COVID-19 Forecast for El Paso County — Nov. 9
Plus, our resident microbiologist on current conditions in Colorado Springs
Good morning, and happy Monday. On this pre-pandemic date in 2018, Colorado College language house residents were participating in a Travelling Dinner as part of International Education Week. (International Education Week 2020 is next week.)
Today, Phoebe Lostroh returns to give her weekly COVID-19 forecast for El Paso County and to explain her reaction to recent guidelines from the governor. Lostroh is a professor of molecular biology at Colorado College on scholarly leave who is serving as the program director in Genetic Mechanisms, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences at the National Science Foundation.
➡️ICYMI: On Wednesday, we talked to the Fine Arts Center about their new director, their reopening plans, and ongoing online programming. We also spoke to Arts & Crafts about their online and in-person classes.
Phoebe’s Forecasts
NOTES: These forecasts represent her own opinion and not necessarily those of the National Science Foundation or Colorado College. She used the public El Paso County dashboard for all data. Lostroh prepared these forecasts on Nov. 7.
⚖️ How her predictions last week shaped up: Nov. 7 is the last day of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report week 45 in the national public health calendar. It is the 35th week since the first case was detected in El Paso County. Since March 13, 210 El Paso County residents have died of COVID-19. Last week, Lostroh predicted between 12,048 and 12,229 cumulative COVID-19 cases in El Paso County as of Nov. 5. There were actually 13,374.
Many counties in Colorado are experiencing serious outbreaks simultaneously. About 4.8 million people, comprising 87% of Colorado’s population, live in Larimer, Weld, Boulder, Broomfield, Adams, Denver, Arapahoe, Jefferson, Douglas, El Paso, and Pueblo counties — counties that are all in “Level Red: Stay at Home” according to the two-week cumulative incidence.
“It would be prudent to declare a Stay-at-Home order for the affected counties ... not least to keep the healthcare workers along the Front Range as safe as possible,” Lostroh said.
Predicted cumulative reported cases in El Paso County
🗝️ Key points: Lostroh said El Paso County is likely to see between 16,017 and 16,908 cumulative reported cases on Nov. 12. This amount corresponds to between 2,656 and 3,547 newly-reported cases in the next seven days.
Predicted new cases in a single week for El Paso County
🗝️ Key points: El Paso County had 573 cases reported during the worst week of the local peak in the summer and should prepare for four to six times more cases than that in the next seven days, Lostroh said.
Cumulative reported cases of COVID-19 for El Paso County
🗝️ Key points: Values reported by El Paso County Public Health are in black, while estimates based on fitting exponential curves to the most recent seven (high), 14 (medium), and 21 (low) days are in magenta, grey, or blue, respectively.
COVID-19 hospitalization census in El Paso County
🗝️ Key points: The census is reported by the Colorado Hospital Association, an advocacy group for hospitals in Colorado. El Paso County’s previous peak daily hospitalization census was in July. Lostroh predicts between 122 and 163 new COVID-19 hospitalizations in El Paso County next week.
Rolling 14-day COVID-19 incidence per 100,000 people in El Paso County
🗝️ Key points: The reported cases normalized per 100,000 people in El Paso County are reported in the standard 14-day rolling metric and are represented by black Xs. The dotted lines correspond to the Colorado COVID-19 guidelines. Next week, Lostroh predicts a 14-day rolling incidence per 100,000 people of 733-857. The highest incidence during the summer peak was 155, but incidence this week will be about five times higher than that. Lostroh predicts El Paso County will remain under “Level Red: Stay at Home” incidence conditions for the next few weeks unless substantial public health measures are enacted immediately.
PreK-12 school guidance
🗝️ Key points: The thresholds Lostroh used are based on recommendations from The Harvard University Global Health Institute.
