COVID-19 Forecast for El Paso County — Nov. 16
Plus, our resident microbiologist on why she’s wary about the Pfizer vaccine
Good morning, and happy Monday. On this pre-pandemic date last year, the Colorado College men’s hockey team beat St. Cloud State University 5-2 in the conference opener weekend. (This year, the Tigers will kick off the season on Dec. 1.)
Today, Phoebe Lostroh returns to give her weekly COVID-19 forecast for El Paso County and to explain contact-tracing in the county, a recent update from the CDC, and the latest vaccine news. 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 explained how CC’s ITS and Emergency Response Fund have been trying to help bridge a technology gap. Also, a member of CC Facilities explained how they have updated the ventilation systems on campus in accordance with COVID-19 guidelines.
🔮Lostroh’s Crystal Ball: You might’ve seen our favorite microbiologist featured in The Gazette last week for her COVID-19 forecasts in this newsletter, which they called “eerily accurate.” She also made local Fox21 headlines last Wednesday after predicting coronavirus hospitalizations would double within a week.
🚨HIGH RISK: El Paso County recently moved to “Level Orange: Safer at Home — High Risk,” only one level below “Level Red: Stay at Home” in Colorado’s COVID-19 dial framework. The county had until 5 p.m. last Friday to fully implement the new restrictions.
🧪We want to hear from you! Are you a CC faculty or staff member who recently participated in random testing? Tell us about your experience.
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. 13.
⚖️ How her predictions last week shaped up: Nov. 14 is the last day of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report week 46 in the national public health calendar. It is the 36th week since the first case was detected in El Paso County. Since March 13, 225 El Paso County residents have died of COVID-19. Last week, Lostroh predicted around 16,017-16,908 cumulative COVID-19 cases in El Paso County as of Nov. 12; there were actually 17,203 cases, about 5% more cases than Lostroh calculated.
Lostroh says her estimate was too low for two reasons. One, the cases are happening so fast that the county’s reporting system is not keeping up. Two, by the time the cases get reported, several days have passed, and the actual number of cases on that day is higher because of the rapidity of the prevailing increase.
Here are some numbers that described the state of the COVID-19 outbreak in El Paso County at the time we were putting together this forecast.
14-day rolling incidence: 939.8 and increasing.
Average daily incidence: 69.3 and increasing. The Harvard University Global Health Institute recommends not having any in-person K-12 courses for any county above 25.
14-day rolling percent positivity: 14% and increasing.
Testing turnaround time for the most recent week: 2.42 days.
Hospital census for COVID-19 inpatients: 139 and increasing.
New hospitalizations in the last 7 days: 65 and increasing.
Be safe, Colorado.
Let’s get into the rest of the forecast…
Predicted new cases in a single week for El Paso County
🗝️ Key points: The exponential curve-fit predicts 4,816 new cases during the week ending in Nov. 19, so accounting for Lostroh’s 5% underestimation this week, she predicts there will probably be 4,816-5,057 cases. This is 8-9 times more cases than during the worst week of the summer wave.
14-day rolling incidence and 14-day rolling percent positivity in Front Range counties
🗝️ Key points: Here Lostroh is using data from the Colorado COVID-19 Dial Dashboard. About 4.8 million people, comprising about 87% of Colorado’s population, live in the counties included in the graph. The 14-day rolling incidence is on the Y-axis while the percent positivity is on the X-axis. The technical cut-off for “Stay-At-Home” conditions in the Colorado Dial is an incidence of 350. The incidences in Adams and Pueblo counties are more than three times higher than that.
Daily change in the 14-day rolling COVID-19 incidence in Front Range counties
🗝️ Key points: The 14-day-rolling incidence is plotted on the Y-axis, compared with time in days on the X-axis. The horizontal dark red line shows the cut-off to qualify for stay-at-home safety precautions. All counties have increased for the last seven days. The 14-day incidence for COVID-19 in Pueblo and El Paso counties have both almost doubled in seven days.
Daily change in the 14-day rolling percent positivity for nose-swab COVID-19 testing in Front Range counties
🗝️ Key points: The ideal percent positivity, which indicates both public health and medical measures are working, is 5%. To put current conditions into perspective, that 5% marker was too low to include on the Y-axis in this graph.
Weekly reported COVID-19 cases in El Paso County with projections
🗝️ Key points: El Paso County should plan for 10,000 new cases in the next two weeks, Lostroh predicts. That is a 14-day rolling incidence of 1,385.
Q-and-A with Lostroh: Our resident microbiologist on how wearing a mask protects you, not just those around you
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CC COVID-19 Reporting Project: El Paso County recently added a notice to their website saying they are currently experiencing so many COVID-19 cases they may not be able to contact-trace them all. What might this mean for the local El Paso County population?
Lostroh: That’s very bad. And they’re portraying it as though it’s not that big a deal, but it is a big deal. So what they've said is, they can’t call everybody anymore. And so people who get diagnosed are supposed to fill out a survey, and then contact their own contacts, and tell them to quarantine. So that’s not as effective as having a professional, who knows about the infection, do it. And also, the turnaround time for getting tests right now is almost four days. It’s closer to four days than it is to three days. Well, you also can’t do effective contact tracing, even if you’re a professional, if the turnaround time for testing is four days. So the situation now is: somebody feels sick; they go through a drive-thru; they get their test four days later; they get a positive result. Now, are all those people quarantining or in isolation between when they go to get their test and when they wait? And also, you know, have they written down every single person that they were in the room with, or near, or breathing on outside close in that period of time? And then do they have contact information for all those people? I don’t know. I think that contact tracing is a professional job for a reason. It requires professional attention. So this is not a good situation.
CCRP: Explain to us the recent news from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that wearing a mask doesn’t just protect others, but it also protects the wearer. Why do you think this information is just now coming out?
Lostroh: You know, I feel like we knew from epidemiology in places where people wear masks, that they were effective at protecting the wearer just as much as protecting the people who might breathe the air that that person exhales. And we chose not to believe it and have demanded extraordinary proof of scientists to show that that’s the case when you can show through a variety of other measures, especially population-level studies, that it has to be the case. … The newest research was a more direct demonstration of that fact. I think at first, it just seemed to all of us who work in microbiology that wearing a mask is such a minor thing to ask people to do. So why wouldn't they just do it if there were even a small chance that it might protect them? And it certainly would protect others? So why in the world wouldn't you agree to just do it just seems so counterfactual. So I think that’s one reason that it took a bit longer to get some of that more direct evidence.
CCRP: We’ve seen reports all over the news this week about positive early results from Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine trial. To what extent should we start to get excited about the possibility of a successful Pfizer vaccine?
Lostroh: I think it’s very promising that they are getting a good level of protection for the very small people who became positive. So the main problem with that announcement is that in the whole study, only about 90 people became positive. Now 90% of those were among the people who got the fake vaccine, and only 10% of those infections were among the people who got the real vaccine. So that's a good ratio, but it's still a tiny number of people. So you know, that’s a big caveat that hasn’t been discussed. And then I am not sure if they know yet what adverse effects might be associated with a new kind of vaccine because this is an mRNA vaccine of the kind that has never been commercialized before. And so I am very pro-vaccine, and I want this vaccine. I want a great COVID vaccine to come out. But I think we need to know more about any adverse events and how frequent they are for this particular type of vaccine. I think scientists and the business community both get excited about something new. And this mRNA vaccine is a new flashy idea. I have a lot more hope for the safety profile and efficacy combination for the more old-fashioned strategy that they’re trying in the United Kingdom.
About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Miriam Brown, 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 every Monday.
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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