Oregon has passed the crest of the omicron wave of COVID-19, but still faces a dangerous time before levels drop back to where they were in June, state health officials said Thursday.

“The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 has peaked and will steadily recede until reaching pre-omicron levels by the end of March,” according to the forecast Thursday by Oregon Health & Science University.

But the wave is not over.

“It’s important for people to stick with masking through the next several weeks,” said Peter Graven, director of the OHSU Office of Advanced Analytics.

The trend is backed up by the averaging of 13 major medical, university and scientific forecast models submitted regularly to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hitting the peak and starting down does not mean the wave is over. Each day will roughly match up with a similar point on the curve, with new infections, severe illness and death.

Graven’s forecast shows Oregon is on track to pass the key number of 400 hospitalizations per day.

Gov. Kate Brown has said she will end the indoor mask requirement when the state has fewer than 400 patients with COVID-19 in Oregon hospitals, or March 31, whichever comes sooner.

In a briefing with state lawmakers late Monday, Graven said he was seeing sustained trends that omicron is very high, but receding.

“I believe we are at the peak and we are kind of bouncing around a little bit as it comes down,” he said.

Hospitalizations are the most accurate measure of the impact and direction of a virus surge. Graven’s report showed the state would be under 1,000 hospitalizations a day by Feb. 18. It expects cases to drop under 500 around March 23.

Oregon has fared relatively well so far in the omicron surge with lower than projected illness and deaths.

Estimates of severe cases of COVID-19 in OHSU reports near the beginning of 2022 showed up to 3,000 people could be hospitalized in Oregon on peak days in the wave.

“In the current surge, a lot more states went up much much higher than us and more steeply,” Graven said.

OHSU projected 80% of the state population followed the indoor mask mandate during recent weeks. That’s a level similar to mask wearing in the Northeastern states first hit by omicron. Oregon had its guard up two weeks prior to the wave moving across the nation to the West Coast.

With masking and a relatively high level of vaccination, Oregon was dealt a less powerful blow than other states where the safeguards were ignored or actively opposed.

The hospitals have filled up during the omicron wave with mostly unvaccinated people either suffering from severe cases of the virus, or hospitalized for other reasons — surgery, accidents, heart attacks — but blood tests showed they were positive for COVID-19.

The omicron wave was far less damaging for those who were vaccinated, and especially had the booster shot, Graven said.

“Once you get boosted, you pretty much get removed from the possibility of getting hospitalized for much,” Graven said.

The overall result in Oregon has been a lower peak but a flatter curve that spread new cases over a longer period of time.

Graven said the typical wave behavior pattern of “fear and fatigue” was again showing up, with residents taking strong action as the virus numbers mounted, but now tiring of the effort and being quicker to spend time indoors with others, going to restaurants and indoor events.

“That is kind of a true metric of fatigue,” Graven said. “People getting through a surge and trying to get back to normal.”

The Oregon Health Authority, meanwhile, reported 27 new virus cases for Clatsop County on Thursday and 23 new cases on Wednesday.

Since the pandemic began, the county had recorded 4,361 virus cases and 38 deaths as of Thursday.