“When you first hear that, and you don’t look at every part of it and dive into details, from afar you’re thinking, ‘That’s very fast and too soon,’” University of Colorado School of Medicine professor Eric McCarty said. “However, as we as sports medicine physicians look into it and see what has occurred and everything he has available to himself, we start thinking, ‘All right ... it’s in the realm of possibility.’
Western science and medicine have historically ignored and underestimated the traditional knowledge of Native people, said Katrina Claw, a Navajo geneticist at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus. Many people in the community have a deep knowledge of biology and heredity, grounded in expertise in raising livestock and crops passed down over generations. The Navajo clan system, a way of identifying oneself that also keeps track of kinship, is a complex genealogical and cultural system and a form of genetic knowledge, Claw said.
In Denver, Samuel Dominguez, an infectious-disease specialist at Children's Hospital Colorado and a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said the cases he had seen were "across the age spectrum" in children, noting that they may be more susceptible because bacteria tend to colonize more aggressively in their throats and skin than in adults.
Research by the Injury and Violence Prevention Center at the Colorado School of Public Health found 85 percent of protection orders granted by judges were filed by law enforcement.
Colorado’s crisis-standards activation focuses on EMS — including ambulance and paramedic services — “because the pinch points are largely not in the ICU, which is what we were worried about previously,” said Matthew Wynia, director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
“He could be helping us in finishing off this pandemic, especially with a vulnerable population,” says Joshua Barocas, an associate professor of medicine with an expertise in infectious diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “We’re looking at millions and millions of people worldwide. He could be a global ambassador, and instead he’s chosen the pro-covid, anti-public-health route.”
Right now there are “two Colorados,” said Matthew Wynia, director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “If you’re in the health-care system — if you’re a patient needing services in a hospital or if you’re a medical practitioner, things are really bad,” he said. “But if you’re a regular citizen just walking around on the street, you wouldn’t know it. People are behaving as though things are normal.”
“It’s very different when you’re on oxygen or you’re on a diuretic or heart medicine or, you know, you’re a smoker or have existing heart disease,” said Jay Lemery, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “At that point, you know, that physiological stressor is just enough to put you over into crisis.”
