“It is always a bit politically charged because different people have different motivations,” said Dr. Matthew Wynia, director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado. “But it has played out in spades with the COVID pandemic because there is such a lot of political motivation to say, ‘Oh, it’s not that many people. It’s not so dangerous.’”
That’s been an adjustment for Lexi Barrere, an instructor at the University of Colorado’s College of Nursing and nurse practitioner at a school-based health clinic serving families in Sheridan School District No. 2. Barrere and her colleagues would traditionally go into schools to provide services such as sports physicals and mental, dental or behavioral health care, but now they rely on connecting with patients virtually, which is limiting families’ access to care, she said.
“We will start to see more of these deaths occurring with more hospitalizations and more people in the ICU,” said Dr. Zachary Macchi, an instructor in the University of Colorado School of Medicine’s Department of Neurology. “Ultimately, more of those patients are going to be those who are in living facilities and are at risk.”
Typically, hospitals can get an idea of what the flu season will be like by looking to Australia, whose winter flu season is during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer, said Michelle Barron, medical director of infection prevention at UCHealth [and professor of medicine at CU School of Medicine].
The things that make Colorado a healthy place, like the abundant opportunities for outdoor exercise, aren’t equally available to people who work lower-paying jobs and don’t have the money or free time to enjoy them, said Patricia Valverde, a faculty member at the Colorado School of Public Health’s Latino Research and Policy Center. And who works in low-wage jobs, which also tend to be more dangerous and may not offer health insurance, isn’t random, she said.
It’s not yet clear if young people, who accounted for a high percentage of new cases recently, are starting to get sick enough to need hospital care, or if they might have passed the virus to higher-risk age groups, said Beth Carlton, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health.
It appears the rise reflects both increased testing on college campuses, and increased spread of the virus within that population, said Beth Carlton, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. What direction the epidemic will take depends on how seriously people take precautions like mask-wearing and social distancing over the next days and weeks, she said. “The time is now” to prevent out-of-control spread, she said.
It’s an important distinction, said Sean O’Leary, professor and pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine in Aurora. Since it’s early in the school year, he expects most positive cases “came in from the outside” rather than being contracted at school.
