The state has reached its worst point to date in the pandemic, with thousands of new cases reported each day. The statewide count moved past 240,000 Wednesday.<\/p>\n
A common theme across Colorado public health: Many businesses are failing to self-report outbreaks, as required by law, and people who receive positive test results need to inform anyone they might have exposed because contact tracers can\u2019t get to them all.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t have eyes on every corner,\u201d said Christine Billings, emergency preparedness and response coordinator for Jefferson County Public Health.<\/p>\n
Here are answers to three key questions:<\/p>\n
None.<\/p>\n
While every positive test result gets reported to the state, both the state and local public health agencies have a fairly extensive process making sure that one person with, say, three positive tests in a short timespan doesn\u2019t get entered into the data as three new cases.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018A case\u2019 is not a positive test result, it is a person with a positive test result,\u201d the state health department wrote in an emailed statement to The Sun. \u201cEven if a person tests positive multiple times, they are defined in the data as a case.\u201d<\/p>\n
That data all gets reported to a system called CEDRS, for Colorado Electronic Disease Reporting Systems. The acronym is pronounced \u201ccedars.\u201d<\/p>\n
Each case has a name, date of birth and home address attached to it, and there is a system to catch duplicates, said Nicole Harty, an epidemiologist with Routt County Public Health.<\/p>\n
County health departments also scour the reports for their counties as part of the normal investigation and contact-tracing process. But this can also help them catch duplicate entries that might have slipped past the state system, Harty said.<\/p>\n
In larger counties, some of this work is even automated<\/a>.<\/p>\n Read more at The Colorado Sun<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n