COVID-19 Forecast for El Paso County — Jan. 25
Plus, our resident microbiologist on the local vaccine situation
Good morning, and happy Monday. On this pre-pandemic date last year, people in the U.S. were blissfully unaware the mysterious virus that locked down around 11 million residents of Wuhan, China two days prior would come to haunt the rest of the world in a few weeks. (As much as it pains us to write this, last year is not really pre-pandemic anymore. We’ll use this introduction until mid-March, when the U.S. started to recognize COVID’s deadly potential.)
Today, Phoebe Lostroh returns to give her weekly COVID-19 forecast for El Paso County and to explain how vaccine rollout is going in Colorado. 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, the Reporting Project published its 100th newsletter, which happened to fall on Inauguration Day. We interviewed CC’s acting co-presidents about how four years of a Trump administration impacted the college, and created a timeline highlighting some of our favorite newsletters and what was happening on the days we published them.
🎧 Listen: Our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh was on the podcast “Absolute EHS: COVID-19 Protecting Yourself and Your Family” to talk about her expertise in coronaviruses, mutations, RNA vaccines, and more. Listen to the episode here.
📚 Learn: This spring, Lostroh is also teaching several online classes through the Pillar Institute under the theme “Vaccines and Medications for COVID-19” for a general audience. Check out her Facebook post to learn more.
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 COVID dashboard for all data. Lostroh prepared these forecasts on Jan. 23, 2021.
⚖️ How her predictions last week shaped up: Jan. 23 is the last day of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report week 3 in the national public health calendar. It is the 46th week since the first case was detected in El Paso County. Since March 13, 675 El Paso County residents have died of COVID-19. Last week, Lostroh predicted between 1,509 and 1,951 new cases in El Paso County for the week ending Jan. 21. There were actually 1,066 cases.
“In Colorado Springs, our sacrifices in physical distancing, avoiding indoor gatherings with people not in our households, and maintaining other respiratory transmission precautions such as good ventilation and humidity are working,” Lostroh said.
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. If the trend in decreasing case counts continues, Lostroh predicts El Paso County will see 463-1,061 new cases of COVID-19 for the week ending Jan. 28. If the virus resumes exponential spread, the count for the week might be closer to 1,172 cases, Lostroh said.
Rolling 14-day incidence per 100,000 people in El Paso County with predictions
🗝️ Key points: The actual calculated incidence are shown with black Xs. The orange and red lines at the top of the graph show when El Paso County had orange or red-level safety precautions in effect. The red, orange, and yellow-dotted lines at the bottom of the graph show the thresholds for those incidence levels. The dotted black line shows the trajectory of decreasing incidence that was in effect for the weeks prior to Christmas. As of Jan. 23, the county’s incidence is 345.7 cases per 100,000 people, meaning it has fallen below the threshold for Level Red (≥350 cases) for the first time since Halloween.
“Had the trajectory prior to Christmas continued, our incidence would already be in the green zone (≤25 cases); incidence remaining as high as it has is akin to a surge following the holidays,” Lostroh said.
🗝️ Key points: This graph shows the incidence levels in El Paso County since last February. “This view of the last ten months shows the very large winter wave in the context of the entire local pandemic,” Lostroh said.
Average 14-day rolling percent positivity in El Paso County
🗝️ Key points: The average 14-day rolling percent positivity is plotted in dark blue while daily values are plotted in light blue. The dotted red, orange, or yellow lines show the Colorado COVID-19 dial thresholds for percent positivity. As of Jan. 23, the percent positivity in El Paso County was 5.9%. A percent positivity of less than 5% is important for having confidence that cases are being detected and contact-traced, Lostroh said.
The 14-day rolling percent positivity had a slight upturn at the end of last week but has since returned to declining. If this trend continues, Lostroh predicts El Paso County may go below the 5% threshold in about a week.
💉 Local vaccine situation
On Jan. 19, El Paso County Public Health launched a new dashboard to display local vaccination data. The county is currently administering its limited supply of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines to healthcare workers, long-term care facility staff and residents, first responders, and people age 70 and older, who all fall under Phase 1A and 1B of Colorado’s vaccine distribution plan.
As of Jan. 24, El Paso County has administered 37,718 doses of the COVID vaccines, and 7,613 people have already received both the required shots.
Essential workers including teachers, food and agricultural workers, the postal service, some state officials and some journalists, among others, will be eligible for vaccination starting March 1.
State officials expect Phase 2 to begin in the spring. It will include people age 60-69, people age 16-59 with high-risk health conditions, and other essential workers. Phase 3 is expected to begin in summer for “the general public.” The pace of vaccination could change due to shifts in policy and practice at the federal level, Lostroh said.
