Dr. Sean O'Leary, a professor of pediatric infectious disease at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who works with Children's Hospital Colorado, said his fellow pediatricians are starting to hear from more parents, "particularly for the older kids who were vaccinated several months ago."
“Is there cause for concern? Absolutely,” Dr. Sean O’Leary, the vice chair of the academy’s infectious diseases committee, said in an interview on Monday night. “What’s driving the increase in kids is there is an increase in cases overall.” Children have accounted for a greater percentage of overall cases since the vaccines became widely available to adults, said Dr. O’Leary, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital Colorado.
“He could be helping us in finishing off this pandemic, especially with a vulnerable population,” says Joshua Barocas, an associate professor of medicine with an expertise in infectious diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “We’re looking at millions and millions of people worldwide. He could be a global ambassador, and instead he’s chosen the pro-covid, anti-public-health route.”
Some recent research shows that even once they’ve been infected, the vaccinated are less likely to spread the coronavirus than the unvaccinated. “We’re back in this category of, Yeah, it can happen, but it seems to be a very rare event,” Ross Kedl, an immunology professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told me.
For a front-line perspective, I'm joined by Dr. Ivor Douglas. He's chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Denver Health and a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Dr. Douglas, welcome to the "NewsHour." Thank you for making the time. Take us, if you can, inside your hospital right now. What does it look like? What do you see?"
Ideally, you would not even need to ask questions of your employer about protocols. “It should be stated up front: ‘Should we have a case, this is what we are going to do,’” said Michael Van Dyke, an industrial hygienist who studies workplace exposure assessments at the Colorado School of Public Health.
For a few weeks in September, the state’s cases and hospitalizations were on a “high plateau,” and there were some indications they could be slowly going down, said Beth Carlton, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health at the Colorado School of Public Health. “Now we’re still stuck on that high plateau, and it looks like things are trending upwards,” she said.
Last month, Glen Mays was having dinner at a rural mountaintop restaurant west of the city when a fellow diner collapsed with a heart attack. Mays, a college professor, leapt into action, clearing a space and giving the 60-ish woman CPR. For 35 minutes. "It was exhausting," he said. "I knew as soon as it happened that it would be 30 minutes or more until we got an ambulance up there." An ambulance racing up a nearby canyon from the outskirts of Denver finally reached the woman, and the EMTs got her heart beating again before rushing her to the hospital. Mays doesn't know if she survived. But he does know her chances of survival are significantly lower than had she been in Denver. "Incidents that are survivable in urban areas are often not in rural areas," said Mays, the chair of the department of health systems and policy at the Colorado School of Public Health.
