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The Durango Herald conducted a question-and-answer interview with Liane Jollon, executive director of San Juan Basin Public Health. The Q&A was held Tuesday morning shortly after the health department issued its “Safer La Plata” order, which extended the timeline for reopening some nonessential businesses in La Plata County, including personal services, such as salons, tattoo parlors, dog groomers, massage, personal training and others.

Here’s what Jollon said after the announcement of her Safer La Plata order:

Q: Can you explain what went into the decision to extend some aspects of the shutdown?A: Two things went into this decision.

One, is the criteria for safely reopening includes demonstrating a decrease in cases prior to starting to reopen. And while we’re showing really stable numbers in La Plata County, we know that we’re part of a region where people travel for work and essential goods and services, and we’re not seeing this stabilization in northern New Mexico, and we don’t want to put either of our communities in a riskier situation.

The other part is, the things that came online with the governor’s safer-at-home order on (Monday) April 27, which include some low-risk additions to businesses, like curbside retail or delivery retail, we have guidance to make sure employees and customers are safe. We feel like those are small steps, and we’re just slowly integrating the next step so business and community members can learn how to do this safely, while we know we’re in a region with tremendously growing infection rates.

Q: How heavily does the situation in northern New Mexico affect decision-making here? Is there anything we can do to help?A: If you look at our numbers, we have most of the ingredients to make the small steps to reopen, but there isn’t a wall around our city. We’re part of a region, and the virus doesn’t know what side of the state line it’s in. With that, we owe it to all our community members on both sides of the border to continue to move slowly and carefully.

Until we have good resources everywhere to fight this, we’re all going to be at some level of risk. In an ideal world, we would have more testing resources, we’d have more public health ability to investigate cases.

But we just don’t have the resources to go across the state line and offer more. We’ve collaborated on contact tracing, we’ve reached out for help/support, and so have they. So we’re absolutely working across state and county lines.

Q: Is it possible the public health order will be extended beyond May 8?A: (By extending the shutdown), it gives our businesses time to learn and get the resources and train their staff on what their business is going to look like, for those that can open. It’s not all businesses, that’s clear.

We’re very much on target for that date, but of course, if we had something like a doubling of cases here over the next week, or some other difficult and unfortunate events, we’d have to have this conversation again, and we really don’t want to.

Q: What if northern New Mexico doesn’t improve by May 8, would La Plata County still reopen?A: If businesses have figured out a way to take baby steps and practice really good infection control and want to open, that will be allowed.

We also suspect a lot of businesses won’t open. We’ve heard a lot of that from the business community, that just because they can reopen doesn’t mean they will until we have a better handle, all of us, on what’s happening with this infection.

Q: Have we reached the peak yet in Southwest Colorado?A: We have not peaked. That’s the whole trick of the flattening the curve: If you practice good social distancing, you don’t see the peaks we’re all worried about. So it kind of gets us into a difficult spot. We’re causing a lot of challenges in the community by social distancing, and it’s hard to understand why we’re doing it because we’re not seeing that peak come.

But it’s a trick your brain is playing on you: You’re not seeing that peak come because we’re doing that hard work in social distancing. And here, we’re trying to loosen up a little bit, get a little bit of business going and keep that from starting a surge.

Q: What is our ability to contact trace?A: The community has done such a good job social distancing and keeping case numbers low that we’ve been able to contact trace really effectively with our staff. We interview all lab-confirmed positive cases, we get a good accounting of anyone they’ve had direct contact with in the last 14 days. Then we contact those individuals, and we don’t share information about lab-confirmed cases to protect privacy.

Quite frankly, we’ve had some really close calls in this community with case investigation, and we’re proud of the work our staff has done to prevent things like the Aurora Walmart (where an outbreak at the store resulted in three deaths).

Q: If business reopens May 8, is it possible there could be another closure in the future?A: We heard the governor say again this weekend he expects with the decision to transition to safer-at-home, there may be adjustments statewide around what’s open in the future.

What we’re doing locally is no different: We’re watching the numbers really closely, and we want to keep the community safe. And we’re very luckily – unlike most communities in Colorado – with the amount of testing we have. We can do this (reopen) because we have enough testing, and there are very few communities that can say they can do that.