By Rocky Mountain Voice Editorial Board
This second installment of RMV’s COvid Chronicles runs longer than usual – for good reason. In just two weeks, civic trust collapsed, state control deepened and neighbors turned on each other. The details matter—because memory fades, because memory fades, but the impact endures.
If the first two weeks of April 2020 made it clear to Coloradans their state was forever changed and would not be going back to the way it was any time soon, the later part of the month crystalized just how difficult earning back any God-given constitutional rights and freedoms would prove to be.
Much of that had to do with the heavy-handedness of Gov. Jared Polis, elected officials and unelected bureaucrats who weren’t keen on relinquishing their newfound regal powers over the people.
More concerning was the increasing dogma from Coloradan to Coloradan, neighbor to neighbor, family member to family member. As Colorado’s COVID reopening quandary deepened, our sense of community was crushed.
These are the COvid Chronicles for April 16-30, 2020…
COvid Chronicles catch-up
• Introducing The COvid Chronicles: How fear and force reshaped Colorado
• COvid Chronicles April 1-15, 2020: Fifteen days that changed Colorado forever
April 16
On the heels of Gov. Jared Polis’ announcement that Coloradans should get ready for COVID measures disrupting their lives for weeks and months to come – The Denver Post reached out to its readers with an article asking them to share “how you’re planning to change your daily routines, activities and summer plans as you adjust to living with coronavirus in the state for the long-term.”
“So what will you do differently? Are you weighing what to do with your summer concert tickets? Are you a season ticket holder for the Colorado Rockies? Will you be donning masks and gloves at restaurants for the next few months, or staying home more than normal? Are you heading back to work and making plans for childcare for the rest of the school year? Fill out the form below to let us know.”
As The Denver Post indirectly did its part to normalize these excessive disruptions to daily life, Post columnist Krista Kafer took to the opinion pages to flirt with the third rail becoming increasingly apparent in Polis’ Colorado — is this all bordering on authoritarianism?
Kafer detailed how Coloradans were beginning to write anonymous notes.
Residents began informing their neighbors that they should be wearing masks or, in one handwritten letter, “Bars are closed and you couldn’t possibly be getting groceries every night (which would also require you to wear a mask), so again I ask you to please stay home.” Heather Silchia, a Jeffco 911 dispatcher, found this note while leaving her house to work a graveyard shift.
The lack of humanity and the breakdown of community and sheer ‘neighborliness’ was spreading like a wildfire across the state faster than the actual virus.
“Gladys Kravitz could have asked,” Kafer wrote, alluding to the signature on the neighbor’s note. “COVID-19 seems to be bringing out the inner authoritarian in some people.”
That was just a tip of the iceberg. The wildest example? Kafer wrote how in Brighton, police officers handcuffed a man and briefly detained him for the grave sin of playing T-ball with his daughter and wife at a park.
These — yes — authoritarian actions on the part of neighbors and law enforcement were all downstream of King Polis’ edicts, as the governor at this point was using aggregate cell phone tracking data to monitor how people were “moving around with cell phones, and how much they are moving when people are pinged.”
Polis’ government claimed in an official statement it was using the data to “analyze whether the steps Colorado has taken to facilitate social distancing are working and whether we are on track to meet our goals,” he said.
To quote Kafer: “No, that’s not creepy.”
April 17
Polis and other government officials’ top-down approach to the pandemic response increasingly is seen in the public. Along with un-neighborly notes, letters submitted to the Post are pushing “strictly enforced” mandates “that everyone must wear some type of face covering when in an enclosed public space,” Boulder’s Ken Graham wrote.
“This needs to happen now,” Graham continued, “not after the next 1,000 new cases and numerous deaths. Once this policy is enacted, we can look at the data and slowly, cautiously, move forward. Reopening business without doing this first will greatly increase the current infection rate. We are smarter than a virus. We must use our intelligence.”
On the economics side of the response, the first round of the federal Payroll Protection Program (PPP) closed, as did the acceptance of new applications. Polis’ executive director of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, Betsy Markey said the Governor’s Council on Economic Stabilization and Growth was launching its own $25 million assistance fund at the maximum of $10,000 per loan “to help at least 2,500 borrowers who otherwise might not receive assistance.”
The Denver Post’s editorial board doubled-down on its condemnation of Coloradans who were not content with lockdown measures. Though the editorial board said protestors of state mandates had the constitutional right to do so, despite a technical violation of the state’s “lawful” stay-at-home order – they made it clear who would be to blame for any further spread of the virus.
“Those who attend should know that the people they will hurt the most are our paramedics, nurses, doctors and other health care workers,” the editorial board wrote.
