CU Anschutz In The News

“The number I track most closely is the number of people admitted into the hospital. I think that is a strong indicator of how severe the cases we’re having,” Elizabeth Carlton, Colorado School of Public Health Assistant Professor. Carlton has been tracking and researching the data since the outbreak started. “Let’s put it in perspective. On average in December when things were at their worst in Colorado, we were admitting about 290 people per day, the last few weeks it’s been as high as 100 per day on average, now we’re dropping down to 70 people,” she said.

“Outdoors is better than indoors if you’re going to be around other people,” said Sean O’Leary, vice chair of the committee on infectious diseases for the American Academy of Pediatrics and a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “Less contact is better.”

“The pandemic has been a tale of two realities for us,” says Emily Zadvorny, a clinical pharmacist and the executive director of the Colorado Pharmacists Society. (She also teaches at the University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy.) Although pharmacists were busy during the early days of the pandemic—especially since they were often the only health care provider open—Zadvorny says the industry has experienced its own “surge” over the past three to four months during the vaccination rollout.

Early in Dr. Emmy Betz’s career, “well-meaning mentors” recommended she find an issue other than gun violence to research. She’s now director of the nonpartisan Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (and an emergency room physician). “We’ve been really behind in finding solutions, and behind especially when you compare it to things like motor vehicle safety, traffic safety,” Betz said.

“Colorado is heading in a positive direction again, and vaccination coverage is almost certainly playing a key role in this decline,” said Glen Mays, chair of the Colorado School of Public Health’s department of health systems.

The biggest donation, though, went to the University of Colorado, which received just north of $1.3 million to "support the next generation of nursing leaders," Leiker said.  The school was taken aback by the hefty donation, although it knew Lutz was no stranger to helping. She had been contributing regularly to the University of Colorado College of Nursing for a number of years, starting with a $10 donation in 1983, Leiker said.

Part of the risk is behavioral: Children pick up eating habits from their parents. Also, being exposed to deficits of some nutrients and excess calories in utero—particularly from fats and carbohydrates—can cause changes in gene expression that “trigger all sorts of pathogenic pathways including promoting obesity,” says Dana Dabelea, a professor of epidemiology and pediatrics at the Colorado School of Public Health, Anschutz Medical Campus. These epigenetic changes can affect the development of children’s fat tissue and when they feel full, she says.

So, for experts such as Elizabeth Carlton, an epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health, the message is clear: The dents that the variants can inflict in the vaccines’ armor are relatively small. “You are far better off vaccinated if those variants are circulating than if you are unvaccinated,” Carlton said.