COVID-19 Forecast for El Paso County — March 29
Plus, our resident microbiologist on Colorado’s latest dial framework
Good morning, and happy Monday. On this pandemic date last year, Colorado College students, faculty, and staff were enjoying their last day of the extended Spring Break before Block 7 began. (This year, CC is not having a spring break in order to reduce the risk of massive outbreaks and quarantines.)
Today, Phoebe Lostroh returns to give her weekly COVID-19 forecast for El Paso County, and to explain Colorado’s new Dial 3.0. 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 has continued the Criminal Justice Coalition during the pandemic. Also, how CC has offered Lyft passes to students living in supplemental housing.
🔊Dial 3.0 just dropped
Last Tuesday, Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) announced that effective March 24, Dial 2.0 would be replaced by an updated pandemic safety framework, Dial 3.0.
The new dial, which was the second update public health officials made to Colorado’s dial framework in less than two months, made significant changes to the metrics the state uses to determine county safety levels, and moved 26 counties to the dial’s lowest level, Level Green.
In Dial 3.0, most safety restrictions for Level Green have been removed, and green-level metrics have been eased from requiring 15 cases per 100,000 people or less to achieve Level Green status to up to 35 cases, making the level less difficult for counties to achieve.
Public health officials also made significant changes to other safety levels, including an increase in the metrics range for Level Blue to 36-100 cases per 100,000 people, and permission for 5 Star-certified gyms and restaurants in Levels Blue and Yellow to operate at 100% capacity, as long as six feet of space is still provided between parties. Dial 3.0 also lifted all limits on personal gatherings in Colorado.
Public health officials expect that Dial 3.0 will remain in effect until mid-April, at which point the dial will likely be eliminated in favor of a public health order that will give “greater control over capacity restrictions to local public health agencies.”
“Coloradans have made great sacrifices to protect ourselves and our communities from COVID-19 over the past year,” Jill Hunsaker Ryan, executive director of the CDPHE, said. “While this is still a time for caution, these changes to the dial better reflect where we are in the pandemic today, and the balance we are trying to strike between disease suppression and economic hardship.”
To learn about all of the changes made to Colorado’s COVID-19 dial framework in Dial 3.0, read more here.
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 March 27.
⚖️ How her predictions last week shaped up: March 27 is the last day of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report week 12 in the national public health calendar. It is the 55th week since the first case was detected in El Paso County. Since March 13, 753 El Paso County residents have died of COVID-19. Last week, Lostroh predicted between 1,002 and 1,082 new cases in El Paso County for the week ending March 25. There were actually 984 cases.
Cumulative reported cases in El Paso County with predictions
🗝️ Key points: Reported cases are in black circles while the other symbols provide estimates based on curve-fitting. The high, middle, and low estimates are based on exponential curve-fitting to the most recent seven, 14, and 21 days, respectively. For the week ending April 1, Lostroh predicts 1,006-1,067 new cases.
“[The] CDPHE reports that the more transmissible variant viruses called B117 and B.1.427/B.1.429 have been detected in El Paso County,” Lostroh said. “So, I think reported cases will be higher next week than they were for this week.”
Rolling seven-day 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, yellow, or blue-level safety precautions in effect. The orange, yellow and blue-dotted lines show the new thresholds for the new Dial 3.0 levels. The triangles indicate when Dial 2.0 and Dial 3.0 were introduced. As of March 28, the incidence per 100,000 people in El Paso County over the last seven days was 134.1.
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 light blue diamonds. The orange, yellow, and blue lines near the top of the graph show the date ranges El Paso County had orange, yellow, and blue-level safety precautions in effect. The triangles indicate when Dial 2.0 and Dial 3.0 were introduced. As of March 28, the percent positivity in El Paso County was around 6.5%.
“The rolling percent positivity shows an upwards trend for the past thirteen days; the trend puts us above the 5% threshold,” Lostroh said. “ Percent positivity higher than 5% indicates that we are not testing enough to detect most local cases.”
SARS-CoV-2 genomes detected in wastewater in Colorado Springs compared with rolling seven-day total of COVID-19 cases.
🗝️ Key points: The number of SARS-CoV-2 genomes detected per liter at two wastewater collection sites (representing most of Colorado Springs households) is plotted in blue diamonds using the left-hand axis. The seven-day rolling sum of COVID-19 cases is plotted in orange using the right-hand axis.
