With COVID-19 in the mix, a typical virus season now is higher-risk than one before the pandemic, said Beth Carlton, associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “There is hope that (COVID-19) declines to have an impact akin to flu, but that’s still a big impact,” she said.
It’s unclear why transmission of the virus has increased in the summer, said Beth Carlton, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “We don’t fully understand why that is,” she said. “We also don’t know if those summer waves are slowly going to go away.”
Unfortunately, those trends aren’t likely to reverse any time soon, said Beth Carlton, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “Deaths of despair,” including overdoses, liver disease and suicide, have been rising in working-age populations since the early 2010s, she said. “That’s not just pandemic-related,” she said.
“For some folks (for whom) a higher level of care is really needed, there are aspects of treatment that are extremely uncomfortable,” said Emily Hemendinger, a social worker who works with eating disorder patients at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus.
“As a Louisville resident and as someone who’s really concerned with equity in the composition of my community, if that does mean at the end of the day that folks who are lower-income are less likely to return to my community, that’s a problem for me,” said Katie Dickinson, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “Thinking about what those folks might need today to put them on a path where they might be able to come back, speaking as a resident, would be my preference.”
Dr. Jon Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, said the problem of misinformation isn’t new; the tobacco industry created the playbook for disinformation during its long battle to suppress the truth that smoking kills. (Misinformation is unintentionally wrong — think of that person on Facebook who’s convinced drug companies are hiding a cure for cancer — whereas disinformation is something that the spreader knows isn’t right, but chooses to push anyway.)
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Two House Democrats introduced HB23-1209 in mid-February in the latest step in policymakers’ ongoing journey to expand health care access in the state. The bill would direct the Colorado School of Public Health to analyze “model legislation” to implement a publicly funded but privately delivered health system here — meaning state-funded care provided by existing hospitals and providers.
