Scientists on the governor’s modeling team echoed caution, stressing that the state has allowed business to resume only with social distancing and cleaning. “This is not a complete reopening,” says Elizabeth Carlton, an epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health and a member of the modeling team.
“If you are going to go to all these steps of taking the sushi out of the packaging and washing your hands, make sure you don’t go to the ‘in’ place that has 20 people packed in the vestibule to do pickup,” said Elizabeth Carlton, an assistant professor of environmental health at the Colorado School of Public Health.
“The use of any agent that’s going to generate a lot of coughing among people that are in dense group settings, when people are in close proximity, that’s absolutely going to elevate risks considerably,” said Glen Mays, a professor of health policy at the Colorado School of Public Health.
Glen Mays, professor of health policy at the Colorado School of Public Health, added that beaches, when compared to pools, could provide a few more degrees of freedom since they offer greater space to socially distance. “You don’t want to go to a beach or a pool that’s kind of oversubscribed, where it’s going to be more difficult to maintain a minimum of 6-foot social distance,” Mays said.
"Putting a face mask on does not mean that you stop the other practices," said May Chu, a clinical professor in epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health on the Anschutz Medical Campus who was not involved in either new study.
Many labs are implementing staggered work shifts to limit the number of employees at any one time. “I don’t see how we can maintain the levels of activity we had in the past,” said Craig Jordan, a leukemia researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
Over the past month, Jennifer Leiferman, a researcher at the Colorado School of Public Health, has documented a tidal wave of depressive symptoms in the U.S. “The rates we’re seeing are just so much higher than normal,” she says.
Dr. Jonathan Samet, the UC School of Public Health dean and head of the research group, said the cellphone data reflects the social distancing his team inferred from the slowed growth of new cases, and reveals Coloradans’ incremental changes in mobility, which didn’t exactly line up with the orders.
