Colorado’s K-12 educators and those 65 and older will begin receiving COVID-19 vaccinations Feb. 8, Gov. Jared Polis said Friday, an effort to ensure schools reopen and can stay open to the state’s ever-shifting vaccine priority list.
A third to half of the state’s vaccine allocation beginning Feb. 8 will go to the state’s educators, an effort that will take two to three weeks, Polis said at a press conference. As much as half of the state’s weekly vaccine inoculation will go to classroom teachers, bus drivers, child care workers, educational paraprofessionals and other support staff.
It does not include anyone working in higher education unless they qualify because of their age. Polis has repeatedly stressed the need to vaccine K-12 staff to keep schools open, classes consistent and allow parents to continue working. He said Friday that while higher-education staff and educators were important, it was not as important as ensuring K-12 schools could continue in-person classes.
While inoculating educators, the state will also begin vaccinating the 65-and-older population. Previously, the cutoff had been 70 and older. Polis said 40% of that group has been vaccinated. Still, that leaves hundreds of thousands of the most at-risk Coloradans without an inoculation. Polis said that anyone in that age group who wants the shot will be able to receive it in February. He said that the uptake by that group will slow as time goes on, and rather than waste vaccine, the state is turning to its next priorities.
All of the state’s nursing home residents and staff have had first doses administered by Walgreens or CVS, and 70% have had their second doses.
Friday’s news marks another shift by the state in its vaccine priority list, expanding its phase one into a four-tiered grid that still leaves most Coloradans in the latter phases. Polis said the priorities may change again in the coming weeks, as more information about vaccine supply — potentially augmented by another vaccine getting approved — becomes available.
Though shipments are improving in size and stability, the state is still receiving far fewer doses than would be needed for a rapid inoculation effort. Indeed, this latest change will bring another 408,000 Coloradans into the vaccine queue, said Scott Bookman, the state’s COVID incident commander. That’s about how many Coloradans have received a first dose as of Friday, six weeks since the vaccine first arrived here. The next group — essential workers and those with certain health conditions — is even larger, totaling more than a million.
Initially, the first phase was supposed to be various health care workers, first responders and the residents and staff of long-term care facilities. Now, by the end of this new first phase, which now will chug into March, the state will have targeted roughly a third of Colorado’s total population for priority vaccination.
Bookman said the state’s goal is to vaccinate 55% of educators and those between 65 and 70 by March 5; educators’ first doses should be done before then.
When the first priority list was unveiled late last year, educators criticized their absence. Polis and the state then tweaked it, giving teachers and school staff more emphasis, albeit one delayed until the spring. This latest tweak, though, earned praised from the Colorado Education Association.
“We want to thank Gov. Polis for listening to the voices of educators on COVID-19 safety in schools, ” association President Amie Baca-Oehlert said in a statement. “For the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has and continues to take a tremendous toll on educators, students, and their families. While we believe that all essential workers should be a priority for the COVID-19 vaccine, this is a gigantic step toward our longstanding goal of getting our students back into classrooms, where the best learning takes place.”
To sign up, teachers and educators should consult with their school districts. Polis said the districts were engaging with providers, a contrast to the provider-to-patient model that’s frustrated some older Coloradans this month.
Those 65 and older will still follow the same process that those 70 and older had to take, meaning they’ll need to reach out to a local provider to make an appointment. The vaccine remains free to all. Eligible Coloradans can get the vaccine regardless of the county they live in or if they have a prior relationship with the hospital system offering it.
This latest tweak to the state’s priority list had been teased in recent days, after Colorado National Guard Brig. Gen. Scott Sherman, who’s overseeing the distribution of the vaccine, said Monday that teachers would be given expedited priority. Polis said earlier this month that those 65 and older would also be part of the next phase.
But earlier estimates indicated that those groups could expect to start being vaccinated in March, rather than in the second week of February. Sherman, who spoke alongside Polis on Friday, said the state had been given a longer-term estimate of the size of its February shipments. Sherman said that conservatively, Colorado should receive roughly 452,000 doses between Friday and March 1.
“We’re very confident in this number that we’ll receive through the end of February,” he said. The first week of February will also include a boost from CVS and Walgreens, in the form of unused long-term care facility vaccines.
“Colorado’s a state of nearly 6 million people, so it’s going to take time … before we can expand access to the general public,” Sherman said, urging patience.
On March 5, once the state has moved through more than half of its educators and those 65 and older, it will begin to vaccinate an even larger share of the general public: 750,000 essential workers and more than 400,000 Coloradans between the ages of 16 and 64 who have at least two of a handful of health conditions.
Those health conditions are cancer, chronic kidney disease, COPD, diabetes, Down syndrome, heart failure, coronary heart disease, congenital heart disease, obesity, pregnancy, sickle cell disease, solid organ transplants or people who can’t wear a mask because of a health condition. This at-risk general population group does not include the catch-all immunocompromised, which was present in previous iterations of the priority list, and includes a broader section of the public.
The essential workers include those who work in agriculture, manufacturing, public transport, public health workers, faith leaders and front-line journalists. It also includes health care staffers who work with Coloradans experiencing homelessness, but it does not include those experiencing homelessness themselves. Nor does any of the new priority list include inmates, despite federal guidelines that they be vaccinated alongside prison staff.
Denver Mayor Michael Hancock said earlier this week that he had asked the state to give more priority to the homeless in Denver and that city health officials were already preparing teams to begin those vaccination efforts.
Polis, who late last year repeatedly said that no inmate would get a vaccine before someone who’s not incarcerated, said the state was focusing on age as the biggest risk factor, rather than living conditions. Prisons and jails in Colorado have been hammered by the pandemic, contributing to thousands of cases — so many, in fact, that one in 24 of Colorado’s coronavirus cases were tied to outbreaks in those facilities.
Polis did say that those inmates who are over the age of 64 will be inoculated in this phase, alongside their peers from broader Colorado. But that will impact relatively few inmates, fewer than 600 in all.
Nearly 8,200 state prison inmates have been infected thus far, a number that doesn’t include those in county jails or other correctional facilities.
This content was originally published here.
