The First Wave: Inside Colorado’s Initial Response to COVID-19

By late January, Dr. Sam Dominguez sensed the world was about to change. The professor of infectious diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine had spent his entire career studying emerging pathogens such as SARS, and the news coming out of China at the time, about a novel coronavirus with a high human-to-human transmission rate, led him to believe a pandemic was possible. “It seemed like there was a tidal wave coming,” says Dominguez, who is also a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital Colorado, “and medical facilities needed to gear up.”