Colorado’s coronavirus surge swamps count, exposure trackers

Thursday, Dec 3, 2020 4:36 PM

County health departments have turned to robocalling and spend hours hunting for duplicates

Moe Clark/The Colorado SunP.J. Parmar, a family physician, tests a patient for the coronavirus in the parking lot of his clinic in Aurora on April 15, 2020. The medical clinic is part of the Mango House, a shared space for refugees and asylum seekers.

Kathryn Scott/Special to The Colorado SunJulianna Sandoval, 24, pauses for a COVID-19 nasal swab test from Dr. Sarah Rowan from Denver Health Medical Center. Rowan and other medical staff administered a free drive-up COVID-19 testing in the parking lot of Abraham Lincoln High School on November 7, 2020.

Jesse Paul/The Colorado SunColorado Gov. Jared Polis receives a coronavirus test in Wheat Ridge on Monday, May 18, 2020, to show Coloradans how quick and easy it is. Polis says everyone in Colorado who has coronavirus symptoms can now be tested.

Colorado’s daily flood of new coronavirus cases is overwhelming the local public health officials who work to accurately count cases and inform anyone who might have been exposed by each new contagious person.

It’s become impossible to keep up.

The Colorado Sun checked in with public health workers in several counties to find out how their ability to conduct contact-tracing has changed in the last few weeks as cases have spiked and if they’re confident in their case tallies.

The state has reached its worst point to date in the pandemic, with thousands of new cases reported each day. The statewide count moved past 240,000 Wednesday.

A common theme across Colorado public health: Many businesses are failing to self-report outbreaks, as required by law, and people who receive positive test results need to inform anyone they might have exposed because contact tracers can’t get to them all.

“We don’t have eyes on every corner,” said Christine Billings, emergency preparedness and response coordinator for Jefferson County Public Health.

Here are answers to three key questions:

How many of these “new” cases are just the same people being recorded multiple times?

None.

While every positive test result gets reported to the state, both the state and local public health agencies have a fairly extensive process making sure that one person with, say, three positive tests in a short timespan doesn’t get entered into the data as three new cases.

“‘A case’ is not a positive test result, it is a person with a positive test result,” the state health department wrote in an emailed statement to The Sun. “Even if a person tests positive multiple times, they are defined in the data as a case.”

That data all gets reported to a system called CEDRS, for Colorado Electronic Disease Reporting Systems. The acronym is pronounced “cedars.”

Each case has a name, date of birth and home address attached to it, and there is a system to catch duplicates, said Nicole Harty, an epidemiologist with Routt County Public Health.

County health departments also scour the reports for their counties as part of the normal investigation and contact-tracing process. But this can also help them catch duplicate entries that might have slipped past the state system, Harty said.

In larger counties, some of this work is even automated.

Moe Clark/The Colorado SunRaz Al-Jaf, a medical assistant who works at Ardas Family Medicine, documents coronavirus test results in the clinics system on April 15, 2020.