Sixteen Jefferson County residents have died of COVID-19 in the past week, and the county's Board of Health has joined a growing chorus of public health officials in urging Gov. Jared Polis to institute a statewide mask order.
"Trends are going in the wrong direction," the board wrote in a letter to the governor Thursday, "and we implore you to take additional mitigation steps immediately before anyone else loses their life unnecessarily."
The county's letter, which also asks for a stakeholder process to seek ways to improve vaccination rates, is the latest plea to the governor to more directly address the spread of the virus in Colorado. The state's COVID-19 death toll jumped by 1,000 fatalities in roughly a month, and weekly deaths have for weeks been at their highest levels since February. Thanks to staffing shortages and the pandemic's latest surge, state officials have warned that hospital capacity is in its most desperate position of the pandemic thus far.
Up to this point, Polis has favored actions that seek to prevent hospitalizations and protect those facilities' capacity. With the exception of a health order issued last week, which requires vaccine passports for some indoor events in some of the metro area, Polis has not taken any action to alter Coloradans' behavior and address the virus' spread.
Jefferson County has averaged "over one death per day among our residents since July 1, when the current surge began," the board told Polis. Its members said the trends are "extremely disturbing."
State data shows "the growing risk to stymied economic recovery, in-person school attendance, harm to our most vulnerable citizens, continued demand on crippled health care systems and increased deaths," the board wrote. Facing those threats, it continued, the board's members "respectfully seek your urgent leadership" to institute masks and improve vaccination rates.
The letter comes six days after a coalition of metro-area public health departments — including Jefferson County's — urged Polis to implement a statewide mask order and a vaccine passport system for restaurants, bars and gyms. The coalition also sought vaccine mandates for more workers statewide, including school personnel. The Colorado Association of Public Health Officials has also requested a statewide mask mandate, as has San Juan Basin Public Health.
Polis has steadfastly refused to implement a mask order. He has said the unvaccinated — who are primarily driving hospitalizations and deaths — are least likely to follow a mask order and that vaccinated Coloradans shouldn't be required to take that step because of others' choices. He's also pointed to New Mexico, which has a mask order and is seeing rising case rates, as evidence that face-coverings aren't a silver bullet.
A spokesman for the New Mexico Department of Health told the Gazette earlier this week that "the science is unequivocal: when high-quality masks are worn correctly, they are incredibly effective at reducing the spread of COVID-19. Without a mask mandate, New Mexico would have more cases."
In a statement responding to the metro-area health departments' letter, Polis spokesman Conor Cahill indicated the governor still favored local authorities taking these actions themselves. Polis was a "willing partner to support local actions tailored to local circumstances such as mask policies," Cahill wrote.
But the metro leaders, representing some of the largest public health agencies in the state, say that approach is insufficient, given how intertwined the health system is statewide.
"We all recognize and agree that this is a statewide crisis," Bob McDonald, the executive director of the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment, said in an interview Tuesday, "and a patchwork of public health orders and mandates is not going to get us where we need to be."
"We continue to take steps within our county to help slow the spread of the virus," the Jefferson County Board of Health wrote, "and we request your assistance to encourage our fellow counties to do the same. We are all in this together."
