COVID-19 Forecast for El Paso County — Feb. 15
Plus, our resident microbiologist on COVID-19 being around for the 'long haul'
Good morning, and happy Monday. On this pre-pandemic date last year, college leadership broke ground for construction onthe Ed Robson Arena. (This year, construction has continued on the arena, which is set to open in Oct. 2021)
Today, Phoebe Lostroh returns to give her weekly COVID-19 forecast for El Paso County and to explain how COVID-19 might become an endemic virus. 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 may help with vaccine distribution, as well as how newly-formed clubs have adopted virtual formats. Also, we reported on how CC’s women’s basketball team went under quarantine last Monday after returning from Louisiana.
📋 The CDC’s new guidance for reopening schools
On Feb. 12, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a new operational strategy for the reopening of K-12 schools, which provides updated virus metrics for communities to resume school operations.
The guidelines, which the CDC said “incorporate the best available evidence at this time,” are an update to indicators that were released on Sept. 15. One of the most significant changes the CDC made to its previous guidance was to eliminate its category for “lowest transmission,” reducing the number of categories from five to four. The agency did this by merging the metrics of its “lowest” and “lower” levels while adjusting higher categories accordingly.
While the CDC did not drastically change the thresholds for percent positivity in each of its categories, many of the metrics for cases per 100,000 people have changed. For example, the previous category for “highest risk of transmission” was determined by over 200 cases per 100,000 people, while the new red category designates a rate of 100 cases or over as an indicator for “high transmission.”
Just as Colorado did on Feb. 6, the CDC has also changed its standard for calculating percent positivity and local case rates, now using relevant data from the most recent seven days instead of the most recent 14 days.
In addition to updated category determinants, the CDC also provided comprehensive strategies for schools to reopen, which included recommendations on in-person learning, health equity, and testing.
Our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh said that the new CDC guidelines are “substantially different” from those laid out by Colorado’s new Dial 2.0. In the following charts, she compared the metrics for each guidance:
The CDC’s operational strategy
Colorado’s Dial 2.0
While it should be noted that Colorado uses different guidelines for Level Green than other levels in the dial, Lostroh said that green-level metrics most closely correspond to the low transmission (blue) or moderate transmission (yellow) categories on the CDC’s scale, while Colorado’s Level Blue corresponds to moderate transmission (yellow) or substantial transmission (orange) categories on the CDC’s scale. Colorado’s yellow, orange, red, and purple-level guidelines all exceed the amount for the CDC’s high transmission (red) category. However, Lostroh added that testing percent positivity is much more similar between the two scales.
Although Lostroh said that the United States is “famous for having local control over school districts rather than national control,” she was hopeful that El Paso County school districts would consider using the CDC’s new strategy as they resumed operations.
“I think they’re good guidelines, and I hope that here in Colorado Springs at least some of the school districts will take them into account,” Lostroh said.
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 Feb. 12.
⚖️ How her predictions last week shaped up: Feb. 13 is the last day of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report week 6 in the national public health calendar. It is the 49th week since the first case was detected in El Paso County. Since March 13, 721 El Paso County residents have died of COVID-19. Last week, Lostroh predicted between 823 and 981 new cases in El Paso County for the week ending Feb. 11. There were actually 903 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, while the best case is a linear fit based on data for the last 14 days. For the week ending Feb. 18, Lostroh predicts that El Paso County will see 890-919 new cases.
Rolling seven-day incidence per 100,000 people 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 7 days. The red, orange, and yellow lines at the top of the graph show when El Paso County had red, orange or yellow-level safety precautions in effect. The orange, yellow and blue dotted lines show the new thresholds for the Dial 2.0 levels. The slanted dotted black lines show trajectories of decreasing incidence that did not continue.
“The county is likely to remain in the yellow zone for the next few weeks,” said Lostroh. “Had the downward trajectory after the holidays continued, we would already be at zero new cases.”
Average seven-day rolling percent positivity in El Paso County with testing
🗝️ Key points: The seven-day total of nasopharyngeal tests for viral nucleic acids are plotted on the left in pink while the seven-day rolling percent positivity is plotted on the right in blue. As of Feb. 15, the percent positivity in El Paso County was 5.9%.
