Just as in other states, some Colorado residents are testing the boundaries of the reopening. Public health researchers warned on May 14 that “recent mobility patterns suggest concerning changes in behavior that may increase transmission.” The proof appeared on Twitter in photos of hundreds of residents escaping record heat on a crowded lakefront beach in a Denver suburb and riverside rocks in Boulder. Epidemiologists now are poring over data to determine whether cases are rising as workers have begun to return to their jobs, and mountain communities, where unemployment reached 20 percent in April, have exhorted second-home owners to come for the summer. Still, Colorado’s vaunted tourism industry remains largely closed, oil and gas companies are shutting in hundreds of wells, and business owners I spoke to say they don’t expect a quick recovery.
Polis, even in discussing the newest reopening guidelines this week, is urging his state’s 5.8 million residents to tread carefully. “It’s how well we succeed in wearing masks, and social distancing in public, and staying in groups of less than 10 people,” he said on Tuesday. “So far, you’ve done an amazing job. If you didn’t do an amazing job, our infection rate would be increasing like it is in other states.”
As China was paralyzed by the virus in early March and nursing home residents in Kirkland, Washington, died with Covid-19 in their systems, Colorado’s ski resorts enjoyed above-average snowfall. Skiers covered most every inch of their skin to protect against freezing temperatures, and the sport felt safe. It wasn’t. On March 5, Polis announced that an out-of-state visitor who had traveled to Italy had tested positive after skiing at Keystone and Vail, making Colorado among the earliest states to get hit by the virus. As mountain communities rushed to quarantine people who had come into contact with the man, Colorado’s Department of Public Health and Environment opened a drive-up testing center in north Denver. It was quickly overwhelmed.
With cases climbing rapidly, on March 14, the governor ordered the state’s 26 ski areas, a major economic engine, to shut down for a week in the middle their profitable spring break month. The order was later extended, threatening to kill the remainder of the season. Bars, restaurants, gyms, theaters and casinos statewide closed in mid-March under orders from the state’s health department. On March 25, Polis’ big announcement came: Residents with nonessential jobs were required to stay at home. Schools also closed. By that point, Democratic governors in California, Washington, Michigan, New York, Illinois and New Jersey, as well as their GOP counterparts in Idaho, Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia, had all enacted sweeping restrictions.
Polis took a pragmatic, measured approach, keeping Coloradans informed with regular briefings at which he discussed reams of ever-changing data compiled by a Colorado School of Public Health modeling team assembled quickly in the pandemic’s early days. At one such news conference immediately after the stay-at-home order went into effect, the governor warned calmly but urgently that without strict physical distancing measures the state could tally 33,200 deaths by June 1.
“Treat this like you would a tornado or a flood or a wildfire or a hurricane. This is far more serious, and the loss of life is going to be far greater,” he said on March 27, adding the state needed time to secure adequate personal protective equipment, testing supplies, ventilators and hospital beds. “The more people are not heeding advice to stay at home, the longer and more severe this crisis will be.”
The move angered Republican state legislators from rural counties, many of which never recovered jobs lost in the Great Recession. Some conservative lawmakers favored allowing the state’s more than 50 local public health agencies to make decisions to curb the virus individually based on infection rates in their regions. “In our caucus, four of our State Senators represent 78% of Colorado’s land mass—and none of those four were consulted on how an order such as this would affect their rural communities, where your administration’s data shows that the virus is not spreading the way it has in the metro area,” 14 Republican state senators wrote in a March 27 letter. Polis had resisted making the stay-at-home order for days, questioning how it would be enforceable, but he said in a March 25 briefing that county-by-county orders were untenable because people were still congregating at facilities that remained open.
The state’s less populous regions didn’t remain immune for long. Dozens of workers soon fell ill at a JBS USA meat-processing plant, where 6,000 people worked in close proximity, in Greeley, a small city in the northern part of the state. On April 13, Polis announced that the facility would shut down for several weeks for deep cleaning. Meanwhile, nursing homes statewide were also battling outbreaks that sickened hundreds and accounted for more than half the state’s deaths.
Resentment about the statewide restrictions continued to simmer in areas reliant on the shuttered tourism industry, struggling oil and gas operations, or agriculture operations stymied by supply chain disruptions. In Mesa County, in the state’s far west, commenters on Facebook compared local health department officials to Nazis after they had suggested residents report workers who weren’t following orders to wear masks. (Polis, who is Jewish, evinced visible emotion when asked about the comments at a news conference.) In Weld County, home to the JBS plant and the state’s largest oil field, commissioners declared on April 23 that their businesses could reopen in defiance of the state’s stay-at-home order, prompting Polis to threaten to withhold emergency funds.
Impatient with the economic fallout from business closures, many counties, both rural and urban, requested waivers from the state’s health department to reopen certain venues in late April and early May. The state granted variances only if county officials could show their infection rate was slowing and if they had plans in place to ensure distancing and cleaning protocols were followed. In Logan County, officials expressed frustration at the state’s denial of a waiver due to an outbreak of about 400 cases at a prison in Sterling that became the state’s biggest hot spot.
“This state is starting to rebel. Some people are being favored over others,” Republican state Senator Jerry Sonnenberg—a farmer, rancher and feed lot operator who represents 20 percent of the land mass in Colorado—told me before Polis had allowed restaurants to reopen. “There are a number of us that don’t trust the governor’s ability to get a handle on this.” After Logan County modified its request, state health officials granted the variance on May 23.
Yet even as some balked under the constraints of the stay-at-home order, a poll of 1,000 Coloradans showed strong support for the governor’s response to the crisis. The survey, conducted from April 15-21 by Magellan Strategies for Healthier Colorado and the Colorado Health Foundation, found that 64 percent of the those who had lost their jobs, income or paid hours due to the coronavirus said they preferred policies to slow the pandemic’s spread, even if that meant businesses needed to stay closed.
Source: politico.com
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