COVID-19 Forecast for El Paso County — March 1
Plus, our resident microbiologist on how partisanship may impact vaccine rollout
Good morning, and happy Monday. On this pre-pandemic date in 2018, the political science department hosted Lisa Wedeen of the University of Chicago as a speaker for their Encounters Speaker Series. (This year, the department will be holding a virtual lecture, “On Fugitive Aesthetics,” on March 11, at 2:00 p.m.)
Today, Phoebe Lostroh returns to give her weekly COVID-19 forecast for El Paso County and to explain Colorado’s updated priorities for administering vaccines. 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 Department of Music explained how they keep live concerts safe. Also, we explained how commencement celebrations are looking at other higher-education institutions.
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. 27.
⚖️ How her predictions last week shaped up: Feb. 27 is the last day of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report week 8 in the national public health calendar. It is the 51st week since the first case was detected in El Paso County. Since March 13, 739 El Paso County residents have died of COVID-19. Last week, Lostroh predicted between 913 and 935 new cases in El Paso County for the week ending Feb. 25. There were actually 987 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 Mar. 4, Lostroh predicts El Paso County will see between 986-1,046 new cases.
“We are on a knife’s edge, our cases are higher than they were for the peak of the summer wave, and our cases are right where they were when they really got out of control for the winter wave,” Lostroh said. “We are teetering on the brink of going back up, or staying flat or going back down, I think it could go any of those directions. How frequently those variants are found in the population will have a big impact on this question.”
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 seven days. The orange and yellow lines at the top of the graph show when El Paso County had 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. As of March 1, the incidence per 100,000 people in El Paso County over the last seven days was 133.8.
“The three projections are very similar because human behavior has been similar for the three weeks used for forecasting,” Lostroh said. “It is probably about one week too early to know if the Super Bowl was a spreading event.”
Average seven-day rolling percent positivity in El Paso County with testing
🗝️ 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 timing of orange and yellow level safety precautions is indicated by the orange and yellow lines near the top of the graph. As of March 1, the percent positivity in El Paso County was 5.5%.
“The county continues to post a warning that we have exceeded contact-tracing capacity so people who test positive will receive a phone notification and be asked to take a survey and to isolate,” Lostroh said.
COVID-19 vaccinations 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 128,130 doses. Some of those doses were the first shot someone received, while others were the second shot to complete the vaccine series. 40,636 people have received both shots and thus have completed the immunization series.
Q-and-A with Lostroh: Our resident microbiologist on how to combat vaccine hesitancy
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CC COVID-19 Reporting Project: Colorado has adjusted its vaccine rollout plan, bumping down many essential workers to Phase 1b.4. What will this reshuffling of vaccine prioritization mean for the rate at which the state is immunizing its population?
Lostroh: At this point, the more people who get vaccinated helps us all, so I’m just trying to focus on being happy that people are getting vaccinated, even if it seems illogical and keeps changing. Getting vaccinated helps everybody. I were an essential worker I’d be pretty mad if I got bumped, but on the other hand, the risk of death is probably still higher for people in certain age brackets than it is for an essential worker who’s not in that age bracket, so I see the trade off and I see why states are making their own different decisions. It would be better and more consistent if we had a national policy so that nobody was confused. But that is not what we are going to do in the United States. So, at least we keep vaccinating, at least there’s been no interruption in the supply, at least we have enough shots, we have enough people to do it. So that’s all to the good. I’m glad that we’re getting to people ages 60 to 64. And so I think that by expanding the age that’s eligible, we are expanding to include more people who are Black, and Latino, or Hispanic in the community so I think that part of it is really good.
CCRP: New polls are showing that party affiliations impact people’s willingness to get the COVID vaccine. How do you think this will impact vaccine distribution in El Paso County?
Lostroh: I think it’s going to mean that in some communities we don’t reach herd immunity because of political choices. Infectious diseases are always politicized, that’s just how we have always done things. But I can’t think of another situation where there’s a pandemic, and a vaccine available, and that vaccination itself has been so politicized. There are still people out there who believe all the discredited science and scientists who have been opposed to measles vaccinations for a long time — but that was not politicized along party lines in the same way. And it’s never been an issue in a presidential election, or in a congressional election in the same way. I think this has set a very bad precedent. My hope is that moving forward, people are going to see how much protection this vaccine affords, and how safe it is. Americans have a one in 100 chance of dying in a car accident. We’ve given out about 96 million doses of these two mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and AstraZeneca) and not one person has died from the vaccine. So the vaccines are 100% effective at preventing death from COVID, and preventing hospitalizations from COVID. So, your chance of getting COVID and getting long-hauler symptoms or getting really sick for some period of time, are much higher than the chance of you having any ill effect from the vaccines, which are very efficacious. So I’m hoping that as time goes on and we move away from the election, and maybe even as the vaccines become available in more sort of private settings like your own doctor’s office, some of that hesitancy will lessen because there won’t be this performative aspect to it. When you go to a mass-vaccination site your neighbour is going to see that you’re there and if they think that you don’t believe in the vaccine or the infection because you’re a staunch Republican or whatever you’re not going to want to reveal to your neighbours that you’re there waiting in line to get your vaccine too. So maybe when we get some months past the election and when there are opportunities for people to be vaccinated in private we will see greater uptake of the vaccine.
CCRP: Some studies have shown that vaccine hesitancy isn’t just a result of partisan decision-making. What are some good ways to reach communities that are unsure about whether they want to receive COVID-19 vaccines?
Lostroh: I think we really need outreach to healthcare workers to help them become better able to advocate individually for the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. I think that people have high trust in nurses and pretty high trust in doctors too. You spend much more time with a nurse than you do with a doctor at any doctor’s appointment in a healthcare setting. And so I think that if we could reach nurses and help them, first of all, trust in the vaccine themselves but second of all become community advocates for vaccination, especially in one-on-one settings, I think we would see much greater vaccine uptake. I’d like to see some of that happen, and then I think that Black communities are doing some really smart things by having people in positions of authority such as pastors, Black doctors, and Black professors become community advocates for vaccination. I think that as more of that happens we’re going to see less vaccine hesitancy in that population than we are seeing in the population that is more hesitant for political reasons. It’s just so ironic because Black people have very good reasons to be suspicious of medical technologies, whereas the white people who are resisting are really the privileged ones that medicine has mostly benefited anyway. So I’m a lot less sure how to reach them than how to reach African American communities, and Latino, and Native American communities who have reasonable concerns about abuse and discrimination by the medical system.
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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