DENVER | As COVID-19 cases continue to rise in Colorado the state is preparing to increase surge capacity in its hospital system, but has no plans for another stay at home order.
Gov. Jared Polis provided an update at a Friday afternoon news conference, where he gave much of the same information he had in the past about the state’s worsening situation and the need for Coloradans to wear masks and limit interaction with people outside their households.
He was particularly blunt about the risks that could come from traveling to see family over the Thanksgiving holidays. If you have a 10-person Thanksgiving gathering, there is a one in 11 chance that someone will have COVID-19, he said.
If you plan to have Thanksgiving with people outside of your household, he said you should start quarantining today in order to keep family members, especially older relatives, safe.
He described traveling without quarantining beforehand as “bringing a loaded pistol for grandma’s head.”
There are currently 1,159 Coloradans hospitalized for COVID-19 and the state has over an 11% positivity rate. Like the nation, Colorado is hitting record levels of people testing positive for the virus each day, and statewide one in 110 Coloradans are contagious for COVID-19.
“These are our darkest days as a state,” Polis said.
Polis said he is signing an executive order to provide direction to the state’s hospitals about the order of steps they should take to increase surge capacity. If hospital capacity decreases, moratoriums on elective surgeries may have to be implemented.
Activating the state’s three alternative care sites — the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, St. Mary Corwin in Pueblo and St. Anthony North Health Campus in Westminster — will be a last resort. He said that the state is closer to having to do that than it was two weeks ago.
Polis repeatedly evaded questions about whether the state would impose another stay at home order considering the worsening situation. He said that he thought the stay at home order was a “blunt tool” that was necessary in the spring because of a lack of PPE and hospital surge capacity. Now that the state has more surge capacity and Coloradans know what they need to do to decrease spread of the virus, he did not think it was as necessary.
He pushed back at assertions that Coloradans have lost the collective will to respond adequately to the pandemic given that they have been told for months what kind of precautions need to be taken.
“This is not a lost cause,” he said.
Polis was more direct than he had been in the past about a lack of support from the federal government.
“We could do better if we had stronger messaging from President Trump and the White House,” he said in response to a question. The president can reach some people that he can’t reach, he said, and he wished Trump would “reengage” with efforts to combat COVID-19.
If people took nothing else from the news conference, he asked that they stop interacting with people outside their household for the next month.
“Our numbers will continue getting worse if nothing is done,” he said.