DENVER (KDVR) — If Colorado is past its COVID-19 plateau, it would line up with what medical experts predicted at the beginning of the year.
Colorado has languished for most of the last three months in a kind of COVID-19 holding pattern. Cases and hospitalizations ebbed and flowed but on average stayed level on a large scale.
If it holds, the back half of July has broken this pattern, matching the general trendline from a pair of COVID-19 modeling reports issued by the Colorado School of Public Health.
The 7-day average of new COVID-19 cases in Colorado has been steadily falling since mid-July.
There were nearly 1,900 new cases per day on July 7. By Aug. 4, that had fallen to 617 per day in the space of a month. This is the first sustained slide in Colorado’s COVID-19 cases since February when the country was coming out of the grips of the omicron strain surge.
Hospitalizations have followed the same trend as cases. They have slowed after several months of largely steady hospitalizations.
On July 11, there were an average of 102 people per day admitted to hospitals with COVID-19. On Aug. 2, that average had dropped to 68 per day — the lowest hospital admissions numbers since May. As with cases, this is the first long-term downward movement in hospital intake numbers since January.
Both the cases and hospitalizations are tracking with predictions that COVID-19 numbers would fall in mid to late summer.
In April and May, the Colorado School of Public Health released two COVID-19 modeling reports. The reports project that Colorado’s COVID-19 hospitalizations will rise through the summer of 2022, peaking in late June and trailing into July and August.