AURORA | Tri-County Health Department’s public health orders requiring masks in indoor spaces and schools will be allowed to expire Friday, Feb. 4, at which time public health officials believe that case rates will be much lower than they were in early January.
The Tri-County board of health, which now consists only of representatives from Adams and Arapahoe county, had a meeting Monday to discuss the orders. The board passed a mask mandate for school districts and childcare facilities in August, and just before Thanksgiving joined other metro counties in passing an indoor mask mandate due to strained hospital capacity and high levels of the delta variant.
Now, health officials say the state of the pandemic in the region has reversed, with case counts falling dramatically.
“They’re frankly more dramatic than anyone expected,” Tri-County executive director Dr. John Douglas said of the decline in COVID-19 case rates.
Douglas presented to the board on the current health data, and shared that after the omicron variant caused a surge in cases in late December and early January, cases have fallen steadily for the past two weeks and are projected to be on an ongoing downward trajectory.
Two weeks ago each county had a 7-day incidence rate of about 1,500 cases per 100,000 people, Douglas said. On Monday, each was in the 500s range.
That’s “nothing short of an unprecedentedly dramatic drop,” he said.
The health department also estimates that currently about 75% of the population is immune to the omicron variant, either through vaccination or natural immunity due to being infected. Because of omicron’s highly contagious nature, people who are unvaccinated have already contracted the virus or can expect to contract it in the near future, Douglas said.
“There is a very high likelihood that a very large fraction unless they were really completely sequestered, got infected with omicron during the past month,” he said of the unvaccinated.
Based on current projections he said that by mid-February over 80% of the population is expected to be immune, and that by Feb. 10 transmission could fall from “high” to “moderate,” defined as fewer than 50 cases per 100,000.
The department initially passed the indoor mask mandate to protect hospital capacity, which was threatened in the fall by significant numbers of people becoming seriously ill. The order was initially supposed to stay in place until hospital ICU capacity in the region was above 10% for two weeks.
That target has not been reached yet, but Douglas said since Jan. 16 hospital capacity has had its greatest sustained increase since before Thanksgiving. And because so many people are now immune, transmission of the virus is much less tied to hospitalization than it was in the fall.
On a practical level, enforcement of the mask mandate has also become more difficult to control. There is more compliance fatigue in the community, and the department does not have the capacity to enforce the mandate everywhere it is in place.
In one slide of a powerpoint presentation he included photos of local school sporting events, which included many maskless fans.
After strict adherence in the early going of the pandemic, masks have become very much a hit-or-miss proposition at local high school sporting events in recent weeks. The winter prep season has seen masks required for entry and to take the floor in sports like boys and girls basketball, but largely have been worn improperly or removed during competition with little to no enforcement from officials or host schools. Most referees have done away with wearing masks as well.
There is no perfect time to end the mandate, Douglas said, but as time goes on society will have to transition from viewing COVID-19 as a pandemic to treating it as an endemic disease.
Ultimately, he recommended to the board that both mandates be allowed to expire on Friday, Feb. 4. Future public health orders are not off the table if other variants appear, he cautioned.
School superintendents Chris Gdowski from Adams 12 and Rico Munn from Aurora Public Schools joined the meeting to discuss how this would affect schools. Both said their districts have other measures in place that they can use to help protect students who are at higher medical risk without a mandate, including managing where students are seated and using portable air filtration devices. (APS also has a vaccine requirement for employees.)
The district has been working over the past several months to accommodate students who cannot wear masks for medical reasons, so “to a degree we will flip those conversations,” Munn said. Students’ needs will be handled on a case-by-case basis, he said.
The motion passed 5-1, with Rosanna Reyes the one dissenting member. Reyes suggested during the meeting that the expiration date be pushed back a week so that schools would have more lead time to prepare, but did not garner any other supporters.
Julie Mullica acknowledged that the decision was not easy, and that the board has received hundreds of emails from people on both sides of the issue.
Local students will still be required to wear masks on school buses, as that mandate is being enforced at the federal level.
Courtney Oakes contributed to this report
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