“We were introduced by email, so we just continued emailing,” said Dr. Grossman, who specializes in emergency medicine. She is currently the medical director of the UCHealth Integrative Medicine Center, and a faculty member of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, both in Denver.
Dr. Carlos Franco-Paredes, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who has inspected immigration detention centers during the pandemic, said that several factors were to blame for the surge, including transfers of detainees between facilities, insufficient testing and lax Covid-19 safety measures. For example, he said, during a recent inspection at a center in Aurora, Colo., he saw many staff members who were not wearing face coverings properly, adding: “There is minimal to no accountability regarding their protocols.”
“I anticipate that we will see this crisis grow in the fall as kids return to school and are trying to adjust to making up for a year of lost development,” said Jenna Glover, a child psychologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado [and assistant professor of psychiatry at CU School of Medicine].
Dr. Matthew Wynia, an ethicist and infectious disease physician at the University of Colorado [Anschutz Medical Campus], said that health officials faced a frightening trade-off in choosing between a pause and warning: They would know only hypothetically the lives a pause may have cost, but they would know exactly who may have suffered or died from clots. Because of how unusual this disorder is, Dr. Wynia said, a typical warning to physicians would not have grabbed as much attention and “not have made the impact this did.”
The Circulation study employed observational data, but its initial aim was not to assess the relationship between coffee and heart failure. This is how the lead author David Kao, a cardiologist at University of Colorado School of Medicine, characterized it to me: “The overall question was, What are the factors in daily life that impact heart health that we don’t know about that could potentially be changed to lower risk.” Because one in five Americans will develop heart failure, even small changes in their behaviors could have a big cumulative impact.
“I am an infectious diseases physician, respiratory virus researcher, pediatric hospitalist and mother of two. I have taken care of children with Covid-19 and seen its devastating complications. I have engaged in this work while taking care of the academic and social-emotional needs of my children. I had to make the difficult choice to abandon the public school system, of which I was a strong proponent. My children needed to be in school. I needed them to be in school. I knew this could be done safely. I wish the same for everyone else.” Suchitra Rao, Associate Professor, Pediatrics, University of Colorado School of Medicine; Pediatrician, Infectious Disease, Children's Hospital, Colorado
“Usually, researchers pick things they suspect would be risk factors for heart failure — smoking, for example — and then look at smokers versus nonsmokers,” said the senior author, Dr. David P. Kao, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado [School of Medicine]. “But machine learning identifies variables that are predictive of either increased or decreased risk, but that you haven’t necessarily thought of.”
Laura Anthony, a child psychologist at Children’s Hospital Colorado and an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said that one common mistake that even she sometimes makes is trying to solve a child’s problems. “What I need to do is just listen,” she said.
