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Community members remaining vigilant with hygiene, social distancing, etc. is the best way to ensure an earlier opening.

The 8th Amended Public Health Orders were signed today, 4/25/2020. There will be three dates with different aspects of the order taking effect.

The next public health order will describe our first steps into the stabilization period of Covid-19 response.

While we have a continued focus on increasing diverse testing capabilities, we do currently have 1,000 tests available. Thus far we have efficiently used the testing we have with one of the most successful screening sites in the state.

Cathie Pagano has been appointed/identified as the Section Chief for the Recovery Section as part of Incident Command.

We are actively working on a phased reopening of the County. We are using locally gathered data as well as guidance from the Colorado Association of Local Public Health Officials.

Many countries, like Italy, Spain, the US and others, only test people who are showing symptoms leading to a wrong age distribution of cases in the population. With data from South Korea, which tested comprehensively across the entire population- symptoms or not- we see an uneven distribution towards younger people. Even if you are not showing symptoms, you could be spreading the virus.

Staff at Incident Command will be taking a day of rest on Sunday. We will have a skeleton crew in place in case there is pressing information that needs to be pushed to the public. Do NOT look for the 5pm update tomorrow. We will resume normal updates on Monday.

The state of Colorado has recently changed its definition of a positive case and that has caused a discrepancy in our local counts and the state level counts. We are working to align those counts. The changes are around the state counting the probable positive cases while we have only been counting the confirmed positives and presumed positive.

While you are home, we strongly encourage you to take this opportunity to fill out your Census information online. Recent reports show that about 50% of households in Colorado have put in their Census data but the figure for Gunnison County was a dismal 16%.