It’s not looking good, folks.
COVID-19 cases in Denver have been increasing since early September. The state, city and Denver Public Schools have been enacting new public health orders and changing the way things work to try to curb the spread.
According to the metrics the state follows, Denver is dangerously close to reverting to stay-at-home territory, which limits public outings to grocery shopping, walks and doctors visits, among other “essential” needs. Denver’s currently following safer-at-home rules, which limit capacity in businesses and group gatherings to just people inside your home.
There’s a lot to follow and a lot of confusion. So consider this a guide with answers to questions you have — and questions you didn’t know you had.
Didn’t get the answer you were looking for? Email us at tips@denverite.com.
Let’s start off with the numbers the state and Denver have deemed important to follow.
🌡 Two-week cumulative incidence per 100,000 residents
In other words, how many COVID-19 cases there are per 100,000 residents in Denver every two weeks. The state uses that timeframe to balance days when cases are very high and days when they’re very low.
Right now, Denver saw more than 950 over the last two weeks, which isn’t great. According to the state, anything more than 350 cases pushes a county more into total lockdown territory.
This graph will update every day:
👩⚕️Days of stable or declining hospital admissions
Counties that are doing well in this metric see at least eight days of declining or stable hospital admissions of patients with COVID-19. Denver’s admission numbers are good by state standards, but just barely, at eight days of declining or stable new hospital admissions.
📈 Two-week average positivity rate
This metric is defined by the percent of tests that come back positive out of all the tests that have been conducted over 14 days. Denver’s rate is 11.3 percent, which puts us comfortably in the state’s “safer-at-home” category, the level just before stay-at-home (i.e.: the worst category).
What about all that other stuff you hear about, like testing and hospital capacity?
💉Testing availability
Denver was serving up COVID-19 tests from the Ball Center (Pepsi Center) until transitioning to smaller community sites at the end of September and mobile testing sites that come to you if you’re homebound (the link has information on where you can get tested).
According to Denver Department of Public Health and Environment spokesperson Tammy Vigil, “Denver is able to provide a test to whoever wants one. We have had a lot of demand, and have only turned people away due to increased wait times.”
Vigil said Denver is administering 1,050 tests per day, not including testing by hospitals and healthcare partners.
“When including all testing in Denver, we’re closer to 3,000 tests a day, well above what the CDC recommends for a city our size,” she said.
Vigil couldn’t say for sure how much the need for testing has increased: “It’s hard to compare due to going from one site (Pepsi) to three sites closer to individual communities.”
She encouraged people who have insurance to get tested through their healthcare provider. “Our testing sites are designed to bring testing to communities with high positivity rates and to support people who don’t have insurance or are underinsured,” she said. “Those who can see their doctor or an urgent care facility for a test are encouraged to do so.”
🏥 Hospitals
According to Dr. Connie Savor Price, Chief Medical Officer at Denver Health, roughly 20 percent of beds there are occupied by patients with COVID-19.
“However we still have a number of additional patients who are not actively infectious, but still remain in the hospital for a long stay recovering from the impacts of COVID-19 who are not counted as part of that 20 percent,” Savor Price said.
The hospital system has not stopped elective surgeries whose patients can be discharged the same day. However, “we have limited elective surgeries that do require a hospital bed as our bed utilization from COVID-19 patients has greatly increased over the last few weeks,” Savor Price said.
The hospital system is recruiting more healthcare workers to deal with a potential surge.
UCHealth spokesperson Dan Weaver said the system has 12 hospitals in the state and four in the metro area, including Highlands Ranch Hospital, University of Colorado Hospital, Broomfield Hospital, and Longs Peak Hospital in Longmont. Right now, their facilities are caring for about 280 patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 infections — a record high for them, Weaver said over email. The system is caring for about 135 patients in the Denver region.
Weaver said University of Colorado Hospital started postponing a small number of non-emergency, prescheduled surgeries and procedures last week, while other hospitals started doing that this week. He added the postponements vary by day, with decisions made based on a projection of bed needs for the next day. The hospital system has a surge plan in place to increase capacity and add ICU beds if needed.
“It is important that people throughout the state take this surge of COVID-19 patients seriously,” Weaver said over email. “This is the best way to support our nurses and doctors who are taking care of patients with COVID-19 each and every day.”
HealthONE, which operates seven facilities in the metro area, currently has 210 COVID-19 positive patients in its hospitals, according to spokesperson Stephanie Sullivan. Those numbers are close to the peak the system saw in April, when the hospital system was treating 226 COVID-19 positive patients.
However, its ICUs are currently treating 61 COVID-19-positive patients, which is not as high as the 109 patients the ICUs were treating during the April peak. Sullivan said HealthONE’s ICU capacity remains stable. The hospital is still doing elective surgeries but evaluating them on a case-by-case basis.
St. Joseph Hospital and National Jewish Health had not responded to requests for comment by the time this story published.
Now, onto some rules.
🌆 Business capacity and more restrictions
Under Denver’s current rules, restaurants must close their dining rooms by 10 p.m., though they can continue offering delivery, curbside pick-up or takeout after that. Any business that sells booze, including bars, restaurants, breweries, distilleries, wineries, and grocery and liquor stores, won’t be allowed to sell alcohol after 10 p.m.
All public and private gatherings gatherings of people who are not members of a single household are prohibited.
Here are some more restrictions, per the city:
- Restaurants can only have 25 percent capacity indoors, with a max of 50 people.
- Places of worship and life rites may operate at 25% capacity or 50 people.
- Non-critical manufacturing and offices must operate at 25% capacity.
- Retail must operate at 25% capacity.
- Indoor events may operate at 50% capacity or 25 people, whichever is fewer.
😷 Masks
You must wear a mask inside any business. In mid-October, the city started enforcing a stricter mask rule that requires anyone gathering outdoors with people who are not in their pod to wear masks.
⏰ About that “curfew”
On Nov. 8, the city enacted a rule requiring residents to be home by 10 p.m. The rule bans people from getting together in public or private settings with anyone outside of their household from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. The city refuses to call it a curfew, suggesting it’s instead “a restriction on gatherings, business hours and a guidepost for behavior.” This curfew-but-not-really ends on Dec. 7 and won’t apply on Thanksgiving Day. Some exceptions include going to and from work, interstate travel and getting medical care.
🍎Schools
Denver Public Schools scaled back in-person learning on Oct. 27.
Kids in early childhood education classes through second grade will continue in-person learning, while those in third to fifth grade shifted toward remote learning starting on Nov. 2, according to the district’s website. Students in middle school and high school will remain in remote learning for the rest of the semester, through December.
Some 80 parents demonstrated outside DPS headquarters downtown on Oct. 30 after the changes were announced, irked over the district’s decision to pull third to fifth graders back into remote learning. Many elementary school students had just started in-person learning the previous week.
Superintendent Susana Cordova, who announced Friday she was leaving the district, said attendance for both in-person and remote learning was 88 percent district-wide.
This story has been updated with information from Denver Health.
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