Research Patient Care COVID-19 Cancer Mental Health
With the events of the past year underpinned by the fast-mutating SARS-CoV-2 virus and the vaccine rollout, researchers, clinicians and other healthcare professionals at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus remained in the spotlight in 2021.
Tears still cloud Patrick Brenner’s eyes when he recalls childhood. Even now, as a father of three, memories of middle-school bullies and biased looks throughout adulthood darken his outlook on a life spent hiding his smile.
Growth, collaboration and COVID-19 marked the second annual State of Research Address on Dec. 7, with Thomas Flaig, MD, vice chancellor for research, highlighting some of the groundbreaking science that netted the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus nearly $654 million in research awards this year.
Debra Melani | 
January 11, 2022
Omicron is hitting the nation hard, pushing delta out as it infects at a higher rate of speed than any SARS-CoV-2 variant so far. In past days, infection rates in some of Colorado’s mountain towns have topped the nation, even in areas with high vaccination rates.
"The most likely time that you're going to be infectious is those 5 to 6 days. We ask that you mask afterwards, we ask that you remain diligent." "We have to be somewhat realistic about what people are willing and able to do," said Barocas, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
Data from South Africa and the United Kingdom suggests that people hospitalized with the omicron variant tend to have shorter stays than those hospitalized with delta, allowing beds to turn over more quickly and somewhat reducing the strain on capacity, said Beth Carlton, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “The one encouraging bit of news is that we’re not seeing an exponential increase in hospital demand,” she said. Exponential growth is when numbers snowball, increasing by higher and higher rates.
Colorado’s crisis-standards activation focuses on EMS — including ambulance and paramedic services — “because the pinch points are largely not in the ICU, which is what we were worried about previously,” said Matthew Wynia, director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
Dr. Payal Kohli, assistant clinical professor of medicine at University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus, further clarified that COVID-19 belongs to the coronavirus family of viruses, which is a separate family of viruses than the flu.
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