COVID-19 Forecast for El Paso County — April 19
Plus, our resident microbiologist on El Paso County’s plans for post-dial safety precautions
Good morning, and happy Monday. On this pandemic date last year, Colorado College announced that virtual fitness classes would be available through the Adam F. Press Fitness Center’s resource page. (This year, the fitness center is open only by reservation to CC employees and students that are approved to be on campus. Group fitness classes are available by reservation and are limited in capacity, though virtual fitness classes are still available on the fitness center’s website.)
Today, Phoebe Lostroh returns to give her weekly COVID-19 forecast for El Paso County and to explain what rising COVID-19 case counts in nursing homes means for 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, we took a look at the student bar that could have been. Also, how one senior’s thesis looked into vaccine hesitancy and other pandemic risk-taking behaviors.
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 17.
⚖️ How her predictions last week shaped up: April 17 is the last day of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report week 15 in the national public health calendar. It is the 58th week since the first case was detected in El Paso County. Since March 13, 773 El Paso County residents have died of COVID-19. Last week, Lostroh predicted between 1,344 and 1,470 new cases in El Paso County for the week ending April 15. There were actually 1,559 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 22, Lostroh predicts 1,526-1,697 new cases in El Paso County.
“Reported new cases continue to rise at an increasing rate,” Lostroh said. “The more transmissible B.1.1.7 and B.1.427/429 variants are in Colorado and are doubling about every 8-10 days. More variants have been detected in El Paso County than in any other county.”
Rolling seven-day cumulative incidence in El Paso County with predictions
🗝️ Key points: The actual calculated incidence is in black Xs, while the red, grey, and light blue 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 yellow, orange, and red-dotted lines show the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s thresholds for risk categories. As of April 18, the incidence per 100,000 people in El Paso County over the last seven days was 212.2.
“Incidence started rising one month after the orange-level safety precautions ended and continues to rise,” Lostroh said.
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 yellow, orange, and red-dotted lines show the thresholds for CDC risk categories. As of April 18, the percent positivity in El Paso County was 7.2%.
“The percent positivity is holding steady at an elevated level indicating that the county is undercounting total cases,” Lostroh said.
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 18, the seven-day average daily hospital admissions was around 6.3.
“The burden of disease has shifted from older people to younger ones, so that people under 60 make up a significant proportion of hospitalized patients statewide,” 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 by 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 351,885 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 18, 141,689 people have received both shots and thus have completed the immunization series.
“Estimates of the amount of vaccination that are necessary to achieve herd immunity depend on the reproduction number for the virus and how long immunity lasts,” Lostroh said. “The presence of the more transmissible variants of concern and cessation of safety protocols make it harder to achieve herd immunity. On the other hand, survivors who have had COVID-19 might also contribute to herd immunity for some period of time, even without vaccination.”
Q-and-A with Lostroh: Our resident microbiologist on how to tackle Colorado’s fourth wave
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CC COVID-19 Reporting Project: In response to state health officials’ removal of Colorado’s COVID-19 dial system, El Paso County and Colorado Springs leaders have said that instead of imposing safety precautions that go beyond statewide measures, they will rely more on “individual responsibility.” What do you think about that plan?
Lostroh: I think that Colorado Springs is going down the wrong road, and we’re going to be hit by a much larger surge of cases than we otherwise would. This is a really foolish time to drop all of the safety precautions as I prefer to call them. It’s ridiculous that there are going to be little to no limitations on restaurants and retail stores and places of worship, since those are places where people are often eating or singing and things like that. I don’t think it’s a safe choice, and I am shocked that local public health officials think that this is a workable idea, because it’s inevitably going to lead to much more illness. State guidelines provide a comprehensive view that makes it possible to compare, so that you know whether El Paso County is doing better or worse than, say, Arapahoe County or Weld County, so you can know where you are in terms of your neighbors, and how good you’re doing on your safety precautions. I also think we’ve seen with this pandemic that numbers are politicized, especially regarding how serious COVID is, what the percentage of deaths is, what the percentage of hospitalizations is, how many cases there are, how many deaths can be attributed to COVID — all these things have been politicized. So what I think we’re going to see is counties making safety precautions that use numbers in a very politically savvy way. And I think that we’re going to see that counties that vote mostly Democrat are going to have safety precautions, and counties that vote mostly Republican are going to have fewer safety precautions. And that’s what we’re seeing right now with Weld County and El Paso County, for instance, compared with some of the other counties, up or down the Front Range. We have also needed county-level forecasting all along. So if there are counties that have sufficient employees to do county-level, detailed forecasting and share that information more effectively with their populations because they know their county really well and have communication strategies that work really well for that county, I think that would be great, but that’s not the situation that we’re in in our county.
CCRP: Some reports have found that COVID-19 case counts have been on the rise in Colorado. Why is this happening, and what does it mean for transmission throughout the state?
Lostroh: To my knowledge, there is no requirement for employees working at nursing homes to be vaccinated. There have been quite a few journalistic studies as well as some academic studies of vaccine hesitancy among people employed in medical careers — not necessarily doctors, but nurses, and certainly nursing assistants. So, since your immune system just gets weaker as you age, there are still some people that are more susceptible than people who are vaccinated and who are younger. So what we really need is to stop introducing new infections into the facilities, which means that everybody who visits and works there needs to be vaccinated. This is actually a prime example of what happens when you have some vaccination but you don’t get to herd immunity — you will continue to have outbreaks. So, the long-term care facilities in Colorado are canaries in the coal mine in that they are probably more sensitive to rising levels, as they have been all along. So it’s concerning to me that we are getting more outbreaks in long-term care facilities because to me that indicates that outbreaks in other places are on the way, especially if we relax our safety precautions, which we did this week in El Paso County. Essentially, I think it means that the pandemic is worsening. I’ve said before that we really should be much more cautious about enabling this virus to evolve. And so the only way to stop it from evolving is to stop infections, and I think that there’s growing awareness that the consequences of COVID-19 can be very serious and long-lasting for someone’s health, even if they’re never hospitalized for COVID-19 in the first place. So I’m trying to remind people that hospitalizations and deaths are not the only undesirable outcomes of COVID-19, because people can get pretty sick. In general we have so much uncertainty, so I don’t understand why people wouldn’t choose safety first.
CCRP: Some public health officials have said that the fourth wave of the pandemic in Colorado will be centered more around younger people, and thus will look differently than it did in the first three waves. If that’s the case, how will virus mitigation in Colorado need to change this time around?
Lostroh: I think for the fourth wave we need to be more proactive about encouraging people to set up some kind of safety bubble that is their community that they can trust, so that we acknowledge that people are going to gather. Rather than trying to convince everybody to stay apart and physically distance and wear their masks all the time, I think we should be trying to persuade people to get vaccinated as soon as they can and to pick a small number of people, or like two or three households, that are going to have good times this spring until everybody can be vaccinated and go about it that way. Hopefully we’ve learned from the previous waves and we’ll do that messaging better. I think in El Paso County, we’re just going to see lots of denial about how bad the situation is because there’s no way you can look at the situation now and compare it to last July, and say ‘what we should do is drop all safety precautions’ — it’s just completely illogical. And so I’m just concerned about the local situation and whether the public is going to get accurate information. But on the other hand, another good thing about this wave compared to the earlier ones is that journalists in town and in Colorado generally are becoming really adept at reporting what’s really important, and trying to get the word out, and that might really help us out.
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.
📬 Enter your email address to subscribe and get the newsletter in your inbox each time it comes out. You can reach us with questions, feedback, or news tips by emailing ccreportingproject@gmail.com.