CU Anschutz In The News

As school districts embark on the school year with the pandemic still posing a threat, Dr. Glen Mays, chairman of the Department of Health Systems, Management and Policy in the Colorado School of Public Health, is a big proponent of schools exploring every possibility to maximize outdoor instruction. Airborne transmission is “much less likely to take place in an outdoor setting just because the larger volume of air outside,” Mays said.

The current focus centers on airborne transmission, said Dr. Lisa Miller, professor of epidemiology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “What CDC is saying is they don’t think objects — or fomites, as they’re called in science literature — are the main way coronavirus spreads,” Miller said. “Based on the literature and the outbreaks that we’re seeing, it’s mostly a person-to-person respiratory spread. Things like your mail or currency don’t seem to be a major factor.”

It’s always been easier for people in a behavioral health crisis to get access to alcohol and drugs than to a therapist, said Tanya Sorrell, a psychiatric and mental health nurse practitioner and associate professor at the University of Colorado College Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.

“Rural pharmacies are a cornerstone of their communities, and the pandemic has only heightened that,” said Gina Moore, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado’s Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

“This is a common public health tool that’s been used for decades if not centuries,” said Dr. Lisa Miller, an epidemiology professor at the Colorado School of Public Health and a former top leader at CDPHE. But scaling up to tackle a disease as fast-moving and widespread as COVID-19, Miller said, “That’s something we haven’t done before.”

“We can count the most visible tip of the iceberg in the case counts and presumably the deaths are pretty accurate,” said Jonathan Samet, dean and professor of the Colorado School of Public Health. “We know that those case counts are an undercount, and they clearly are going to miss most of the asymptomatic people.”

Dr. Jonathan Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, says his team of epidemiologists derived the January introduction date by projecting backwards from the first cases identified by the CDPHE. “What is really built into it is the transmission dynamics,” he said. “In other words, how long it takes for somebody to go from being infected to being symptomatic, symptomatic to detected.”

UCHealth is evaluating whether to take everyone’s temperature before allowing them inside the building, said Dr. Richard Zane, UCHealth’s chief innovation officer and chair of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Fever is a frequent symptom of the coronavirus, along with trouble breathing.