With the thermometer well below zero, cars full of Crested Butte residents lined up on a private air strip starting at 7 a.m. last week to stick swabs up their noses.
While that doesn’t sound like a fun morning for anyone involved, Gunnison County residents and public health officials were eager for the chance to gauge just how much coronavirus is circulating in their community.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment has been deploying teams to help small communities with limited testing resources, like Gunnison, Ouray and San Miguel counties, to run mass screening events so that public health officials can see the full picture of their coronavirus infection load.
Having that knowledge is critical for a number of reasons, including helping to shift where the counties fall on the state’s COVID-19 dial. If mass testing results show the counties are improving, they may even be allowed to relax some restrictions on restaurants and other local businesses.
Outside of the mass testing sites set up in Crested Butte on Dec. 17 and Gunnison on Dec. 18, Gunnison County has only been testing people who are experiencing COVID-19 symptoms or had a known exposure, and is doing so via appointments at the hospital. This is in large part due to limited resources, both in the number of tests available as well as the ability to turn around results in a timely fashion, county emergency manager Scott Morrill said.
That potentially leaves a large swath of individuals who are asymptomatic or presymptomatic — but no less contagious — unidentified, meaning they could continue to spread the virus to others without knowing it.
“We don’t know what we don’t know, so having mass testing helps illuminate that for us,” Gunnison County Public Health Director Joni Reynolds said.
Last week’s results are in and the news is good: Of 1,624 tests, just 44 came back COVID positive, which translates to a 2.7% positivity rate. (Experts say a positivity rate over 5% indicates that a community does not have sufficient testing capacity to understand the community-wide infection rate.) Data on which of those positives were asymptomatic is still being processed.
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