CU Anschutz In The News

You might say nursing is the family business. Gordon-Norby’s father and grandmother were nurses. The graduate of the University of Colorado College of Nursing has already had several job interviews. “The thought of joining correctional nursing right now, during a pandemic, I guess it's terrifying. Because everyone is in such close quarters and so that's scary. But then also I would be proud to be able to jump into that response,” she added.

“From that work, we already had a reasonable understanding of the types of antibody responses we should look for in a person infected with SARS-Co-V-2,” said Dr. Tem Morrison, an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at CU Anschutz.

But quarantine and social distancing policies are nearly useless without frequent testing to know who is sick, said Dr. Carlos Franco-Paredes, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and infectious disease specialist. And the CDC-recommended symptom screenings used by the jails are ineffective against those with COVID-19 who are asymptomatic, he said.

“Obviously the safest thing to do would be to shut down and stay in our houses until a vaccine appears — but we can’t do that,” Dr. Jonathan Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, told me. With a vaccine unlikely to be developed this year, Samet said leaders must decide how to reengage society with the virus still at play. “It’s far more complex balancing the economy against the epidemiology here,” he said, “but we’ve got to find that balance.”

The medical element of We Are Unstoppable is key. The bi-monthly podcast is sponsored by the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, whose experts add another layer of information to the package. "Vic and I have very thick Rolodexes, so we're able to secure big names in sports and entertainment," Shapiro points out. "But as an epilogue, we're interviewing doctors at CU Anschutz to talk about what everybody just heard.” 

“Good practice is always to use multiple models and multiple inputs,” said Elizabeth Carlton, an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “A smart state program will consult a lot of different data sources.”

"If [the child is] looking particularly ill, you should definitely call the doctor," says Dr. Sean O'Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Children's Hospital Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and member of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

That said, many (but not all) parts of the country have at least gotten out of an “acute emergency phase” for the time being, according to Elizabeth Carlton, a professor at the Colorado School of Public Health. She now sees “a shift towards trying to come up with strategies that allow people to resume some parts of their old lives that are the least risky … We need to find a way to slow the spread of the virus that also allows us to maintain our mental and financial health.”