CU Skaggs School of Pharmacy professor Rob Valuck said fentanyl can be up to 100 times stronger than morphine. “If it’s used outside medical use, it’s just extremely potent,” said Valuck, who also directs the Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention. “It’s really troubling, obviously, because it doesn’t take much of it to kill (a person).”
Elizabeth Carlton, an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Public Health and a researcher on the state’s modeling team, agreed that data suggests “things may be slowing down” and that public health officials were waiting to see whether those trends hold in coming days. She said there is strong evidence social distancing measures are having a positive effect.
"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. "It does not mean you get closer to people, it does not mean you don't have to wash your hands as often and you can touch your face. All of that still is in place, this is just an add-on."
Other coronaviruses that affect humans can invade the central nervous system, so it makes sense COVID-19 may have neurologic manifestations, Dr. Kenneth Tyler, chair of neurology at University of Colorado School of Medicine, told Neurology Today, a publication of the American Academy of Neurology.
Thomas Finger is a professor of cellular and structural biology specializing in taste at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Based on accounts he’s collected from around the world, “The very peculiar thing about the covid taste loss is that it may preferentially affect sweet,” he says, meaning for some people, that’s the first taste to go — but it remains unknown why tastes would not be impacted equally.
Dr. Jonathan Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, says his team of epidemiologists derived the January introduction date by projecting backwards from the first cases identified by the CDPHE. “What is really built into it is the transmission dynamics,” he said. “In other words, how long it takes for somebody to go from being infected to being symptomatic, symptomatic to detected.”
“The actual sport itself is not the major risk factor, but primarily it’s the lodging and the restaurants and the other social spaces where people from different areas interact,” says Glen Mays, a professor and public health expert at the University of Colorado. “Ski towns funnel people from different areas into places of social interaction and that’s kind of the recipe for being a super-spreading location.”
"If you're starting to feel really short of breath, coughing a lot and developing fever – especially if you've had exposure to somebody who either has had COVID-19 or if you've been in a place or situation where you might have been exposed – then it's a good idea to go to the emergency department," says Dr. Darlene Tad-y, vice president of clinical affairs for the Colorado Hospital Association and a hospital medicine physician at UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital [and CU School of Medicine].
