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San Juan County, Colorado, is one of the most vaccinated counties in the U.S. Leaders across the country continue to expound on the vaccine as the path forward in the pandemic. But San Juan’s experience the past few weeks with its first covid hospitalizations shows that, even with an extremely vaccinated population, masks are still necessary.
Students in many places are starting the new school year with their masks off — even in one Colorado county that was one of the nation’s first delta variant hot spots.
As the nation confronts the delta variant, many consumers are again facing delays getting tested. The problem appears most acute in the South and Midwest, where new infections are growing the fastest.
Statistics show that Colorado residents are much more likely than Wyoming residents to be vaccinated against covid. Yet both Wyoming and Colorado were among the top 12 states with the highest covid case rates at the beginning of July. A closer look at a pair of similarly sized counties in those states helps explain why.
Mesa County is a breeding ground for the covid-19 delta variant, but few would guess with tens of thousands of people flocking to the state’s largest country music festival.
A college student never got an answer for what caused her intense pain, but she did get a bill that totaled $18,736 for an ER visit. She and her mom, a nurse practitioner, fought to understand all the charges.
Agricultural workers living in employer-owned housing can have trouble getting health care. It’s symptomatic of bigger gaps in worker protections that the pandemic spotlighted, say proponents of a newly passed Colorado bill for farmworker rights.
When estimating how well a patient’s kidneys are working, doctors frequently turn to an equation that depends on a question: Is the patient Black? Kidney experts are now debating how to remove the race adjustment and whether the question is a function of sound science. It’s considered just the first step in dismantling institutional racism in kidney care.
For some, a vaccine appointment a few hours away is no biggie. For others, it’s a major barrier to gaining protection from the coronavirus.
The city of Durango has hired an actor to bring his Old West acting skills to tackle a current problem: the Wild West of spring break, in which visitors from states such as Texas and Oklahoma flock to town. The “lawman” cajoles them into wearing masks while vaccinators stand ready for out-of-town visitors.
Hesitancy toward routine childhood vaccines doesn’t necessarily predict hesitancy toward a covid shot.
Amid the disorganization and confusion of the vaccine distribution, smaller communities may have an advantage. In some long-term care facilities where vaccination is underway, things are looking up.
The oxygen delivery infrastructure is crumbling under pressure in Los Angeles and other covid hot spots, jeopardizing patients’ access to precious air and limiting hospital turnover.
In a fracas between a largely rural county and neighboring cities, class and politics are just as relevant as the coronavirus. People are getting “stupid and mean,” as one mayor put it.
Kent Thiry, the former CEO of dialysis giant DaVita, has clear ideas about how democracy should work. By backing ballot measures in Colorado, he’s shaping the power of voters in that state.
A shortage of nurses has turned hospital staffing into a sort of national bidding war, with hospitals willing to pay exorbitant wages to secure the nurses they need. That threatens to shift the supply of nurses toward more affluent areas.
Contact tracers in many states are stretched thin. Colorado is among the latest states to launch an app that aims to help, based on the COVID contact-tracing tool built by Apple and Google. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem: More people will use them if they prove to work, but the apps become effective only if more people use them.
About 6% of large universities with in-person classes are routinely testing all students. For many institutions, that strategy is out of reach. To get ahead of the virus, Colorado State University is experimenting with a combination of sewage monitoring and a lesser-known approach to pool testing.
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