“The number of tests administered fluctuates widely and should be higher to ensure that we are detecting all cases,” Lostroh said. “It is crucial to test asymptomatic and presymptomatic people in addition to testing people with symptoms.”
COVID-19 vaccinations in El Paso County
🗝️ Key points: The vaccine dashboard tracks county vaccine distribution. Blue symbols correspond to the left axis, plotting administered doses. Red symbols correspond to the right axis, plotting completed vaccine series. El Paso County has administered a total of 86,896 doses. Some of those doses were the first shot someone received, while others were the second shot to complete the vaccine series. 25,357 people have received both shots and thus have completed the immunization series.
Q-and-A with Lostroh: Our resident microbiologist on the future of the B117 variant in Colorado
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CC COVID-19 Reporting Project: While the B117 variant has taken hold in Colorado, state health officials have said the strain has not spread as rapidly as it did in the United Kingdom. To what extent do you think variant cases will continue to remain low in Colorado, especially in the weeks following the release of Dial 2.0 and recent holidays?
Lostroh: If it’s here it’s gonna spread because that’s what happened everywhere else that variant has been, so I don’t think it’s a good prediction that it will not spread and become more frequent in Colorado. It’s here, so it’s going to behave just like it did in U.K. and in other places. I think that the Super Bowl and changing the indoor restrictions almost across the entire state all at once, both of those things lead to conditions where any of the coronaviruses are going to spread more efficiently. And so yeah, we’re going to see that variant spreading through Colorado. As far as Valentine’s Day goes, I hope that people will be spending it at home with the person they love who’s already in their household, rather than going out to eat in a crowded restaurant or bar, but I don’t know whether that’s really going to happen. I think we’re in a precarious position and we are going to see higher spread. I think for those people who’ve been vaccinated that’s wonderful news, but just because some of the 70 year olds have been vaccinated, that doesn’t mean that other people in that age group won’t catch it. And we know that other people who are younger than 70 could get very serious infections — death is not the only bad thing that happens to people when they have COVID-19.
CCRP: Some public health experts have begun to warn that COVID-19 could become an endemic virus, which is an illness that maintains a baseline amount of infections in a population. How likely do you think it will be that COVID-19 could become a virus that will be sticking around?
Lostroh: It is very common for a virus, when it enters a susceptible human population for the first time, to go pandemic and then over many, many years become endemic, and I’ve even heard people argue that right now we should consider COVID-19 endemic because it’s so widespread around the globe. And so I think that it is very likely to follow the same course that other coronaviruses have followed. There’s actually evidence that there was a flu in 19th century Russia that was probably caused by one of the coronaviruses that now causes the common cold. And so I think it’s very likely that we are going to see endemicity and that this virus is going to be with us for the long haul. Most of the authors I follow who are experts in immunology and medicine think that this will probably be a situation where we need to get booster shots for much of our lives. And so maybe we will also get a long-term coronavirus shot that would work for many years.
CCRP: Last Thursday, President Biden announced that his administration had finalized a purchase of 200 million additional vaccine doses to be delivered by the end of July, bringing the U.S.’ supply to enough to vaccinate most American adults. What will this delivery of vaccines mean for the U.S., as well as for countries that have yet to administer a single dose?
Lostroh: Manufacturing and delivery of the vaccine to be distributed is not the home run, you still have to get it into people’s arms. So there’s still some logistical hurdles to overcome. I wonder if there’s going to be a national effort to train more volunteers to be able to either actually administer the vaccine, or to observe people after they’ve had the vaccine and make sure they’re not having a serious reaction, kind of like efforts at the beginning of the pandemic for contact-tracing in some states. Also, there are people in all kinds of other countries at high risk of dying who are not getting the vaccine. And so they’re going to have to wait. So I think we’re very fortunate that we live in the United States and that we could maybe all be vaccinated by the end of the year, but that is going to come at a global cost, meaning that there are billions of people in other countries who are at substantial risk and will not be getting vaccinated.
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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