COVID-19 Forecast for El Paso County — April 26
Plus, our resident microbiologist on COVID-19 infections among vaccinated people
Good morning, and happy Monday. On this pandemic date last year, Colorado College’s Department of Theatre and Dance announced a new adjunct course titled “Somatic Practices: Embodied Practices for Staying Connected During COVID-19,” to be offered in the fall semester of 2020. (This year, the course was held remotely during Blocks 1 and 4, but the department is slowly moving courses back to in-person learning.)
Today, Phoebe Lostroh returns to give her weekly COVID-19 forecast for El Paso County and to explain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decision on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. 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 looked at how the pandemic has influenced decision making. Also, what other institutions of higher education across the country are planning for the coming fall semester.
🚨WE’RE HIRING: We’re looking to add some new members to the team for the summer. CC students, if you’re interested in joining us, email us at ccreportingproject@gmail.com for more information. Applications are due May 5 at 5 p.m. MT.
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 April 24.
⚖️ How her predictions last week shaped up: April 24 is the last day of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report week 16 in the national public health calendar. It is the 59th week since the first case was detected in El Paso County. Since March 13, 779 El Paso County residents have died of COVID-19. Last week, Lostroh predicted between 1,526 and 1,697 new cases in El Paso County for the week ending April 22. There were actually 1,651 cases.
Cumulative reported cases in El Paso County with predictions
🗝️ Key points: Reported cases are in black circles while the red, grey, and light blue symbols provide estimates based on curve-fitting for the most recent 21, 14, and seven days. For the week ending April 29, Lostroh predicts 1,744-1,923 new cases in El Paso County.
“Reported new cases continue to rise at an increasing rate,” Lostroh said. “It is likely that more transmissible variants comprise a significant proportion of the viruses causing new cases locally.”
Rolling seven-day cumulative incidence in El Paso County with predictions
🗝️ Key points: The actual calculated incidence is in black Xs, while the other symbols provide estimates based on curve-fitting for the most recent 21, 14, and seven days. The orange, yellow, and blue lines at the top of the graph show when El Paso County had orange and yellow safety precautions in effect, and when the 5 Star State Certification Program went into effect. The gray, orange, and red-dotted lines show the CDC’s thresholds for risk categories. As of April 26, the incidence per 100,000 people in El Paso County over the last seven days was 247.5.
“Incidence started rising one month after the orange-level safety precautions ended and continues to rise,” Lostroh said. “The last time incidence was this high was in January.”
Seven-day rolling percent positivity compared with daily percent positivity in El Paso County
🗝️ Key points: The seven-day rolling percent positivity for nasopharyngeal tests for viral nucleic acids is plotted in dark blue diamonds, while the daily percent positivity is plotted in open light blue diamonds. The gray, orange, and red-dotted lines show the thresholds for the CDC’s risk categories. As of April 26, the percent positivity in El Paso County was 8.4%.
New COVID-19 hospitalizations compared with the regional census of hospitalized COVID-19 patients
🗝️ Key points: Daily hospitalizations are plotted in blue using the left-hand axis, while the census of regional hospitalized COVID-19 patients is plotted in red on the right-hand axis. As of April 26, seven-day average daily hospital admissions was at 6.8.
“Hospitalizations for COVID-19 in El Paso County, Colo. continue to increase; on the positive side, we are not near hospital or ICU capacity,” Lostroh said.
COVID-19 vaccinations in El Paso County
🗝️ Key points: The El Paso County vaccine dashboard tracks county vaccine distribution. The number of people who have been partially or fully vaccinated in El Paso County is indicated with purple symbols, while percentages of the population that has been vaccinated are indicated by the red, orange, and green-dotted lines. El Paso County has administered a total of 384,544 doses. Some of those doses were the first shot someone received, while others were the second shot to complete the vaccine series. As of April 26, 159,764 people have received both shots and thus have completed the immunization series.
“About 32% of the local population is at least partially immunized,” Lostroh said. “If the rate of immunization remains at the level we have seen for the last month, the county should reach 80% with at least partial immunity induced by vaccination before August and 80% fully vaccinated around Thanksgiving.”
Q-and-A with Lostroh: Our resident microbiologist on vaccination strategies in Colorado
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CC COVID-19 Reporting Project: As of last week, Colorado public health officials have recorded around 819 cases of COVID-19 in fully-vaccinated individuals. What do these infections mean for the pandemic in Colorado, and to what extent do you think they will become more prevalent?
Lostroh: Well first of all, that’s actually a great number because it means that protection was 90 to 95% for using the vaccines in Colorado, and that is fabulous. Many efficacious and useful vaccines are not 90 to 95% protective so I think the first thing is that is great news. The second thing is that maybe there could be variants that arise in other places that are going to be able to escape the immune reaction provoked by these particular vaccines. We don’t know if that’s going to happen or not, but it does seem like the virus evolution is accelerating in places like Brazil and India, as well as in the United States. And so I think that what the small proportion of people who are susceptible means is that we will be able to tell if infections among vaccinated people become more common, because we will have the baseline now. And so we’ll be able to notice whether something is going wrong, maybe because of the viruses evolving, or people are getting infected with a variant that can escape the immune community.
CCRP: Recent reports have shown that some Coloradans are traveling to get vaccinations in counties they don’t reside in. What does this mean for the residents of those counties and for the vaccination rate in Colorado altogether?
Lostroh: The main thing about that story is that any kind of outbreak of infectious disease is going to reveal the parts of society that are not working very well. And so the fact that some people have money and time to fly from Denver to Cortez to get vaccinated, while other people who live in Cortez don’t have basic transportation to be able to come to a vaccine site just shows you how rural health is a problem in the United States. We need to start adopting vaccination strategies other than advertising and telling people to come to us, so we’re probably going to need to go door to door, we’re going to need to go to churches, we’re going to need to go wherever it is that people are, just like the campaigns that eradicated smallpox and the campaigns that are trying to eradicate polio. You don’t just set up a site and hope people drop by, you have to go out and find them and talk to them.
CCRP: On April 23, the CDC decided to resume vaccinating people with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. What do you think the lasting impact of its pause for side effects will be on Americans’ willingness to be vaccinated?
Lostroh: The reason that they took the pause was twofold. First of all, people were getting blood clots at a rate of about one in a million, and they wanted to look at the evidence and try to decide whether it was plausible that the vaccine could have caused the blood clots, and the committee that met decided after 11 days that it is plausible that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was causative for those blood clots that came in people’s brains, but they also established that the frequency of getting those clocks in at around one in a million. And it seems that women under the age of 50 are much more susceptible to getting the clots than other people, but even for women under the age of 50, it’s incredibly rare. They also implemented the pause so that doctors could talk about their experience treating patients who got those clots and develop some standard operating procedures for treating those clots before they become fatal. I believe that around three people have died of these clots in the United States, so that’s less than one in two million, but it still seems large when it’s you going to the doctor or the mass vaccination site to get your shot. So I think that it’s going to increase vaccine hesitancy in some ways and that it is going to be really important to improve the clarity and transparency of communication with the public. I hope that the CDC will be better at communicating about this than they were about masks at the beginning. There have been a lot of communication flubs, but I feel like they’re doing a better job than they had been.
About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Esteban Candelaria, Lorea Zabaleta, and Cameron Howell 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.
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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