Sarah Flower: News on COVID-19 is like a total yo-yo with the state of Colorado, and hospitals around the Four Corners looking at hospital capacity, crisis care services, and then also mixed in there, is the approval for 5 to 11 year olds to now get vaccinated. How are things holding up on your front and what is San Juan Basin Public Health’s focus right now?
Liane Jollon: I would like to start with acknowledging how confusing of a time this is and how we continue to have mixed messages and continue to have to communicate things that have uncertainty. And, that is really challenging for everyone who’s trying to plan their next moves in their lives, and also for our public health agency and all public health individuals responding to this… We also have to recognize that Colorado is one of about a half a dozen states that’s experiencing a very significant surge. So right now across the state, we have about 1,300 people in the hospital. All of these people are not going to make it out of the hospital. We will have more fatalities over the next couple of weeks and months due to COVID due to this winter surge. And this is a tough thing for people to face over their holidays…
— from an interview between Liane Jollon, director of San Juan Basin Public Health, and KSUT reporter Sarah Flower, November 8, 2021
In her interview with KSUT reporter Sarah Flower, SJBPH’s Liane Jollon shared some positive news, and some less than positive news.
Because the news is, indeed, full of mixed messages. And uncertainty.
Ms. Jollon noted, for example, that the Pfizer vaccine is now available for children age 5-11, and “we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of families already partake in our local community.”
She didn’t mention that, according to reports from the CDC — Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — fewer than 100 children in the U.S. have died from COVID since January 2020. So we will mention it for her. We would hate to learn, two or three years from now, that more children were killed or injured by the vaccine than by natural infections.
Ms. Jollon shared a state-wide statistic. “…right now in Colorado one out of 50 Coloradans is currently infectious with COVID-19.”
The positivity rate in Archuleta County — the rate at which tests are coming back ‘positive’ — is particularly high, it would appear. Here’s the current display from the SJBPH website, noting a 19% positivity rate in Archuleta County. That’s twice the current rate in neighboring La Plata County, even though the percentage of population “fully vaccinated” is very similar in both counties.
The chart displays “cases” and we can see the trend in Archuleta County: the numbers are currently approaching the peak of cases during the early-winter surge last year. As we see, the one-week incidence rate is ‘658’ per 100,000 population. The State of Colorado shares a two-week incidence rate on its COVID website: ‘684’ per 100,000. So things are not looking too great in Colorado, taken as a whole.
As we all know, “cases” do not precisely equal “hospitalizations”, although they are correlated to some degree. SJBPH does not share an historical chart of “hospitalizations” on its COVID website, but the State of Colorado does. Here’s the “Acute Care Beds” and “ICU Beds” data since April 2020, for the whole state.
If we compare these two hospitalization charts with the wild swings in the infection rates… the COVID infection rates look like a roller coaster, but the hospitalizations — which include many types of serious illnesses besides COVID — look more like a relaxed drive up Putt Hill. Certainly, the hospital bed use is getting frighteningly close to the top of the hill… which seems hard to explain, if indeed half of our population is “fully vaccinated.”
We might also wonder why ICU bed use has been so constant? Given the wild swings in the COVID infection rate and the multi-billion-dollar effort to vaccinate every American?
Is there something we don’t understand about this whole pandemic? And about our national healthcare system?
Flower
…Liane, this is scary. Now, what is the plan to move forward through all this and make sure that every Coloradan receives quality care?
Jollon
…The advisory indicates that we should have universal masking and do our best to maintain six foot distance. Take activities outside if we can and, and really recognize that when transmission is this high, it has the opportunity to potentially overrun hospital care, but it also means that virus will spread in vaccinated as well as unvaccinated individuals. Now vaccinated individuals, by and large are really well protected from severe illness. But, with high rates of transmission, we all really have to put our best foot forward because we don’t want to run out of hospital space… I think the message is unfortunately for Colorado, we’re going into the holiday season with a high rate of transmission…
…I think there are lots of parts of the country where the evidence seems to imply that the Delta wave kind of came and went. And the transmission rate is a lot lower after your Delta wave is through. But unfortunately, Colorado’s is just getting started. And we’re in a really tough spot going into the holidays.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.