The Aspen Covid Testing lab team works to process COVID-19 tests on Friday, Jan. 22, 2021. (Kelsey Brunner/The Aspen Times)
After seven days of declining COVID-19 case counts, Pitkin County will move back to Yellow level restrictions at 6 a.m. Saturday, the county’s public health director said Thursday.
Thursday marked the seventh consecutive day that seven-day case counts were 90 or below, which is the maximum threshold for the Yellow level, said Jordana Sabella. That was enough for her to call state public health officials late Thursday afternoon and confirm that the county can move to the lesser restrictions as of Saturday morning.
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A year after Glenwood Springs resident Dani Ott became the first person in Garfield County to have a confirmed case of COVID-19, her battle isn’t over.
“I’m still on heart and lungs medications, but I’m doing better this month,” Ott said last week of the lingering effects she still experiences to this day.
At 33 when she was diagnosed (now 34), Ott, an asthma sufferer, was in that “high-risk” category when the novel coronavirus made its first documented appearance in the Roaring Fork Valley.
On March 14, 2020, about two weeks after attending a concert at a club in Aspen where she met a group of Australian tourists who ended up being the first in Pitkin County to test positive she was advised by Garfield County Public Health that she, too, had tested positive for COVID-19.
However, for others with lingering symptoms of the coronavirus, that light is harder to see.
“Well, it feels like I’m living a nightmare,” said Clay Shiflet, an Aspen Middle School teacher and valley resident who’s been suffering the effects of COVID-19 for a year. “Literally, it’s hard to wrap your head around feeling like you have something that’s become chronic, essentially.”
Shiflet and others are known as “long-haulers,” and studies across the country are showing that more and more people afflicted with the virus report symptoms that just won’t go away. The number of long-haulers appears to vary, with a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association and a study by British scientists estimating that 10% of COVID-19 patients belong to that group, though others have suggested the number is much higher.