The great Ricky Bobby once said, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” The new-for-2023 Pacifico Gore IV Raft Challenge had a little Talladega Nights feel Thursday in Vail as Cole Bangert and John Anicito’s “Shake.
After four weeks of declining positivity rates, Eagle County is seeing a “dramatic increase” in COVID-19 infections, which local public health leaders say is evidence that the new rapidly spreading omicron variant is present in…
Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post
Eagle’s County’s first confirmed COVID-19 case arrived exactly 12 months ago on March 6, just one day after Colorado’s first case was discovered in neighboring Summit County.
But it’s clear that the virus was here and spreading much earlier than that, based on extensive interviews with health care workers and officials from Vail Health and Colorado Mountain Medical.
“We had COVID in this community in February. We had COVID all over the United States in February. We just didn’t have the ability to identify it,” said Chris Lindley, the chief population health officer for Vail Health who has spearheaded the hospital’s COVID-19 response since the start. “The testing was not in place until March to identify a case at all in the country, let alone in this valley. And so once we started looking for COVID in early March, we found it right away.”
Vail Health Hospital pharmacist Jessica Peterson, left, places two boxes of mock COVID-19 vaccines into the hospital s ultra-cold freezer at the hospital on Dec. 8 in Vail. The mock vaccines are packaged in the thermal shipping containers that uses dry ice to maintain a temperature of between -60 to -86 degrees celsius to keep the vaccines cold. They in turn will be transferred to these ultra-cold freezer to maintain those temperatures. There are only a handful of hospitals that have these very specialized ultra-cold freezers which will limit in the beginning where the vaccines will end up in Colorado. Vail Health Hospital has the capacity to store up to 5,000 doses in its freezer.