on Wednesday, Dec. 23, 2020. (Kelsey Brunner/The Aspen Times)
At Thursday afternoon’s Pitkin County Board of Health meeting, staff and officials had plenty to be hopeful for.
Thanks to two vaccine clinics last week, most of the county’s educators and essential workers are now fully vaccinated, as are seniors age 60 and older and people with two or more comorbidities, according to a vaccination update from Emergency Response and Epidemiology Administrator Carlyn Porter during the meeting.
Plus, the county is on track to begin administering vaccines to people in Phase 1B.4 on March 21, adding restaurant workers, people age 50 and older, and people with one or more comorbidity to the inoculation list; after that, it’s on to the general public.
But manager Jim Morrison canât say why, exactly.
âOf course our business is down,â he told the News&Guide. âItâs just too difficult to say how much is purely affidavit driven, COVID driven, or snow driven. Itâs pretty evident that people are willing to risk traveling in COVID environments, even at a high risk level.â
Why hotels in the Roaring Fork Valley are seeing so much less traffic than those in resort towns like Jackson Hole is a central question in an ongoing debate in Pitkin County. Health officials there have reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic in two ways that health officials in Teton County have not: by requiring visitors to fill out a form confirming theyâve tested negative before arriving in Aspen and shutting down indoor dining when cases peaked in early January.
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Lani Kitching waits for a patient to arrive for a COVID-19 test at the testing kiosk in the cellphone parking lot near Aspen/Pitkin County Airport. (Dan Bayer/Aspen Journalism)
Pitkin County has maintained a high COVID-19 community-testing capacity since Curative tests were discontinued last month, but the number of people trying to find out if they have the virus has come down from an early-January peak.
In a few weeks at the beginning of winter, the county went from having a low testing rate to boasting one of the highest in the state, thanks in part to the widespread use of free tests available without a doctor’s order, deployed through a partnership involving the state of Colorado, local officials and the San Dimas, Calif.-based company that made and processed the PCR tests.
The presence of variants of COVID-19 in Pitkin County will remain unconfirmed after the state public health lab was unable to sequence the samples in question, an official said this week.
The samples from two Pitkin County residents and one other person who works in the county did not contain enough viral load to be analyzed and sequenced, said Josh Vance, the county’s epidemiologist. But based on subsequent testing, he said he’s confident any risk to the community has passed.
“We feel we’ve been able to contain the outbreak here,” Vance told members of the Pitkin County Board of Health on Thursday. “We feel like we’ve been able to close it out for now.”