Confident that it can prevent mass death and an overloaded hospital system moving forward, Colorado is preparing to relax restrictions even in counties where coronavirus case rates remain high.
In a call on Saturday with city and county leaders, state officials presented a new guideline for softer county-level rules, with more changes planned for mid-2021.
The changes will allow greater economic and social freedoms, even if counties have higher rates of virus transmission. This reflects the state’s confidence that it can avoid overloading hospitals with cases, as Colorado’s older and most at-risk populations are gradually being vaccinated.
“Colorado residents have made significant sacrifices to reduce disease transmission, so it’s time to update the dial to reflect this reality, in addition to the growing number of people who are immunized,” Jill Hunsaker Ryan, director of the Department of Public Health and Colorado’s Environment, said in a statement after connecting with government leaders.
According to several sources who were on Saturday’s call but who were not allowed to share the information they received, the draft Dial 2.0 proposal will lead to an announcement of changes to the governor’s office policies in the coming days, perhaps on Wednesday -market. Before that, it plans to seek public opinion.
The state is planning Dial 3.0 in March, with another possible dial update a few months later.
Colorado has a color-coded display, which ranges from Green (softer) to Purple (more severe), which determines the levels of capacity and social behaviors in the municipalities, depending on the level of virus transmission in those municipalities. The restrictions that correspond to each color are not set to change in Dial 2.0, but the state plans to relax the metric requirements.
For example, to qualify for the Orange Level – the current level for most Colorado counties and the third most restrictive on the dial – a county must have an incidence rate of new positive COVID-19 cases between 175 and 350 per 100,000 people. Any amount greater than 350 per 100,000, and a county qualifies for Red Level. Under Dial 2.0, counties would qualify for Orange Level if their incidence rates went up to 499 per 100,000. The current limit of the Red Level is defined as above 350 per 100,000 people, and in Dial 2.0 it would be increased to 500.
The current dial also bases restrictions on 14-day samples, and on Dial 2.0, which is set to change to seven days – which means that a county can move the dial up or down more quickly as its metric changes.
In addition, counties with fewer than 20,000 residents could receive “special consideration” to account for their weekly variability in positivity rates.
Virus cases remain high here, with the most recent estimate suggesting that 1 in 115 coloradans is contagious with COVID-19. Public health officials are also concerned about new and more contagious variants of the virus, some of which have been detected in Colorado.
At a news conference on Friday, Governor Jared Polis told reporters that he expects half of the coloradans over 70 to have been vaccinated by February 8, when the state plans to start vaccinating the 65-69 population. years. Once the older coloradans are vaccinated, the pandemic “crisis phase” ends. Polis was not on Saturday’s call; he said he was being vaccinated today.
Local authorities had the opportunity to ask questions and offer feedback, and a source on the call said, “In general, we understand why these changes are being made. … We all have many questions, centered around two things: one, understanding how to keep our communities safe and, second, how to give our business as much freedom as possible. “
Dr. John Douglas, executive director of the Tri County Department of Health, said the time was right for a change.
“The dial has been a useful tool to help us manage our response to the pandemic, but it needs to be updated based on the lessons learned in the past five months,” he said in a prepared statement.
Colorado has already changed the dial once, adding the Purple Level in November, amid an increase in cases and deaths. The state did not always abide by its own rules, sometimes allowing flexibility for counties when metrics did not justify it.
State officials informed and solicited feedback on Saturday from county and city leaders and public health officials, and will seek input from the public through an online survey.
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