The Post editorial board’s dogmatic take would not age well, both in the long-term and the short-term. Mere weeks later, their take on protestors following George Floyd’s death had a decidedly different flavor to it – despite the scale of the protests – on top of the billions in wanton property damage and destruction it caused – was exponentially larger.
The Post’s lead editors made it clear the heavy hand of big government was the necessary move, explicitly crediting Denver Mayor Michael Hancock and Gov. Polis for saving “thousands of lives by shutting down businesses and ordering people to stay at home.”
The Post’s editors didn’t stop there – they dubbed the “rampant” idea COVID-19 is a respiratory illness, only affecting “older individuals or those with pre-existing medical conditions” a “fallacy… started by Chinese authorities in their authoritarian effort to prevent people from panicking and fleeing Wuhan” They added, “but it does not hold in democratic societies where the free press reports daily on adults in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s without any known pre-existing conditions dying of the virus.”
To put this in context, that same day, the Post reported 374 Coloradans total had died due to “complications from the virus” – a classification in hindsight we know to be very debatable.
Though the Post did not detail the age brackets of those who died, five days later the newspaper reported 64% of deaths were in state nursing homes and assisted-living facilities.
While the Post’s editors peddled the unsubstantiated propaganda young healthy people were at risk of death due to COVID, quick RMV math shows 222 of these 374 deaths were among Coloradans already facing the most serious health challenges—many in long-term care. That’s before even counting other elderly or immunocompromised individuals.
To be blunt: the Post’s own reporting flew in the face of their editorial claims. Some might call this reckless journalistic malpractice. In hindsight, considering how the COVID response derailed life, societal norms and livelihoods – speculation over whether they should have known better at the time is warranted.
Further, Post editors forecasted a mortality rate based on Colorado’s 5.8 million population, “if half our population contracts the virus, that’d be a staggering 29,000 deaths.”
Five years later, despite multiple waves and round after round of vaccines and boosters, Colorado’s official COVID death toll remains under 15,000 – a figure still debated given how liberally deaths were classified.
And more than a year after the Post penned this editorial, as the first vaccines were full-go, the state’s death toll was shy of 7,000.
April 18
Denverites got the “good news” this April Saturday: it would only be two to four more months until officials might allow life to return to some semblance of normal. That was the best-case scenario. Internal discussions revealed leaders expected metro residents to prepare for “a longer haul than that.”
Many Coloradans, meanwhile, were left wondering if Mayor Hancock would bless them with a lifting of stay-at-home orders – just 12 days before the promised April 30 finish line.
Dr. Bill Burman, director of Denver Public Health, said the mayor and his staff shared a “broad recognition… coronavirus and its challenges won’t end by 2020.” He urged, “All of us need to recognize that this is a marathon. This is not a sprint.”
City officials indirectly detailed how their heavy-handed mandates were conducted in a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants style. Officials acknowledged that tying restrictions to case numbers could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, since improved testing would naturally inflate those figures and potentially skew data.
Powers-that-be it crafted their language carefully.
“Even the word ‘lifted’ might give residents the wrong impression of finality, one member of the group said,” according to a report by the Post’s Conrad Swanson, “suggesting framing the move as a modification instead.”
Denver and Colorado’s approach stood in stark contrast to states like Texas, Florida, and even left-leaning Minnesota under future Democratic VP pick Tim Walz, all of which were beginning to ease restrictions, as The Gazette reported on its front page.
The contrast in messaging was stark. While Hancock and Polis preached caution, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared in a televised address, “We have demonstrated that we can corral the coronavirus.”
April 19
You thought neighbors turning on neighbors was bad? How about wives against husbands?
The tattletale culture spawned by government edicts hit a tragic low in the Post’s Sunday “Ask Amy” column, where a woman signing as “Healthy For Now” wrote to Amy Dickinson:
“When we have to go into the community to get meds or groceries, I wear gloves and a mask; however, (my husband) pooh-poohs my precautions. He will not even wash his hands immediately when we return home. This places me (who is adhering to recommendations) at risk. It places both of us at risk. I am tired of being chastised for being “b****y” when I remind him about precautions.”
Amy’s advice? You guessed it — isolate further!
“One commonsense precaution you could take as a couple would be to eliminate — or at least severely limit your time out,” Dickinson wrote. “If you have to pick up supplies, only one of you should go.”
At the State Capitol, hundreds protested the ongoing stay-at-home and social distancing orders, waving American flags and holding signs that read “freedom over fear.”
The Post’s Shelly Bradbury described the protest as a “cacophony,” noting how many protestors wore pro-Trump clothing while few practiced social distancing in the outdoor sunshine.
