CU Anschutz In The News

“What happens in schools is going to be reflective of the broader community no matter how good a job we do in implementing the mitigation measures,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, professor and pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine in Aurora. “If we see that in mid-August we are seeing similar levels of disease to what we’re seeing in Texas and Arizona, I don’t know that it’s safe to open schools at that point because there’s so much virus circulating.”

People are wary about close contact with others, so the pandemic is a real threat to bystander CPR, Dr. Sarah Perman of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora told Reuters. Writing in the journal Circulation, she notes that the American Heart Association recommends hands-only CPR and precautions such as covering faces to reduce the spread of respiratory droplets that may carry the coronavirus.

The current focus centers on airborne transmission, said Dr. Lisa Miller, professor of epidemiology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “What CDC is saying is they don’t think objects — or fomites, as they’re called in science literature — are the main way coronavirus spreads,” Miller said. “Based on the literature and the outbreaks that we’re seeing, it’s mostly a person-to-person respiratory spread. Things like your mail or currency don’t seem to be a major factor.”

Dr. Abigail Lara, a pulmonary critical care physician at UCHealth, is the daughter of immigrant parents from Mexico. She was the first in her family to go to college, the first to go to grad school, and today not only is she a doctor, but she’s also an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Wary of missteps, companies are turning to consultants and academic experts for guidance. “The appetite for the information is huge,” says Mike Van Dyke, an associate professor at the Center for Health, Work & Environment at the Colorado School of Public Health. The center began doing weekly webinars for businesses related to Covid-19 this spring that attracted at least 200 attendees each, compared with the 40 or 50 who typically attended the group’s online events before the pandemic.

Given budget crunches and coronavirus testing problems, should universities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a season to routinely test players, coaches and staff? “Is this a good use of our resources?” said Dawn Comstock, a sports epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health.

“Our site here at University of Colorado Hospital is part of a nationwide network called the COVID Prevention Network, which is set up so that it has a cohort of sites that are available to sequentially enroll into multiple vaccine studies,” said Dr. Thomas Campbell, an infectious disease physician at the CU School of Medicine and University of Colorado Hospital. “If it works, the Moderna vaccine could be a real game-changer for the pandemic.”

“The goal is to put into the hands of Coloradans the tools that we use to project where the epidemic may go and to allow people to look and see how what they do can affect the course of the epidemic,” said Dr. Jonathan Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.