It’s possible that the downward trajectory has paused because kids returned to school and adults went back to their offices, meaning the virus has more chances to spread, said Beth Carlton, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health and a member of the state’s modeling team.
The four-shot sequence of polio vaccines is more than 99% effective at preventing paralysis and death from the virus, said Dr. Daniel Pastula, who studies infectious diseases affecting the nervous system at the University of Colorado Anschutz campus. That means people who are fully vaccinated don’t need to worry about polio, even when there’s an outbreak, he said.
Cass is a standardized patient. Her job is to memorize scripts and act out a wide range of different scenarios to allow medical students to apply bedside manner skills they’ve learned in the classroom in a realistic medical setting. There are currently 81 standardized patients — or SPs, as they’re referred to — employed part-time at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, home to Colorado’s largest SP program.
It’s possible that the increased positivity rate in those mountain communities reflects that the state has scaled back testing, so that those who don’t feel sick are unlikely to go to the effort of finding a location, said Talia Quandelacy, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health.
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.
The last time that hospitalizations dropped for three days in a row was Oct. 7-9. They promptly rebounded and rose for the next month, though. It’s too early to know whether the same thing will happen now, said Dr. Jon Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health. “If you’re the 100% optimist, it’s a glimmer” of hope, he said. “We’ve seen this bouncing around before.”
For a few weeks in September, the state’s cases and hospitalizations were on a “high plateau,” and there were some indications they could be slowly going down, said Beth Carlton, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “Now we’re still stuck on that high plateau, and it looks like things are trending upwards,” she said.
The Workplace Mental Health Module, part of a certification and advising program out of the Colorado School of Public Health called Health Links, helps organizations assess their existing mental health supports through a survey for higher-ups, and then provides management consultations and advising sessions with recommendations to best help employees, said David Shapiro, program manager for the CU Anschutz Center for Health, Work and Environment.
