CU Anschutz In The News

"We've seen quite a bit of variation across local communities, both in capacity to respond and capacity to implement recommendations" to keep the virus from spreading, says Glen Mays, chair of the Department of Health Systems, Management and Policy at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and an expert on public health strategy and preparedness. "There have been variations in trajectory of infections across communities."

Some graduate schools are teaching health care workers about cannabis since many say they don’t feel prepared to answer patients' questions about it. That’s why University of Colorado’s Skaggs School of Pharmacy has started a program to address this. Interview with David Kroll with Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Heather Smith, who took the course.

“There is no good reason not to do it in kids,” said Sean O’Leary, a Colorado pediatrician who sits on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infectious diseases. “It’s a matter of people not being comfortable with doing it.”

It’s an important distinction, said Sean O’Leary, professor and pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine in Aurora. Since it’s early in the school year, he expects most positive cases “came in from the outside” rather than being contracted at school.

“You can’t even plan for all these things in advance because your allocation protocol might change based on all the circumstances,” said Dr. Matthew Wynia, a bioethicist who leads the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

Dr. Kyle Annen is the medical director of transfusion services at Children’s Hospital Colorado, based on the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. Her team collected its first units of plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients on March 31, four days after the FDA approved its experimental use in serious COVID-19 cases.

“In February of 2020, before COVID-19 really hit our country, telepsychiatry was beginning to be widely available but only sporadically adopted,” says Dr. Jay Shore, a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and the chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Telepsychiatry Committee. “Now it’s been a tsunami. At the University of Colorado maybe 10% to 20% of [mental health] visits were over video before. Now, outside of inpatient stuff, we’re at like 100%.”

Cinnamon Dixon, associate professor of pediatrics at University of Colorado and an attending pediatrician at Children's Hospital Colorado, said that while the researchers didn’t have national data from this period, she doubted the findings would prove unique to Colorado. According to 2019 data shared by the United States Postal Service during their annual “Dog Bite Awareness Week” in June, the state doesn’t usually rank among even the top ten “dog bite states.”