, like many in community living situations, was barred from his family visits and daily meals with neighbors. Despite being a previously healthy, independent older person, that patient died. Calzia said he experienced "failure to thrive," often associated with weight loss, decreased appetite and depression. He said while that patient may not have died due to COVID-19, he died due to circumstances created by the pandemic. Calzia said this created a disheartening ethical dilemma: on one hand people can die if exposed to the virus, on the other, people can die due to the isolation preventing the spread.

Having returned to the nursing profession in 2024, Calzia said the healthcare system is practically back to normal, which is both good and bad.

"Where you would have hoped that lessons were learned and that restructuring would begin, and that policymakers and the healthcare systems would be able to come together and acknowledge that we have a very, very broken system, they didn't fix it," Calzia said. "It's not better. It's not ready for any event."

Now, hospitals are overwhelmed with a combination of respiratory illnesses : Respiratory Syncytial Virus, influenza and COVID-19 . A problem exasperated in Lane County with the closure of PeacehHealth's Sacred Heart Medical Center University District hospital in December 2023 . This year marked Oregon's worst flu season since the Oregon Health Authority began tracking the virus 15 years ago.

In Calzia's opinion, health policy and health system leaders have not addressed the problems seriously. Calzia said neither Lane County nor Oregon would be equipped for another public health crisis.

"The healthcare system is always just one large event away from another type of collapse, or inability to meet the needs of community — if they're even meeting it at baseline now," he said.

Local government: A forever change?

Much of the national response to the pandemic fell to state and local governments. Springfield, Eugene , and Lane County all declared states of emergency on March 16 and 17, 2020. Lane County Public Health held the first of what (after a two-day break) became daily COVID-19 updates on March 20 .

Local governments were tasked with administering emergency aid to dampen the health and other impacts of the pandemic. Lane County oversaw local testing and vaccinations .

Eugene City Manager Sarah Medary said one change the city made post-pandemic was to expand the number of staff members trained to respond to an emergency.

“We utilized staff from every part of the City” to staff emergency operations during the pandemic, she said, which highlighted the need to expand emergency management training.

A post-pandemic challenge Medary noted was an ongoing struggle with recruiting. She attributed this to a shift to opportunities for remote work, which she said the city couldn’t match because of the in-person nature of public service work.

“It’s unclear if this is a forever change or not, but (it’s) still impacting our recruitment efforts,” she said.

The criminal justice system 'battled through'

While Oregon saw a decline in violent crime and property crime from 2019 to 2020, COVID-19 precautions produced a clog that impacted every sector of the criminal justice system.

The Lane County Courthouse was forced to operate with reduced hours, postpone hearings and hold most services remotely. With court processes slowed down, attorneys became overloaded with cases.

For example, from April to July 2019, the Lane County Courthouse held 13,049 hearings but from April to July 2020, the court held 6,631 hearings — nearly a 50% decline.

In a 2023 interview with The Register-Guard , Lane County District Attorney Christopher Parosa said that cases for individual deputy district attorneys surged when courts reopened in late 2021, resulting in a backlog of approximately 1,200 to 1,600 cases.

"It's not like crime stopped during the course of that time. We got to the point where people were absolutely burning out," Parosa said. "I saw more tears in about an 18-month period around the office than I'd seen in my 18 years of time outside that period."

Due to the influx of cases and issues managing workloads, workers began to leave the District Attorney's Office for better conditions. As a result, the District Attorney's Office initially enacted a "no file" list of crimes it couldn't afford to prosecute in July 2021 to reduce attorneys' caseloads. The office resumed filing charges on offenses like nonviolent felonies and low-level misdemeanors in 2023.

Sgt. Tim Wallace of the Lane County Sheriff's Office said deputies have never been concerned about reducing patrol options.

"Certainly, there were the things that were kind of impacting everybody, but the biggest exception with patrol is we never stopped going to work," Wallace said.

Wallace said deputies were tasked with navigating the pandemic's day-to-day effects on the community. The impact on patrol was minimal beyond the extra layer of protection and caution deputies used when contacting people, conducting traffic stops, and investigating.

The biggest impact the pandemic had on the Sheriff's Office was at the Lane County Jail where staff was tasked with managing social distancing for adults in custody, going virtual with court systems, and following federal and state guidelines for health screenings and observation periods.

In 2020, at least five pre-trial detainees at the jail staged a hunger strike , meaning they refused food, after raising concerns about jail staff not consistently wearing clean and new masks, wearing gloves, changing gloves from location to location and regularly cleaning communal spaces.

Five years later

Oregon has moved forward, but the pandemic’s imprint remains. Schools are still dealing with learning loss, businesses are still recovering and the healthcare system remains fragile.

While some adaptations, like remote work, have become permanent fixtures, other scars — rising housing costs, workforce shortages and strained hospitals — could take longer to heal.

The Register-Guard reporters Haleigh Kochanski, Hannarose McGuinness, Samantha Pierotti and Alan Torres contributed to this report.