Visit the county website to contact providers and find out how you can get vaccinated. When a vaccine becomes available to you could depend on your healthcare network, but the Peak Vista Community Health Centers are administering the vaccine to those 70 and older irrespective of their medical provider, according to Lostroh. She said because of high demand it can be difficult to get through to Peak Vista, but to try calling 719-344-6500 to schedule a vaccine appointment.
There are also active clinical trials in Colorado Springs recruiting adults to help test the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine. Among participants, two-thirds will get both doses of the real vaccine while one-third will get a placebo. Novavax has a site explaining how to check your eligibility and answers to frequently-asked questions.
Moderna is also holding active clinical trials to test vaccine effectiveness in children age 12-17, and Lostroh said they are having difficulty recruiting enough participants. The recruiting adolescent trials physically closest to Colorado Springs are in Albuquerque, N.M. and Oklahoma City, Okla. Studies to see if any of the vaccines are safe and effective in children younger than 12 are still in planning stages.
Q-and-A with Lostroh: Our resident microbiologist on false negatives and vaccinating teachers
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CC COVID-19 Reporting Project: Given your experience with the original El Paso County COVID dashboard, how reliable do you think the new vaccine dashboard will be, and how will vaccine data be useful for residents of El Paso County?
Lostroh: I think the vaccine dashboard is going to be very reliable. It was difficult for a small public health department to get a good dashboard up and running, and there were certain data they were not allowed to share. For example, the data on hospitalizations they were not allowed to make public. So after all of that was negotiated and sorted out, the information available has been very transparent and very current. I think it’s a great dashboard in general and I think the vaccine dashboard will be of similarly high quality. My main complaint now with the dashboards is that you can’t just download the data from the page into an Excel file. It’s just really frustrating for somebody who wants to make their own graphs that we can’t download the data ourselves. Then there are discrepancies in the dashboard for cases and deaths and things like that compared with what the state data say, and that just happens as a matter of course in all counties. There’s nothing nefarious going on in El Paso County compared with anywhere else, but all those differences have to be reconciled at some point. I’m hoping that as the number of cases go down all over the state, there’ll be some employees who have time to go back through the records and figure out which cases were counted twice or counted on the wrong day. Maybe El Paso County counted one case on a Friday, but the state counted it on a Thursday — these kinds of discrepancies can happen when you’re dealing with a complex data set coming in real time under high pressure.
CCRP: On Jan. 21, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment announced that it would no longer be using Curative tests after warnings from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about the tests producing false negatives. How will the roughly 715,619 tests that have been used in Colorado since November impact COVID case data in the state?
Lostroh: Well, it’s a very bad situation. There’s curiously quite a bit of silence about the matter. I think it’s quite a matter of embarrassment, both for Curative and, you know, for the nation. It’s very bad when the tests are inaccurate, especially if they give false negatives. It’s terrible for everyone. On the other hand, Colorado seems to be having better case rates than many of the surrounding states. I would think the impact of those tests, especially because of their false negative rate, would probably lead to increased spread in Colorado specifically, but what we’re seeing is that Colorado looks like it’s in better shape than say Utah or New Mexico and some other surrounding states. So I think it remains to be seen. But these are the kinds of problems we need to detect and address as quickly as possible, and I think that requires an attitude of transparency and truthfulness. I’m hopeful we will see greater transparency and truthfulness throughout all of these public health COVID-related practices moving forward.
CCRP: Per Colorado’s updated vaccine distribution plan, certain school staff like campus security guards and are scheduled to receive vaccinations before others like teachers and principals. How will these prioritizations impact school districts that are reopening for in-person learning this spring?
Lostroh: I believe there’s been some chaos in understanding exactly who fits into what categories in Colorado in general, let alone on the county level, and I think that chaos is going to decrease as people have increased confidence the vaccine is coming. When I was reading the El Paso County vaccine dashboard this morning I clicked on some of the links to get to the definitions of different kinds of essential workers for purposes of Phase 1, and for Phase 1C some teachers are defined as essential workers. So as soon as we can implement Phase 1C, teachers will be eligible for the vaccine, and I think that’s very positive. I wish they were a little higher up the list, but honestly they are at lower risk of death than some people who are higher up on the list, so I understand why teachers are in this group of essential workers. I think everybody will feel better about school once the teachers are vaccinated. I think for the most part, everyone can see the disease is rarely fatal in children, and it is often not even a serious infection in terms of symptoms for children. Now of course, there are a few hundred kids who have died from COVID-19 and it’s a tragedy whenever it happens, but children are at relatively low risk of serious symptoms, whereas teachers are not always at such low risk and plenty of teachers have medical conditions. What was happening with closing classrooms down because of a case meant that all the teachers had to go home, and they were running out of teachers and didn’t have substitutes — that’s what was causing all these problems. So if the teachers themselves are protected from infection, I think this will make it much more possible to operate schools in a more normal manner in the near future, hopefully by late spring.
About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Isabel Hicks, 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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