{"id":44434,"date":"2021-10-01T19:30:00","date_gmt":"2021-10-02T01:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/silverton-is-about-as-vaccinated-as-it-can-get-but-it-still-has-covid\/"},"modified":"2021-10-02T01:30:00","modified_gmt":"2021-10-02T01:30:00","slug":"silverton-is-about-as-vaccinated-as-it-can-get-but-it-still-has-covid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/silverton-is-about-as-vaccinated-as-it-can-get-but-it-still-has-covid\/","title":{"rendered":"Silverton is about as vaccinated as it can get. But it still has COVID."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"The
The town of Silverton in San Juan County. (Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald file)<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

San Juan County, Colorado, can boast that 99.9% of its eligible population has received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, putting it in the top 10 counties in the nation, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.<\/p>\n

If vaccines were the singular armor against COVID-19\u2019s spread, then on paper, San Juan County, with its 730 or so residents on file, would be one of the most bulletproof places in the nation.<\/p>\n

Yet the past few months have shown the complexity of this phase of the pandemic. Even in an extremely vaccinated place, the shots alone aren\u2019t enough because geographic boundaries are porous, vaccine effectiveness may be waning over time and the delta variant is highly contagious. Infectious-disease experts say masks are still necessary to control the spread of the virus.<\/p>\n

The county logged its first hospitalizations of the pandemic in early August \u2013 this year, not 2020. Five summer residents were hospitalized. Three ended up on ventilators: Two recovered and the third, a 53-year-old woman, died at the end of August. All were believed to be unvaccinated.<\/p>\n

Those cases and even the ones that didn\u2019t need hospitalization raised the alarms for the county with a single incorporated town: Silverton. It\u2019s a tight-knit former mining community nestled in the mountains of Southwest Colorado, where snowstorms and avalanches often block the lone road that passes through.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pandemic is just still going on,\u201d said DeAnne Gallegos, the county\u2019s public information officer and director of the local chamber of commerce. \u201cWe kept thinking it was going to end before this summer. Then we were thinking in November. Now we\u2019re like, \u2018No, we don\u2019t know when.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Aspen
Aspen trees turn color above Silverton. (Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald file)<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

So the county decided to backtrack: \u201cWe went back to the tools that we knew we had,\u201d Gallegos said. \u201cMask mandate indoors and then discouraging indoor events.\u201d Outdoor events continued, such as a brass band concert on the courthouse steps, and the area\u2019s signature Hardrockers Holidays mining competition, with its pneumatic mucking and spike driving.<\/p>\n

On the whole, once the under-12 set is taken into account, 85% of the county\u2019s total population is fully vaccinated. But in the summer, the population nearly doubles as seasonal residents roost in second homes and RV parks, some vacationing while others take up seasonal jobs. Then, there\u2019s what Gallegos described as \u201cthe tsunami of tourism\u201d \u2013 the daily influx of people arriving on the historical railroad from Durango and the dusty jeep trails through the mountains. Many of those visitors are of unknown vaccination status.<\/p>\n

The county\u2019s two-week incidence shot up in August to the highest rate in the state, and stayed there for most of the month. Even though that spike amounted to a grand total of about 40 known cases, it was nearly as many as the county had logged during the entirety of the pandemic \u2013 and cases spilled into the vaccinated as well.<\/p>\n

Any number of cases would be a big deal in a small place without its own hospital.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are all one-man bands just trying to make it happen,\u201d Gallegos said.<\/p>\n

The county\u2019s public health director, Becky Joyce, for example, does everything from contact tracing and COVID-19 testing to putting shots in arms. And when the county restarted its mask mandate, it was Gallegos who designed the signs and spent her weekend zip-tying them around town.<\/p>\n

The biggest concentration of COVID-19 cases happened at an RV park and a music festival driven indoors by rain.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes sense that coming out of three or four weeks of just jamming tourism, people were starting to get sick who work in the restaurants, at the RV parks,\u201d Gallegos said. \u201cAnd then you bring all the locals condensed together for a couple of nights of concerts and it was just the trifecta.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dana Chambers, who runs the hardware store in Silverton, was vaccinated as soon as possible. She said returning to a mask mandate felt in some ways like \u201ca step back.\u201d But, she said, businesses like hers need the summer tourism rush to survive the quiet winter, when just a few hundred tourists come, largely to jump out of helicopters onto ski terrain.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we have to wear the mask, that\u2019s what we\u2019ll do,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Julia Raifman, a Boston University School of Public Health epidemiologist who is following state pandemic policies, isn\u2019t surprised COVID-19 can attack a place like San Juan County despite high vaccination rates.<\/p>\n

