School is careening towards disaster

The latest case Estes Park reported by Larimer County caused the abrupt dismissal of one of the Estes Park Elementary kindergarten classes this afternoon, with recommendations to worried parents to quarantine their children and get them tested.  This is standard SNAFU, and I feel terrible for the school system, with no vaccines available for this age group, but feel even worse for having to deal with parents who won't get their children vaccinated even when vaccines become available.

In the sky with diamonds

I was recently speaking with an Estes Park Trail-Gazette reporter (yes, they still have one) about the likelihood for another wasted year in the Estes Park school system.  In that case, it was a 5th grade class from Denver taking an ill-advised field trip to Cheley Colorado Camps, which led to a 7-person outbreak and a lengthy recommended quarantine.  The local paper didn't cover that outbreak (despite it being handed to them by a Denver Post reporter - Instead, they plugged in a puff piece on Vic Fangio, something that greatly impacts all of our lives here in Bonko country), they won't cover Estes Park Health's failure to meet vaccine requirements (despite promises to "look into it"), and they won't cover this latest kindergarten outbreak, even though it impacts Estes Park families directly.

[Update:  They did cover Estes Park's health inability to meet vaccine requirements by asking Gary Hall, chief apologist for EPH, if they were meeting vaccine requirements and accepting his answer of "yes" without further questioning.  Obviously, this is akin to asking Ted Bundy if he killed any of those women and being satisfied with his denial.  Reporters, at least those outside of Estes Park, try to find out why something is being claimed, not just accept the accused's answer of "no, everything is okay, just take my word for it."

Why, you ask?  Because the Trail-Gazette has signed off on any more COVID-19 coverage.  Mike and his editorial 2 Live Crew are through talking about something that only causes Chamber of Commerce threats to remove advertising.   Now and moving forward, there is no number of cases or deaths that Estes Park or the Trail-Gazette will ever be alarmed by, it simply is a "disappeared" issue, because we made our sacrifices in March and April of last year, and that was the only battle we had the energy and the courage to fight in this ongoing war.

So we will lose.  We will lose more people, more class time, more get-togethers, more holidays, more in-person meetings.  We will lose these things in Estes Park because our town is being run by people who don't know how health care works, who didn't pay attention in freshmen science, and who don't understand that a communicable disease requires full-on vigilance and repeated frontal attacks until you are crushing it underfoot.

We are lazy, and we are stupid.  Cases grow in Estes Park at the rate of five per day, and our town "leaders" and our EDC just sits around slack-jawed, fish-mouthed, brainstorming potential ways to fudge the data to at least make it seem like we are doing better than Timnath.