Like Boulder County, other counties enter rank of high coronavirus community level

Annie Mehl, Daily Times-Call, Longmont, Colo.
·4 min read

Jun. 10—For several weeks, Boulder County was one of only two counties in Colorado with high coronavirus community levels, but after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's most recent update on Thursday, 12 other counties have now entered high levels as the state continues to see an increase in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.

At the end of May, Boulder County moved into high COVID-19 community levels, which is determined using the CDC's community level guideline, which measures the impact COVID-19 has on overall community health and health care systems. It is measured using three metrics: new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people over the past seven days, the percent of inpatient beds occupied by COVID-19 patients and the total new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people over the past seven days.

Weekly metrics released by the CDC every Thursday shows Boulder County with 16.4 new COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100,000 people over the past seven days, 2.8% of inpatient beds occupied by COVID-19 patients and 379.22 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people over the past seven days.

Elizabeth Lawrence spokesperson for Boulder County Public Health said it is unclear why Boulder County was one of the first counties to enter high community levels. She added that having a community where many residents travel frequently in addition to the presence of highly transmissible COVID-19 variants — the omicron variant and its mutations — as well as having a high number of residents who take polymerase chain reaction (PCR) COVID-19 tests can create a high number of cases.

She added that because Boulder County has a high percentage of residents who are up to date with their COVID-19 vaccinations, the level of hospitalizations has remained lower than other Colorado counties.

Last week, both Larimer and Broomfield counties, which are adjacent to Boulder County, were in medium community levels, according to the CDC. Broomfield has since shifted to a high community level. Weld County, which also borders Boulder County, moved from a low community level to medium. Weld County has 0.2 percentage points fewer inpatient beds in use by COVID-positive individuals than Boulder County, according to most recent data updated Thursday.

In Weld County, 61.7% of its population — about 340,000 people — are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data. In Boulder County, 79.1% of its population — about 330,000 people — are fully vaccinated.

During a March interview, Carol Helwig, BCPH epidemiologist and communicable disease program manager, said the CDC's community level guideline provides a more "holistic approach" to tracking COVID-19. In recent months, BCPH has used CDC's community level guideline to determine when COVID-19 cases are high and to encourage residents to take extra measures such as masking indoors or washing hands regularly to mitigate the spread of the virus.

Lawrence said the case numbers included in the CDC's community level metric are new cases — not old or backlogged cases. However, not all of the COVID-19 cases that BCPH adds to its dashboard are new, and until recently there was no way to distinguish the old cases from the new.

Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment officials said the state relies on individual health care providers, local public health agencies, labs and hospitals to aggregate the data on its COVID-19 dashboard. This can create data reporting delays. Because of this and the large number of COVID-19 cases in Colorado during the winter omicron surge, old cases are still being manually imported into the state's dashboard.

Since Jan. 1, the state has recorded 4,149 COVID-19 cases in Boulder County that were part of the state's backlog, CDPHE officials said. BCPH has continually received updates with these backlogged cases, but until late last month, the county never updated its dashboard with information to distinguish old cases from new, making it appear like there were more new cases than there actually were.

On May 26, the county posted an alert informing the public that it had received a recent batch of backlogged cases — 555 — from the state that were added to the county's total number of positive COVID-19 cases.

In April, CDPHE changed the way it was sending backlogged data to counties throughout the state. Instead of sending cases sporadically, it began sending cases in batches every two weeks.

Lawrence said that until its May update, the county did not receive backlogged cases in batches and was unable to add the number of old cases into its alerts. She was unable to specify why the county could not differentiate between old cases and new on its dashboard until it began receiving batch emails.

There is no timeline for when the reporting lag from the state will be resolved, Lawrence said.