“Pot shops are open, abortion clinics are open and my church is closed,” said protester Mary Conley of Jefferson County.
Bradbury reported that Riley Carlson, 25, joined the protest after losing two jobs – $1,600 a month – money she and her husband were saving for a down payment on a house.
“My boss at the winery is on her way to going bankrupt,” Carlson said.
April 20
As The Gazette showcased photos from the previous day’s rally at the Capitol on its front page, Jakob Rodgers’ article above the fold detailed how health care workers were stunned their services were needed less and less in medical settings.
“I would have thought it would be the opposite,” Shelby Johnson, a physician assistant for Concentra, told the Gazette.
Rodgers reported that reality in Colorado’s hospitals didn’t match the hype – 9,000 health care and social assistance workers filed for unemployment in a single week, with total claims since the pandemic’s start hitting 21,209, up from just 161 a year earlier.
As the Denver Post reported growing emotional strain among stay-at-home students, it was already clear the expected COVID hospitalization surge wasn’t materializing. Polis’ Public Health Director Bob McDonald announced the temporary medical site at the Colorado Convention Center – originally planned for 2,000 beds – was delayed due to a “diminishing need” of just 1,000.
In a Denver Post Q&A, Mayor Hancock took a swing at President Trump, saying his “answer” to the crisis had to come from elsewhere due to “lunacy in the White House—and I use that word very intentionally.”
What was the mayor focused on while calling the president a lunatic spreading “hoax” narratives? Equity.
“That means understanding how every crisis falls differently on everybody, that’s the equity piece,” Hancock said. “We put that in our emergency operation efforts from the very beginning in that it’s important that we understand how this virus, its presence and impact is hitting different demographics in our community.”
How sane. Time would soon test whether Denver kept that sanity in the weeks following George Floyd.
April 21
Despite Colorado surpassing 10,000 COVID cases, Gov. Polis “loosened” restrictions under a new label—“Safer at Home.” Translation: while no longer ordered to stay home for all but “essential” travel, Coloradans were now told to cut social interactions by 60% to 65%, a slight improvement from the prior phase, as The Gazette’s Leslie James reported in her front-page story.
Where did these numbers come from? How was a person to quantify it for themselves? Their children? How was the state supposed to verify? Gotta love big government.
The governor’s nod to a bit more freedom came, of course, at a cost – and in the Child Sacrifice State, that cost was once again shouldered by kids. Polis announced all in-person instruction would be suspended for the rest of the school year to, as The Gazette’s Debbie Kelley reported, “ease Colorado back open after more than a month under a stay-at-home order.”
The burden on kids didn’t stop there. CHSAA, Colorado’s high school sports governing body, canceled the rest of the spring season to fall in line with Polis’ directive.
Maybe the kids could continue their seasons later in the year, even if in the summer? Forget about it. CHSAA Commissioner Rhonda Blanford-Green deemed such prospects “impractical” and “irresponsible” and, further, made no promises about fall sports four months out.
Meanwhile, the toll on small businesses was clear: 15,000 unemployment claims were filed by self-employed Coloradans on day one of applications. That followed the state’s largest-ever direct-deposit request—$70 million wired Sunday night.
April 22
What was the next step for Colorado’s war against COVID? Points to you if you guessed “combating climate change!”
State Sen. Chris Hansen pushed that idea in a Denver Post guest column, peddling the soon-to-be-familiar phrase “the new normal.” He argued that “part of coming back stronger is making sure our recovery efforts confront the persistent threat that has loomed over us for decades: climate change.”
“In the past several months, many have correctly drawn analogies between the new coronavirus and climate change — two seemingly intangible threats that, while serious, do not inspire action until the most serious effects are felt,” the senator continued. “We have known the dangers of climate change for decades now and how it is linked to the spread of disease, but we are still far behind reaching the goals that will mitigate climate destruction to the extent we desperately need.”
April 23
Gov. Polis reiterated how his new “Safer at Home” phase of the state’s COVID response was “not a grand reopening.”
“We’re at the trailhead,” he said. “We’re not going to summit it right away.”
But as The Gazette’s Olivia Prentzel reported, not everybody was safer at home amid Polis’ “Safe at Home.”
That was confirmed by a spike in domestic violence reports in El Paso County, where DA Dan May said they saw 50 more cases than the same two-week period in 2019.
“Unfortunately, it’s a perfect storm here,” May said. “These stay-at-home orders are isolating the victims of domestic violence and they are isolating for long periods of time, preventing escape.”
