“Indoors is riskier than outdoors because the walls and ceilings that enclose indoor spaces trap the virus, allowing it to build up in the air over time — much like cigarette smoke,” wrote Jonathan Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health, and Elizabeth Carlton, an associate professor for the school.
Remember that even when it’s chilly, basic safety measures still apply, and they’re even more crucial now, when hundreds of thousands of Americans are getting sick every day. Maintain your distance. Wear a mask. Avoid any situations that increase your risk. “It would defeat the purpose to travel in a car with someone outside your household to get to a place to do an outdoor activity,” says Lisa Miller, an epidemiology professor at the University of Colorado School of Public Health.
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.
Similar to immunity certificates, there are also the wider ethical implications of private businesses creating and enforcing vaccine mandates, according to Dr. Daniel Goldberg, an attorney and associate professor at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “We are talking about differentiating groups of people, and permitting private actors to basically discriminate against them — to bar access on the basis of immunity status,” he tells Rolling Stone. “That, in and of itself, is perilous.”
“This has obviously been a once-in-a-generation — once-in-a-multiple-generation — event that has touched every part of society and the economy,” said Glen Mays, who chairs the Colorado School of Public Health’s Department of Health Systems, Management and Policy. “I’m confident there are going to be persistent effects. When you think about just the extent to which the pandemic has shaped people’s geographic location decisions, their economic decisions, their job opportunities, their housing options — people have shifted where they live or shifted what they do.”
Kevin Lyster patrols the Anschutz medical campus — the same hospital his son Cody was supposed to be transferred to for more treatment against COVID-19. He died before he could make it. There’s not a day that goes by that Cody isn’t on his dad’s mind. "Especially with Christmas coming up in just a few days, it’s going to be kind of hard not having him there and having the hugs and exchanging gifts," said Kevin Lyster.
“For most vaccines there is not much of a reason to think that if they are safe in adults, they wouldn’t be safe in children,” said Sean O’Leary, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and vice chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infectious diseases.
In fact, the antibody treatments are so scarce that officials in Utah have developed a ranking system to determine who is most likely to benefit from the drugs, while Colorado is using a lottery system. Dr. Matthew Wynia, director of the Center of Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado, said that giving the powerful access was patently unfair.
