Behind Wyoming and Colorado’s Abnormal COVID Spikes

By Rae Ellen Bichell, Kaiser Santé news

WHEATLAND, Wyo. –Brandon Graves has said COVID-19 has arrived in Wheatland as new films do in this farming town on the high plains: months after hitting major cities and without much fanfare.

“It kind of spread and never really blew up here,” said Graves, a longtime resident and mayor of the town of about 3,500 people, the largest in Platte County.

Many residents say the virus that causes COVID feels more like an inconvenience imposed on them by strangers than a public threat. For example, utility bills came in late because the company printing them is in a city hard hit by COVID. And the city is stuck fixing and fixing one of its aging garbage trucks, as the ordered replacement has been delayed for more than a year due to a COVID-induced microchip shortage.

Then there’s the “Colorado Navy,” the locals’ nickname for the parade of vehicles with towed boats that cross the state border each summer. Their numbers increased last year as people searched for open lakes and campgrounds during the pandemic, said Shawna Reichert, executive director of the Platte County Chamber of Commerce.

Campers were so tight around Grayrocks Reservoir, a popular fishing spot outside of town, said Reichert, “it literally looked like a town.” The crowd ransacked the place and a rancher lost several cows. Plastic bags were found in their stomachs.

It’s no surprise that many residents are lukewarm about COVID vaccines: As of July 6, about 29 percent of residents in Platte County were fully vaccinated, according to the state’s health department. And Wyoming, a staunchly conservative state, had about 32% of its residents fully vaccinated, giving it one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. Perhaps also unsurprisingly, the state has one of the highest new case rates in the country.

What may be surprising is that neighboring Wyoming to the south has recently seen spikes in similar cases. Colorado is a Democratic-leaning state with an estimated 53% fully vaccinated population, which places it in the top 15 states in terms of vaccination rates. It also had the 12th highest new case rate among states as of July 9, ranking a few states below Wyoming.

In Colorado, one of the most vaccinated counties is San Miguel County, which, like Platte County in Wyoming, has a population of just over 8,000. The two counties entered June with high transmission rates and maintained them for several weeks in a row, but their vaccination rates are the opposite of each other: less than a third of Platte County residents are fully vaccinated, while about a third of residents of San Miguel County are not. The common thread in both places: pockets of unvaccinated residents.

Health officials are closely monitoring COVID hotspots that have emerged in recent weeks due to low vaccination rates.

“One of the things we’ve sounded the alarm about is the need for hyper-local data,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The state might look good and you might think, like, ‘Okay, we’ve got this.’ But then when you dig deeper down to the county level, you might see a much different story. “

The county level might not even be granular enough to show real risk. Small increases in cases can be significant even in sparsely populated counties – and not just because of the potential for transmission to spread across counties or states.

“A small increase in the number of cases in rural areas can have devastating consequences because there is a good chance that there will be less health care resources in these places in order to save lives,” he said. she declared. “There have been good studies that show that, in part, the ability of the virus to kill people depends on the bandwidth of the healthcare system to save people. “

After months of reporting a few cases, the Platte County Public Health Department issued a warning on Facebook in early June that 14 people had tested positive for COVID in the same number of days, and 12 ended up in the hospital. ‘hospital.

This series of cases has pushed Platte County into the “red zone” of high transmission rates. “Platte County contact tracing has shown that unvaccinated people will work and regroup when they are sick,” the post read.

Joan Ivaska, senior director of infection prevention for Banner Health, which operates a 25-bed hospital in Wheatland, confirmed COVID patients were admitted throughout June, although she declined to say how many . The hospital has only two adult intensive care beds.

She and other health officials continue to stress that better immunization coverage is the only way to get back to normal.

The challenge, said Kim Deti, spokesperson for the Wyoming Department of Health, is not just the politicization of COVID vaccines, which has turned many against them, although it is a factor. It is also that many people have resumed their activities and believe that the pandemic is behind them.

“We have had relatively low levels of COVID-19 disease in most areas of the state for quite some time now, which affects the perception of the threat,” Deti said. “There are a lot of people who work very hard and try everything they can. Wyoming’s coverage rate is not due to lack of effort.

In San Miguel County, Colorado, people were excited to get shot from the start. “The interest has been very, very passionate since the vaccines became widely available,” County spokeswoman Lindsey Mills said.

San Miguel County has met President Joe Biden’s immunization target of at least one dose in 70% of adult residents weeks before July 4, a deadline the nation as a whole missed. Still, the county was experiencing an increase in COVID cases similar to its Wyoming counterpart. More than 460 days after Colorado declared COVID-19 a disaster emergency, San Miguel County recorded its first death from COVID on June 14.

The reason? Turns out, not everyone was as enthusiastic about the vaccines as the high rates in San Miguel County indicated. Figures provided by the local health department show that in the eastern part of the county, home to the affluent community of Telluride Ski Resort, around 80% of eligible residents have opted in. . This left the county vulnerable to continued spread.

This east-west divide in San Miguel County reflects a pre-existing cultural divide, according to Mike Bordogna, the county director. The sparsely populated west side, which extends to the Utah Line, was historically the breadbasket of the county, growing crops and livestock that supplied mining towns like Telluride, now known for skiing and its festivals of cinema and bluegrass.

A KHN analysis of data provided by San Miguel County shows that since the start of the pandemic, most of the county’s COVID cases have been on the east side, where most residents live. But in May, the tables turned. While the western part of the county typically recorded less than 10% of the county’s cases in the first year of the pandemic, in May and June its share suddenly surpassed 64%, helped by the arrival of the delta variant.

In late May, an unvaccinated woman in her 60s living in the county’s West End contracted the delta variant during a potluck meal following a funeral and died after a week in hospital . Other unvaccinated funeral attendants also caught the virus.

“Almost everyone who was there who was not vaccinated fell ill afterwards – either tested positive or just got sick and did not test,” said Amanda Baltzley, contact tracing supervisor for the San Miguel County Public Health Department.

Sheila Grother, an EMT and contact tracer who has worked with Baltzley and has lived in the West End town of Norwood for more than 30 years, said she had gone nowhere trying to persuade people to be vaccinate – although two vaccinated West End residents who contracted the delta variant around the same time as the woman who died and who was also over 70, recovered.

“I’ve been with people when they’re at their worst and I’ve been with them in their worst days,” she said. “I thought at one point that people, you know, trusted my judgment to a certain extent, and I think some do, but there are those who – they’re not going to get the shot. “

But county leaders hope some will change their minds. Bordogna said health officials were working on plans to set up underground vaccination stations at the next county fair and rodeo to make it easy for people to get vaccinated without fear of being spotted. The goal is to create a system where participants can, for example, tell a family member or friend that they are heading to the bathroom and get a photo instead.