by Mark Craddock
The holy water fonts at the entrance to St. Mary Catholic Church in Walsenburg are presently empty. This is a common practice during Lent. The fonts are traditionally re-filled on Easter.
This year, they will likely remain dry after the April 12 holiday.
Before Saturday’s evening Mass, and again on Sunday, a volunteer read a directive to the parishioners:
For now, they are not to hold hands during the Lord’s Prayer and, during the “sign of peace” are encouraged to nod to their neighbors rather than make bodily contact.
There will be no communal chalice of wine during Holy Communion, and priests are encouraged to deliver the Eucharist by hand, already a common practice, rather than to a parishioner’s tongue.
Priests and lay ministers providing Communion are urged to disinfect their hands with sanitizer before and after delivering the sacrament.
And parishioners who are sick are excused from attending Mass.
In a more secular vein, The Spanish Peaks Regional Health Center and Veterans’ Nursing Home has suspended entertainment by outside entertainers, a first step to limit their residents’ potential exposure to the virus. “We’re just trying to be very judicious,” SPRHC Public Information Officer Debbie Channel said.
”We’re just trying to err on the side of caution and trying to keep our residents as safe as we can. It’s our job to protect them and shame on us if we didn’t do everything that we can.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said people over age 60, and especially over 80, and those with underlying health conditions, are at a higher risk of becoming very sick. Most of the SPRHC residents fall into that high-risk category.
Welcome to the world of coronavirus prevention and the concept of “non-pharmaceutical intervention” – the panoply of strategies people and organizations can take to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Beyond the confines of rural southern Colorado, which state health officials still deem relatively safe, many corporations are curtailing employees’ business air travel and large public events face cancellation.
Such moves took on a finer point last week when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that an attendee of last month’s CPAC convention in Maryland, an annual gathering of political conservatives, tested positive for COVID-19. President Donald Trump and a number of other White House officials attended the conference, along with about 19,000 other people. So far, five senior Republicans have self-quarantined.
The state health department has established a call line for the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). People who have general questions about COVID-19 can call CO HELP at 303-389-1687 or 1-877-462-2911, for answers in many languages, or email them at COHELP@RMPDC.org for answers in English.
The state of the state
On Tuesday, Gov. Jared Polis declared a state of emrgency because of the growing coronavirus threat. At a morning press conference, he said the state is raising its emergency preparedness to the second- highest level, to prepare as much as possible for COVID-19.
State health officials said it is possible that there were already mild cases in the state, beyond those which have been reported.
“It is possible that mild cases are going undetected by the medical system and spreading,” said Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment executive director Jill Hunsaker Ryan.
Polis said Colorado’s readiness includes 650,000 N95 masks and the capacity to test 160 people per day— free of charge.
The number of presumptive positive cases – those who have tested positive for COVID-19 by state labs but have not been officially confirmed by the CDC – jumped from two cases announced March 5 to 17 as of Tuesday evening, March 10, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
The state did not post the total number of tests it had administered as of Wednesday morning, a change from previous reporting protocols.
The first recorded case announced last week is an out-of-state resident in his 30s who officials say was exposed during international travel or contact with an out-of-state case.
He was staying in a Summit County condo with friends while skiing at Keystone and Vail resorts, when he exhibited symptoms and was seen at Summit Medical Center in Frisco. He was transferred to a Denver hospital, where he remains in isolation.
Broken down by county, Arapahoe County has seen two presumptive positives; Jefferson County, one case; Denver County, five (plus one indeterminate case); Douglas County, three cases; Eagle County, three cases; El Paso County, one case; Summit County, one case (currently isolated in Adams County); and Larimer County, one case.
On Wednesday, the World Health Organization officially declared the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus as a global pandemic.
According to the W.H.O., an epidemic is defined as a regional outbreak of an illness that spreads unexpectedly. In 2010, it defined a pandemic as “the worldwide spread of a new disease” that affects large numbers of people.
There is now evidence on six continents of sustained transmission of the virus, which has infected more than 120,000 people and killed more than 4,300.