Nose-swab testing for viral nucleic acids
🗝️ Key points: Daily percent positivity is in light blue diamonds while the dark blue symbols show the 14-day rolling calculation the state and county use to monitor levels of positivity in the community. The spike on Nov. 3 is most likely due to testing at the El Paso County Jail where hundreds of prisoners and staff tested positive. Results are reported on the day that the county documents the test result, not necessarily on the day the test was administered. According to the county COVID-19 website, as of Nov. 8, the average test turnaround time for the last week has been 2.23 days. The necessary turnaround for contact tracing to be maximally-effective is one day or less, Lostroh said.
Q-and-A with Lostroh: Our resident microbiologist on how local COVID-19 conditions might affect college plans
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CC COVID-19 Reporting Project: What was your reaction to the recent COVID-19 recommendations from Gov. Jared Polis?
Lostroh: He is basically telling people to stay at home without ordering a Stay-at-Home. It is the same as when the fire is bearing down on I-70, just saying, ‘Look out your window, it seems there’s a fire coming. My advice would be to evacuate, but I wouldn’t want to use the power of the governor’s office to require you to evacuate so you just go ahead and you do you.’
CCRP: What would you like to see Colorado College do in response to current conditions in the area?
Lostroh: It’s not going to be a good week to break your leg in Colorado next week. It’s not going to be a good week to have a heart attack, it’s not going to be a good week to need any kind of medical care that requires hospitalization in Colorado probably for the next three to four weeks. The hospital systems are going to be really strained. And so to me, it’s a big safety issue, and if it were me living here and I had somewhere else to live which I do not, I’m not sure that I would stay right now. I have urged the college to put together a committee to decide at what point it would be a good idea to shut down the campus to a better, bigger extent, and to tell students that they might want to choose to go to a safer state. Now, there will come a point where it’s not safe to travel in Colorado Springs. ... I wouldn’t want to go breathe at the Colorado Springs airport right now. And to make a big decision like that takes many days, and then to enact a big decision takes even more days, and meanwhile, the disease is increasing exponentially. I urge the college to take the situation under consideration and think about whether the college’s pandemic/influenza plan, which includes trying to decide whether it’s time to send students home or whether they’re safer on campus, that conversation needs to be had explicitly, and it needs to be had in the next 72 hours.
CCRP: What does recent news about a nasal spray preventing COVID-19 infection in ferrets tell us about possible treatments for humans?
Lostroh: When you interview people about why they don’t get an influenza shot, what some people say is, ‘Oh, I hate needles.’ Okay. Well then, let’s have an inhaled vaccine. But the other reason that an inhaled vaccine or an inhaled medication might be good is that it’s really a good idea to get the medicine to where the infection is actually happening. And vaccines are that way too in a way that we don’t really understand. A vaccine in your bloodstream actually provokes a different immune response than the exact same vaccine if you could figure out how to administer it onto mucosal surfaces — what the epithelial lining of your nose is called. ... Ferrets are really good models for influenza: they are lab animals that get the most human-like disease from influenza, so they’re much better than mice and rats for certain kinds of influenza studies. I think that’s why people have started to use them for COVID-19 to see if maybe they’d be a good model. ... You just never know which nonhuman animal is going to give you a more similar course of disease that will allow you to really sort through those treatments and vaccines that might work in humans more quickly because it’s really sad to have spent the animal lives, as well as all the other kinds of investment to work on a vaccine or a treatment, and then it turns out it’s not translatable to humans. So that’s where the ferret angle comes in anyway.
About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Miriam Brown, Arielle Gordon, Isabel Hicks, and Esteban Candelaria in partnership with The Catalyst, Colorado College’s student newspaper. Work by Phoebe Lostroh, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at CC and National Science Foundation Program Director in Genetic Mechanisms, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, will appear from time to time, as will infographics by Colorado College students Rana Abdu, Aleesa Chua, Sara Dixon, Jia Mei, and Lindsey Smith.
The project seeks to provide frequent updates about CC and other higher education institutions during the pandemic by providing original reporting, analysis, interviews with campus leaders, and context about what state and national headlines mean for the CC community.
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