DENVER — Five years ago today, Colorado entered uncharted territory.
On March 5, 2020, the first two official cases of COVID-19 were officially reported in the state. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) said one of the patients was visiting Summit County ski resorts from out of state.
To this day, COVID has permanently changed the way the state responds to viruses.
CDPHE now tracks COVID, flu and RSV online together. The department still emphasizes the importance of widespread testing. Different agencies still use wastewater surveillance to test the water for a particular virus.
“It's a new tool that we have to track viruses and understand where viruses are spreading in our community in a way that we can do that anonymously without relying on individuals getting testing done,” state epidemiologist Dr. Rachel Herlihy said.
While the program has been downsized, CDPHE also still uses mobile health clinics.
“A recent example would be this past summer,” Dr. Herlihy said. “When we had H5N1 avian influenza cases occurring in poultry workers, we used those resources to respond.”
Dr. Herlihy became a regular on the news during the height of the pandemic. She said moving forward, the state is still working on surge capacity. She also said state leaders are stilling looking at how and when to use lockdowns.
“We know without a doubt that the strategies that we took here in Colorado and many states across the country saved thousands and thousands of lives,“ Dr. Herlihy said. “So really important there, but I think there's a lot to still be learned about trying to understand infectious disease dynamics in certain age groups in certain settings. And where it might be most important to disrupt transmission, and how we can best do that in a way that is less the least disruptive to our everyday lives.”
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Right now, COVID is relatively quiet. However, experts say it hasn’t settled into a clear long-term pattern.
“We saw a small increase earlier this winter, but since then, it's been relatively quiet,” Dr. Herlihy said. “COVID doesn't seem to be settling into a clear, predictable winter surge pattern at this point. So we are still really trying to understand what COVID transmission is going to look like in the long-term. We have a lot more to understand about it.”
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