Gov. Jared Polis orders more oversight, resources for senior care facilities as outbreaks rise

Colorado will tighten oversight on nursing homes and senior living facilities to combat rising coronavirus outbreaks among the state’s most vulnerable population, while essential workers such as grocery store clerks and employees at meatpacking plants will now be required to wear masks.

Gov. Jared Polis announced the new executive order at a news conference Friday, putting some regulatory weight and additional resources — including the National Guard — behind a deepening crisis in facilities across the state.

Nearly half of Colorado’s coronavirus deaths have been tied to residential health care facilities, and the state on Friday confirmed 100 outbreaks at senior living facilities, long-term care centers and factories. Meatpacking plants have been hit especially hard with worker deaths reported at multiple facilities and more than 100 people have tested positive for COVID-19 at the JBS plant in Greeley.

“We really need to up the bar,” Polis said during a news conference. “We know that you all want your parents, your grandparents, to have the very best protection and we want to do our best as a state to provide that.”

 The new order for elder-care facilities includes additional mask requirements for workers and screening requirements for those who come into the facilities, the governor said. The National Guard has been called in to conduct testing at three of the state’s largest facilities, though the governor didn’t identify those by name.

Under Polis’s executive order, all senior care facilities will have to submit an isolation plan for infected residents and staff by May 1 for the state to review, he said.

By early May, the state plans to have 200 isolation beds at St. Anthony’s North Health Campus in Westminster for facilities that cannot accommodate isolation requirements in their own spaces, Polis said.

“While many facilities have complied, others have short-circuited some of those needed temperature checks and questioning of people coming into the building,” the governor said.

When Polis on April 3 introduced the mask recommendation to all Coloradans, it was just that — a strong recommendation. The new executive order mandates that workers in grocery stores, health care facilities and essential food production jobs wear masks. Those who come in contact with customers or goods must also wear gloves.

The governor’s announcement comes as Colorado has confirmed 391 deaths related to COVID-19, and more than 9,000 people have tested positive for the respiratory illness.

There have been 1,755 people hospitalized since the outbreak entered the state last month, but only 858 people were in Colorado hospitals with symptoms of the illness as of Thursday afternoon, state data shows. At least 203 people since Thursday afternoon either went home or were transferred to a lower level of care, like a rehabilitation facility.

As the state builds capacity to conduct extensive contact tracing to monitor the disease after the stay-at-home order is lifted, Polis said cellphone tracking data “in the aggregate, what it does, it gives us a sense of what level of social distancing we’ve achieving.”

The Denver Post reported this week that cellphone data from a variety of sources is actually being gathered and filtered for the governor by a team led by at least seven people, several of them high-level corporate executives with information technology companies in Colorado.

Polis’s statewide stay-at-home order is set to expire April 26, and he and other top health officials have said they still need more testing and contact tracing to be able to contain the virus as restrictions are gradually relaxed.

The governor on Friday pushed back on comments made the previous day by Scott Bookman, the state’s COVID-19 incident commander, who told reporters, “The state won’t reopen until we have the capacity to make everyone safe.”

Polis refuted that quote and said it’s “not true” that he could wait to reopen Colorado until we can “make everybody safe.”

“If any state, if any country, were to wait until we could keep everybody safe,” Polis said, “we’d have to be closed forever.”

“Our public health officials are wonderful,” the governor said, “but they’re not always accustomed to having every word examined as I am, running for office.”

While the economy continues to tumble, financial help is on the way for some, as gig workers on Monday will now be able to file for unemployment. In addition, $4.8 million from the state’s COVID-19 Relief Fund is being distributed to counties around the state, the governor announced.

And four days after the state released much-anticipated data on how the new coronavirus is impacting different racial and ethnic populations, the governor announced a coronavirus health equity response team to address inequities in the access to care. The team will be lead by Web Brown, Colorado’s director for health equity.

The data showed communities of color have been hit disproportionately hard by the COVID-19 outbreak, with higher rates of hospitalizations and deaths for Latinos and Hispanic residents along with African Americans.

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