COVID-19 is rapidly spreading throughout the United States, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is neither transparent nor up-to-date. It is likely that hundreds of people in the greater Denver area are carrying this novel disease due to the constant flow of skiing/snowboarding tourism as well as our big international airport. They are likely experiencing mild symptoms or are asymptomatic and unaware. This increases the probability that the virus will be spread to more vulnerable populations in our state.



Although we do not have the resources to say there is an “outbreak” in our state yet, we should proactively model the last-ditch efforts of other places who have gone before and were seeing steep increases in their positive tests and deaths. South Korea, for example, nearly immediately set up “drive-thru” testing stations and allocated their resources and testing kits to them. They did not have strict guidelines around who could and could not be tested for COVID-19. People who showed up positive self-quarantined, and so far, their mortality rate is practically negligible. Seattle, where an outbreak has been unfolding for over a week, is now activating these methods following the example of South Korea in order to be proactive and in an attempt to significantly decrease exponential growth.

It is far too late to assume that we will be able to trace all positive COVID-19 tests at this point. A woman who was visiting Aspen last week is now back in her home country of Australia. How will we manage finding all of her points of contact? What about the those peoples’ contacts?





Colorado has led the nation in positive change before, and now that we are experiencing what will likely be a pandemic, we must do it again. We need more testing kits. We need looser guidelines around who can be tested. We need more resources & a precautionary state of emergency. We need to re-think resuming normal activity, especially in our schools and universities.

Colorado, do something different!