Indeed, hospitalizations have actually gone up in recent days, case counts have apparently plateaued at a level higher than experts would like, and variants are growing rapidly including one that had been merely categorized as under investigation but is now considered to be of significant concern.
The press conference took place more than twenty minutes late because Polis was spending time with Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, who were in Colorado to promote the American Rescue Plan recently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden. Polis stressed that one underappreciated aspect of the measure is additional money to support state vaccination and testing sites. He also noted plans for increased supplies of the medication over the coming weeks, which will allow the state to stock six new large-scale inoculation sites expected to be up and running across Colorado by the month s end.
David Zalubowski/AP
A pedestrian in a face-covering walks past the sign plastered on the windows of a restaurant to announce that it is open after closure because of the coronavirus Thursday, Feb. 25, 2021, in Boulder, Colo.
While Colorado has moved beyond the winter COVID-19 crisis, cases and positive test numbers have stubbornly resisted returning to summer levels, and now hospitalizations are showing worrying signs of rising again.
State hospitalization data released Monday showed the number of patients hospitalized with confirmed cases of COVID-19 rose by 45 between March 15, and the day before a 16 percent jump from 283 to 328, the biggest spike since late November.
Hospitalizations because of the novel coronavirus have remained fairly steady in Colorado over the past seven days, and overall positive cases are down during the same period, though they ve been rising in recent days and could increase even more once people are able to dig out from the major snowstorm that hit the area and get tested. Moreover, both COVID-19 variants of concern and variants under investigation took substantial leaps, even as authorities are grappling with the appearance of new infections of the South African version initially discovered at a Buena Vista jail.
Here are the fresh figures, updated after 4 p.m. on March 14. We ve juxtaposed them with numbers from March 7, highlighted in our last COVID-19 roundup:
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