Data shows the vaccines protect against death and hospitalization because of COVID-19. But even effective vaccines are no match for the transmissibility of delta.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven in the best-case scenario \u2013 if vaccines reduce transmission by 80% \u2013 you\u2019re actually twice as likely to get COVID now than you were in July,\u201d Raifman said, because of the virus\u2019 recent proliferation. \u201cIt\u2019s impossible statistically to achieve herd immunity with the delta variant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, many local and national leaders, including in Colorado, continue to focus on the vaccines almost exclusively as the path forward.<\/p>\n

Talia Quandelacy, an epidemiologist with the University of Colorado-Denver and the Colorado School of Public Health, said the concept of herd immunity in this pandemic has been oversimplified and over-relied-on.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a useful guide to have some sort of target to aim for,\u201d she said. \u201cBut usually, if we hit a certain metric, that doesn\u2019t mean that transmission or the pandemic is just going to disappear.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many scientists agree that, especially with most of the world still unvaccinated, COVID-19 is likely here to stay, eventually morphing into something more like the common cold.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s probably going to be a matter of a couple of years,\u201d Quandelacy said. \u201cBut that seems to be the trajectory that we are on.\u201d<\/p>\n

For that reason, the \u201cfinish line\u201d language used by many politicians has frustrated Anne Sosin, a policy fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College studying COVID-19 and rural health. The vaccines are doing what they\u2019re supposed to do \u2013 keeping people from getting really sick, not keeping them from ever getting infected \u2013 but that hasn\u2019t been communicated well.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe messaging around this has not been very nuanced,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She pointed to the experience of an epidemiologist who wrote in August in The Baltimore Sun<\/em> that he\u2019d caught COVID-19 at a house party where all 14 guests and the host were vaccinated. The host had infected him and nine others.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs miraculous as they are in keeping people out of the hospital and alive, we can\u2019t rely on them alone to prevent infection,\u201d Sosin said of the vaccines.<\/p>\n

And public health experts said San Juan County shows that measures such as masks, ventilation and distancing are also needed. They are circulating the \u201cSwiss cheese\u201d model of COVID-19 defense, in which each prevention measure (or layer of cheese) has holes in it, but when stacked together they create an effective defense. Sosin said rural places, in particular, may need those layers of defense because residents are often tightly connected, and disease travels quickly within social networks.<\/p>\n

Joyce, the public health director, who declined an interview request, wrote on Facebook in August that the county\u2019s recent experience proved \u201cthe vaccine creates a line of defense but does not make us invincible to this disease or the variants.\u201d<\/p>\n

Raifman views that realization \u2013 paired with San Juan\u2019s ensuing indoor mask requirement \u2013 as a success at a pivotal moment. The monthlong mandate was then lifted Sept. 10, as the county had dropped back to a low COVID-19 transmission rate. At the time, it was the only county in Colorado with such low transmission.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the moment where we kind of define: How are we managing the virus over the longer term?\u201d Raifman said. \u201cSo far, we\u2019re defining that we don\u2019t manage it; we let it manage us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even after lifting its mask mandate, the Facebook page of the county\u2019s public health department urges residents to wear masks and \u201cpay attention to the COVID-19 situation just as you pay attention to the weather.\u201d<\/p>\n

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. It is one of the three major operating programs at the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not related to Kaiser Permanente.<\/em><\/p>\n

Subscribe to KHN\u2019s free Morning Briefing<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

aren\u2019t enough to prevent spread because of porous geographic boundaries and waning vaccine effectiveness<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[685,28,668,1562,327],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-44434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-coronavirus-covid-19","tag-headlines","tag-public-health","tag-san-juan-county-colorado","tag-silverton"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44434\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44434"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=44434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}