Dr. Carlos Franco-Parades, an infectious disease expert and professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Center, has written a letter to Polis asking him to prioritize prison populations for the sake of public health and the wider community. Several of the state’s prisons are in rural areas, where medical facilities have been swamped from COVID-19. “It is a public health failure to not take care of these people,” Franco-Parades said.