But the Denver Post cited 46 responses to its “return to normal” survey, with most saying they’d still take extra precautions after the stay-at-home order ended.
Randy Ketner, 60, of Aurora, was in the minority. He called the statewide order overly restrictive and proposed that only vulnerable groups – older adults and those with health conditions – stay home while others mingled to build “herd immunity.”
“We’re all getting it,” he said. “Might as well get out there and get it over with.”
For 25-year-old Dominique Miles in Crested Butte, the shutdown hit hard. After moving from Tulsa in late October and spending much of their savings, her fiancé was laid off from his restaurant job – leaving her unable to even picture a return to normal.
“All of (our summer plans) are canceled if we can’t find work,” she said.
April 24
Despite the governor’s slight loosening of statewide orders, Denver Mayor Hancock extended the city’s stay-at-home mandate through May 8. Jefferson and Boulder counties followed suit, while Weld County went the other way and eased restrictions.
To reopen, Denver aimed to double its testing – from about 550 to 1,000 tests per day.
News broke that Denver released 15 of 55 inmates who tested positive for COVID. This followed a lawsuit from an inmate’s attorneys, alleging the sheriff’s department failed to protect prisoners and allowed symptomatic and non-symptomatic individuals to mix.
Ved Nanda, a law professor and director at DU, was next to drop the phrase “new normal” in a Denver Post guest column, using it to ask whether the pandemic would lead to a more inclusive, just society.
“In the end,” Nanda wrote, “the need is to create a more inclusive and just society and a system based on international cooperation to solve global problems. The U.S. leadership, now absent, is key to making it happen.”
This fixation on social and cultural issues – wholly unrelated to the virus itself – was echoed by Colorado’s Democratic lawmakers, as the Post’s Saja Hindi reported claims of rising hate and bigotry during the pandemic.
“President Donald Trump and others have referred to the virus as the ‘China virus’ or the ‘Wuhan virus,'” Hindi wrote, “saying the terms are accurate because of where the virus originated. But Asian Americans have said the rhetoric is leading to an increase in racist incidents. The FBI also has warned of a possible surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans.”
“Tragically, some have used this pandemic as a cover and an excuse for abhorrent behavior,” Democrat lawmakers wrote in a letter referenced by Hindi. “Hate crimes against Asian Americans, conspiracy theories denigrating immigrants, statements that compare actions taken by the state’s first Jewish governor to the Gestapo — none of these are acceptable, none of it is Coloradan, and none of it will get us through this crisis any safer or any faster.”
Rep. Leslie Herod, chair of the Black Caucus, went as far as to ask for people “to monitor social media and report hate” because as fellow Democrat Rep. Dafna Michaelson Jenet said, “the big problem is the insidious underground language.”
Herod appeared to be laying the groundwork for racial conflict—just a month before the George Floyd death and ensuing “mostly peaceful” destruction.
Hindi said Black constituents had reached out about discrimination, writing “including how even though face coverings are now deemed necessary, not everyone feels safe wearing them, or finds they’re not treated the same way while wearing them.”
For Colorado’s black men, apparently according to Dem lawmakers, they were in a no-win situation.
To mask or not to mask — that is the question.
“For so long, black people, specifically black men, have been told not to wear a scarf or a bandanna,” Herod said, “not to pull your hoodie up when you’re out in public for fear of being killed.”
April 25
Saving a life is worth it – but apparently not that worth it, according to new “guidelines” from the El Paso County EMS Medical Directors. Olivia Prentzel of The Gazette reported that emergency workers “should limit resuscitation efforts to some cardiac arrest patients to reduce firefighters’ and medics’ exposure to the coronavirus.”
“In this day and age,” said Dr. Stein Bronsky, co-chief medical director at El Paso County American Medical Response, “when those types of procedures like resuscitating someone in cardiac arrest create an extremely high risk and exposure to providers, we have to balance the risk to the providers against the known save rates on some of these patients.”
On the other end of the philosophical spectrum, the Post’s Justin Wingerter reported on the “my body, my choice” ethos “inside Colorado’s growing anti-shutdown movement.”
Wingerter’s report featured Philip Varley, a 61-year-old retired accountant from Jefferson County, who – after firing off hundreds of emails to Gov. Polis and media outlets – spent a day filming outside Denver ERs to prove, he claimed, they weren’t overcrowded.
“This mass unemployment caused by government action has forced people into poverty and the deaths that will come long-term from that will far exceed any deaths of people from COVID,” Varley told the Post. “So, on a net basis, I don’t believe we will have saved any lives. On a temporary basis, we may have postponed a few.”
