COVID-19 Forecast for El Paso County — March 22
Plus, our resident microbiologist on the California variant
Good morning, and happy Monday. On this pandemic date last year, Colorado College students were still on their extended Spring Break. (This year, college leadership opted to eliminate Spring Break to prevent exposure to COVID-19 from travel.)
Today, Phoebe Lostroh returns to give her weekly COVID-19 forecast for El Paso County and to explain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recent change to school safety recommendations. 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 CC’s plan for a return to in-person learning and activities. Plus, how the climbing team has gotten back on the wall.
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 20.
⚖️ How her predictions last week shaped up: March 20 is the last day of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report week 11 in the national public health calendar. It is the 54th week since the first case was detected in El Paso County. Since March 13, 750 El Paso County residents have died of COVID-19. Last week, Lostroh predicted between 640 and 1,074 new cases in El Paso County for the week ending March 18. There were actually 995 cases.
Cumulative reported COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in El Paso County
🗝️ Key points: COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths are plotted on the right-hand axis in red and black, respectively, while COVID-19 cases are in blue and are plotted on the right-hand axis. For the week ending March 25, Lostroh predicts El Paso County will see between 1,002-1,082 new cases.
“The curves for cases and hospitalizations show an increasing trend, while the curve for COVID-19 deaths has become flat and is barely increasing with respect to time,” Lostroh said. “The flatter curve for deaths is due to vaccination efforts for people who are more vulnerable to life-threatening COVID-19 because they are older.”
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, 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 Dial 2.0 levels. The triangle indicates when the new dial was introduced. As of March 21, the incidence per 100,000 people in El Paso County over the last seven days was 125.5.
“The local epidemic stopped improving when we switched from red safety precautions to less stringent orange ones,” Lostroh said. “Since then, we have dropped to yellow safety levels, switched to a rating system that is less likely to require safety precautions, and enabled businesses to opt in to even more relaxed safety precautions (the Blue Star program).”
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, yellow, and blue-level safety precautions is indicated by the orange, yellow, and blue lines near the top of the graph. The triangle indicates when Dial 2.0 was introduced. As of March 21, the percent positivity in El Paso County was 5.8%.
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 219,637 doses. Some of those doses were the first shot someone received, while others were the second shot to complete the vaccine series. 86,817 people have received both shots and thus have completed the immunization series.
“We are in a delicate position where it is not clear whether vaccination and safety precautions will carry us toward the end of the local epidemic, or whether relaxed safety precautions and viral evolution will result in a spring/summer wave,” Lostroh said. “If there is a spring/summer wave it will likely be less deadly than the winter wave because we prioritized vaccinating some populations that are at higher risk of death.”
Q-and-A with Lostroh: Our resident microbiologist on virus sequencing in Colorado
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CC COVID-19 Reporting Project: Recent reports have found that variant strains of COVID-19, including the California variant, have been increasingly discovered by public health officials in Colorado cases. How has this situation progressed, and why is this variant a cause for concern?
Lostroh: The California variant has been detected in 22% of random samples of recent COVID-19 cases in Colorado. So, what makes people worry about it is it has an alteration in the exact surface of the spike that has to contact the human H2 receptor. So the reason that people worry about that surface is that you want antibodies to react there, because that’s the best place where an antibody can bind and prevent the virus from sticking to host cells, just by physically occluding the site where they could stick to host cells. So the concern is that maybe vaccination would be less effective against this variant, but we don’t have any data on that yet, that is still speculation. Also, the variant does seem to be spreading faster than its ancestors, and that’s based on the amount of sequences in databases, especially in California, increasing very rapidly over time. Now that could happen just by chance, or it could be that this virus has a new phenotype and is able to transmit better, and we just don’t have that lab work finished yet. They have finished that lab work for the so-called UK variant, and the UK variant is more transmissible than its ancestors and also seems to be causing higher lethality. And there’s also some evidence that it might be infecting younger people more efficiently, although there’s less research about that. So yeah, the California variant is 22% of our cases. In Colorado, that’s pretty high. So that’s the situation and what I know about it so far.
CCRP: In order to look for variant strains of COVID-19, Colorado public health officials have begun to sequence 5% of cases. To what extent do you agree with the state’s sequencing rate for cases?
Lostroh: I’m a molecular biologist, so my fantasy is that we sequence 100% of cases. But each sequence costs on the order of several hundreds of dollars to obtain and understand and so there’s a balance between having enough sampling to have some confidence that the results you get can be generalized and then the cost. So I think 5% is a pretty good rate, given the scale of the problem. 10% would be better but 5% is enough to be able to generalize to the whole population of viruses in Colorado.
CCRP: Last Friday, the CDC announced that schools can move desks from six feet apart to three feet apart. To what extent do you think schools should go forward with this, and is there cause for concern as new variants come into play?
Lostroh: Three feet is based on the force of a child’s exhalation compared with an adult’s and children who are wearing masks. Those recommendations also include children remaining six feet apart from adults such as teachers. I do agree that children’s exhalations travel less than adult exhalations and of course the older and the larger a person gets, the further their exhalations travel. This precaution will help a lot of schools be able to get back in session, because our classrooms are not that large, but it will be very important, if we go with this CDC guideline, to make sure that ventilation and humidity are safe, and that universal safety precautions are in place, such as wearing masks. And then, the CDC and people in education say over and over again, you also need to be doing this in the context of the lowest possible community spread, so it really would be safer for the children if we continue safety precautions until we get our virus numbers down into the green zone.
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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