Capital Views

 

December 16, 2020



We are very fortunate in rural Colorado to have young people who have been raised to use common sense, to be honest, and to tell it like it is. 

Two of our high school students in NE Colorado made the news with their pleas for some normalcy. They addressed the Governor and Colorado High School Activities Association and both shared concerns about the mental health of Colorado youth and how the governor seems to have missed the message that our young people deserve some sense of stability in these trying times. 

According to a Denver news station, Governor Polis actually called one of them — only to deliver his usual political say-nothing to the brave young man. He is quoted as saying, “I hope the young man is successful in getting activities back in eastern Colorado and across our state.”

What?!

The Governor and Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment are the entities responsible for preventing these activities from happening. When I reached out to CHSAA, their public affairs spokesperson explained to me that all extracurricular activities have been indefinitely delayed at the behest of CDPHE, who essentially act as an extension of the Governor’s office.

The Governor’s and CHSAA’s responses raise the question: who and what can we believe?

Early in this pandemic we were told that if we comply with these restrictions for a couple of weeks, we would flatten the curve. At nine months (and counting!), have we flattened the curve yet?

We were told that hospital facilities were being built at both the Convention Center in Denver and The Ranch in Larimer County. Neither have been used. 

We learned that the death numbers for COVID were artificially inflated and then adjusted. Then we learned that multiple positive results for the same person — during the same infection with subsequent tests — have all been recorded as individual positives in the total number of positive tests, implying more new cases than what actually exist.

More recently, the Governor stated that one in every forty-one Coloradans are contagious with the virus. Without batting an eye, the news media and other high-profile people echoed that so-called fact without a trace of research.

That statement didn’t make sense to me, so I inquired as to how that number was derived. I was told that CDPHE took the population of Colorado — 5.76 million people — and divided that by the number of cases actually reported. They multiplied that number by two, because they guess that half of all cases are not reported and then multiply by nine because that is the number of days people with the virus are contagious. 

Easy enough; I decided to do the math myself. At that time online sources such as https://covidtracking.com/data/#state-co were reporting roughly 3,500 cases per day. Using their formula, I came up with one in over 100. The Governor’s assertion that one in forty-one people in Colorado are contagious using CDPHE’s own formula would equate to a new daily positive count of 15,609. Are the governor’s people dishonest or just bad at math?

We all know the pandemic is real and has real consequences.

People in rural Colorado are smart, they can figure out when they are fed a regular ration of BS. These high school students understand that the information they are being fed doesn’t make sense. They understand that lives are at stake — as is the mental health of our youth.

The Governor’s attempt to sidestep his own responsibility in the destruction of our youths’ health is unacceptable. Part of leadership is the ability to self-assess and admit when you are wrong so that you can fix the problem. A leader with the courage to face his mistakes head-on would be a much-needed bright spot of hope for Coloradans as we close out 2020. 

Let’s pray that our holiday gift from Governor Polis will be a little bit of honesty and a lot of action.

 

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