April 26
The Post’s Conrad Swanson reported a sharp drop in patients seeking care for non-COVID conditions – likely due to fear of catching the virus in hospitals. Dr. Frank Lansville, ER director at the Medical Center of Aurora, said they typically saw five to ten patients with heart attacks, strokes, appendicitis, abdominal pain or diabetic complications.
“That’s probably been cut in half,” the ER doctor said.
April 27
First, they came for the Deadheads.
It was on this day the Denver Department of Public Health shut down Capitol Hill bar Sancho’s Broken Arrow until the city’s stay-at-home order was lifted.
“This establishment shall be vacated immediately and remain vacant until a representative of the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment rescinds this order in writing and removes this placard except for the allowance of filling online orders that shall be shipped via mail or delivered in accordance with physical distancing restrictions,” read the sign on Sancho’s door.
Though the health department found the Grateful Dead-themed bar had opened to the public the week prior, owner Jay Biachi claimed it was “only him inside listening to music at top volume.”
“It is weird to think that someone would be cranking Grateful Dead upstairs celebrating quarantine with his stuffed friends the Grateful Dead Bears when he is in the basement drinking tea and writing about music or probably listening to another show on a computer that someone sent him a link to and thereby would not hear anyone knocking on the door,” he wrote.
Biachi, living in a space above Sancho’s, told Westword he “was doing Facebook and stuff and looking at the computer and whatever.
“I go upstairs and downstairs, and I was playing music loud,” he added. “They knocked on the door, but I didn’t hear it.”
“Perhaps this person was happy experiencing his place as if it was truely (sic) his space,” Biachi wrote on Facebook, before quoting the Grateful Dead’s song Box of Rain. “Now perhaps you explain that to a police officer and perhaps they will believe you. Well, ‘believe it if you need it, leave it if you dare!'”
April 28
Gov. Polis helpfully clarified who could enjoy Colorado’s outdoors – and who couldn’t.
Ten miles was your limit, a hard radius from your front door, courtesy of everyone’s favorite “libertarian live-and-let-live” governor. And while King Jared wasn’t big on humanizing Coloradans, he had no problem humanizing the virus: the “caring” coronavirus.
“I know the weather’s nice, but the coronavirus doesn’t care about the weather,” Polis said during a press conference. “It cares about physical proximity and we need to make sure we stay safe.”
April 29
The front page of Wednesday’s Gazette was particularly Orwellian, capturing the inhuman isolation of the “new normal.” A photo by Jerilee Bennett showcases elderly Jerriann Hance “talking” to her husband Danny through clear glass at Springs Ranch Memory Care as a centerpiece. Her reflection, hauntingly visible, mirrored the man she could only reach through a barrier—thanks to COVID rules.
Bennett also featured the Perretts, married 53 years, who had just spoken through glass for the first time after six weeks apart. Bill, 81, had lived at the center since August, following over a decade with dementia.
“After they closed the doors… that was the last time I saw Bill,” his wife Sally, 76, said. “Before that, we hadn’t spent very many days apart. I asked him, did he understand about the virus and he said yes. He does have understanding, but he doesn’t speak. I can talk to him, but he can’t talk to me.”
In Denver, Gov. Polis “congratulated” Coloradans on their pandemic performance. “Now comes the hard part,” he coached. In his patronizing guest column, he patted us on the head while reminding everyone that gatherings over 10 were still banned – and schools, gyms, spas, bars and nightclubs remained off-limits.
“Because Coloradans have done such a great job of staying at home, and wearing a face covering and practicing distancing when we need to go out, the Stay-at-Home order has been effective,” he wrote.
The kind of privileges Coloradans earned back? Access to elective medical and dental procedures!
“With strict precautions to ensure worker and patient safety,” the governor noted.
April 30
The one COVID mandate that seemed destined to outlast the rest – masking on airplanes – was formally ushered into Colorado by Denver-based Frontier Airlines, effective May 8. The announcement followed JetBlue’s, which would require masks starting May 4, both citing CDC guidance.
Meanwhile, as homeless camps mushroomed across Denver and other cities, Colorado Parks and Wildlife extended its camping ban through May 4 to stay in step with Polis’ Safer at Home order and public health agency advice.
Down in Colorado Springs, Debbie Kelley reported how churches like Emmanuel Missionary Baptist were “perfecting” online services in response to the governor’s order banning gatherings of 10 or more – making in-person worship illegal.
“Not even with this virus can you stop the word of God – we’re still able to spread God’s word even if we’re doing it from our homes,” said Deacon Henry Allen Jr. “We love our churches, but a church building does not make you a Christian.”
Check back in mid-May for the next edition of RMV’s COvid Chronicles…