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Confident it can prevent massive deaths and an overwhelmed hospital system, Colorado is preparing to ease restrictions even in counties where rates of coronavirus cases remain high.
In a Saturday call with city and county leaders, state officials presented a new directive for more lenient rules at the county level, with further changes slated for mid-2021.
The changes will allow greater economic and social freedom even though counties have higher rates of transmission of the virus. This reflects the state’s confidence that it can avoid overloading hospitals with cases, as Colorado’s oldest and most-at-risk populations are gradually vaccinated.
“The Coloradans have made significant sacrifices to reduce disease transmission, so it’s time to update the dial to reflect this reality, as well as the growing number of people being vaccinated,” Jill Hunsaker Ryan, Director of the Department of Health Colorado public and environmental community, said in a statement following the call with government officials.
According to several sources who were on Saturday call but were not authorized to share the information received, the Dial 2.0 draft proposal will lead to an announcement of policy changes by the governor’s office in the coming days, maybe Wednesday. Prior to that, he plans to seek public input.
The State traces the Dial 3.0 in March, with another possible dial update to follow a few months later.
Colorado has a color-coded dial, ranging from green (most forgiving) to purple (most severe), which determines capacity levels and social behaviors in counties, based on the level of transmission of the virus in those counties. . 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 counties in Colorado, 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 inhabitants. Anything above 350 per 100,000, and a county qualifies for the red level. Under Dial 2.0, counties would qualify for the orange level if their incidence rates reached 499 per 100,000. The current red level threshold is defined as greater than 350 per 100,000 people, and in Dial 2.0 it would be increased to 500 .
The current dial also bases the restrictions on 14-day samples, and under Dial 2.0 that is expected to drop to seven days – meaning a county could move the dial up or down faster as its settings change.
In addition, counties with fewer than 20,000 residents could be given a “special consideration” to account for weekly variability in positivity rates.
Virus cases remain high here, with the state’s latest estimate suggesting that one in 115 Coloradans is contagious with COVID-19. Public health officials are also wary of new, more contagious variants of the virus, some cases of which have been detected in Colorado.
At a press conference Friday, Governor Jared Polis told reporters he expects half of Coloradans over the age of 70 to have been vaccinated by February 8, when the The state plans to begin immunizing the population aged 65 to 69. Once the older Coloradans are vaccinated, this ends the “crisis phase” of the pandemic. Polis was not on call Saturday; he said he was vaccinated today.
Local officials were given the opportunity to ask questions and comment, and a source on the call said: “Overall, we understand why these changes are being made. … We all have a lot of questions, centered around two things: first, understanding how to keep our communities safe, and second, how to give our businesses as much freedom as possible.
Dr John Douglas, executive director of Tri County’s health department, said the time was right for a change.
“The dial has been a useful tool in helping us manage our response to the pandemic, but it needs to be updated based on lessons learned over the past five months,” he said in a prepared statement.
Colorado has changed the dial once already, adding Level Purple in November, amid a spike in cases and deaths. The state did not always follow its own rules, sometimes allowing some flexibility to counties when the parameters did not warrant it.
State officials briefed and sought comment on Saturday from county and city leaders, and public health directors, and will seek public comment through an online survey.
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