Lostroh said that there were two instances in November and in December where there were peaks in genomes detected one to two weeks before reported cases also peaked. She also said that the number of genomes detected have been rising for the past month whereas the cases reported have been nearly constant for the past two months.
COVID-19 vaccination in El Paso County
🗝️ Key points: The vaccine dashboard tracks county vaccine distribution. Purple symbols correspond to the left axis, plotting doses administered, while red symbols correspond to the right axis, plotting vaccine series completed. El Paso County has administered a total of 248,246 doses. Some of those doses were the first shot someone received, while others were the second shot to complete the vaccine series. 97,549 people have received both shots and thus have completed the immunization series.
“Despite some success at vaccinating older residents, vaccination has not reached most of the county,” Lostroh said. “The number of local COVID-19 deaths has declined because of vaccination, and outbreaks at long-term care facilities have declined precipitously since February 1.”
Q-and-A with Lostroh: Our resident microbiologist on Colorado’s Dial 3.0
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CC COVID-19 Reporting Project: Last Wednesday, the CDPHE scrapped the previous Dial 2.0 for Dial 3.0, its most recent iteration of Colorado’s dial framework for COVID-19 safety precautions. What is the biggest difference between the two dials?
Lostroh: So, as far as I can tell the main difference between Dial 3.0 and Dial 2.0 is that in Dial 3.0, they have made the lowest level of safety precautions, which is Level Green, easier to achieve. So in Dial 2.0, you had to have 15 cases or fewer in a seven day period out of 100,000 people, and now you can have as many as 35 and still be in the green range. They also have made it simpler in some regards. For instance, instead of the 5 Star businesses having idiosyncratic things that they can do that other businesses cannot do, it’s just that they’re one level down. So if you’re in Level Yellow, but you’re a 5 Star business, then you can practice blue-level guidelines. If you’re in Level Blue, but you’re a 5 Star business, you can practice whatever the green-level safety precautions are, so that made it kind of simpler. They didn’t really change much else about the dial, but they did change that when we get to the lowest level, there was going to be a certification process that a county had to go through to get that rating, and now they have just said ‘if you get there you get there, we don’t have to certify you.’ So, yeah, all of that is going on. I think that relaxing so much now and so quickly takes into account that fewer people are dying locally from COVID-19 — probably because of our 70% vaccination rate for people who are 70 and older — but at the same time it doesn’t take into account how serious long COVID can be and how serious it can be just to have a COVID-19 infection even if you don’t die. So, it’s too bad.
CCRP: Given the rising counts of cases of variant strains of COVID-19 in Colorado, do you think that the state was ready to make a switch to a less-restrictive dial framework when it did?
Lostroh: Well, we’ve still got some counties where skiing goes on that are still in Level Orange, and we know that there’s at least the B117 and the B.1.427 and B.1.429 variants in Colorado, and specifically in El Paso County, because those have been reported by the state health department. So, to me, the dial is based on the ancestral virus behaving the exact same way that it always has. But with these variants, that’s not a true assumption anymore — these variants are more transmissible, and they even infect younger people better than their ancestor infected younger people. But it concerns me a lot that we’re changing the dial again, right at the time when the virus is changing. I think we’ve changed because people are sick of the precautions, not because it’s a good idea to change.
CCRP: With Colorado’s statewide mask mandate set to expire April 3, local public health officials have planned to release eased protocols for the state’s mask requirement. Is there anything that concerns you about the changes planned for Colorado’s mask mandate?
Lostroh: I wish we could stay the course for a while, especially because the viruses are evolving into these variants and I am very concerned about the variants. I have no doubt that they are more transmissible — I’ve looked at the data myself, and they are more transmissible, and at least some of them are more dangerous in terms of making people sick longer, giving them a higher viral load in their nasopharynx, where they therefore can spread it to other people more easily, including younger people. So with all those things at the same time, it seems like it would be better to be very strict and try to reduce virus reproduction as much as we possibly can. And by relaxing precautions, including wearing masks and capacity, it’s inevitable that we’re going to increase the virus’ reproduction. It’s not like we’re already in Level Green with just seven cases a week or something like that. It’s actually almost 1,000 cases reported in the last seven days, and in the state of Colorado supposedly around 30% of a random sample are one of the variants. Well 30% of 1,000 is 300, so if there are 300 active cases right now with one of these variants, that’s really a big difference compared with 300 of the regular old cases, because we know that the safety precautions that work against the ancestral virus don’t work as well against some of these variants.
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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