In one of the country’s most vaccinated places, masks were still key to slowing Covid-19

“The pandemic is just still going on,” said DeAnne Gallegos, the county’s public information officer and director of the local chamber of commerce. “We kept thinking it was going to end before this summer. Then we were thinking in November. Now we’re like, ‘No, we don’t know when.'”

On the whole, once the under-12 set is taken into account, 85% of the county’s total population is fully vaccinated. But in the summer, the population nearly doubles as seasonal residents roost in second homes and RV parks, some vacationing while others take up seasonal jobs. Then, there’s what Gallegos described as “the tsunami of tourism” — the daily influx of people arriving on the historical railroad from Durango and the dusty jeep trails through the mountains. Many of those visitors are of unknown vaccination status.

The county’s two-week incidence shot up in August to the highest rate in the state, and stayed there for most of the month. Even though that spike amounted to a grand total of about 40 known cases, it was nearly as many as the county had logged during the entirety of the pandemic — and cases spilled into the vaccinated as well.

Any number of cases would be a big deal in a small place without its own hospital. “We are all one-man bands just trying to make it happen,” Gallegos said. The county’s public health director, Becky Joyce, for example, does everything from contact tracing and covid testing to putting shots in arms. And when the county restarted its mask mandate, it was Gallegos who designed the signs and spent her weekend zip-tying them around town.

The biggest concentration of covid cases happened at an RV park and a music festival driven indoors by rain.

“It makes sense that coming out of three or four weeks of just jamming tourism, people were starting to get sick who work in the restaurants, at the RV parks,” Gallegos said. “And then you bring all the locals condensed together for a couple of nights of concerts and it was just the trifecta.”

Dana Chambers, who runs the hardware store in Silverton, was vaccinated as soon as possible. She said returning to a mask mandate felt in some ways like “a step back.” But, she said, businesses like hers need the summer tourism rush to survive the quiet winter, when just a few hundred tourists come, largely to jump out of helicopters onto ski terrain. “If we have to wear the mask, that’s what we’ll do.”

Data shows the vaccines protect against death and hospitalization due to covid. But even effective vaccines are no match for the transmissibility of delta. “Even in the best-case scenario — if vaccines reduce transmission by 80% — you’re actually twice as likely to get covid now than you were in July,” Raifman said, due to the virus’s recent proliferation. “It’s impossible statistically to achieve herd immunity with the delta variant.”

Meanwhile, many local and national leaders, including in Colorado, continue to focus on the vaccines almost exclusively as the path forward.

Many scientists agree that, especially with most of the world still unvaccinated, covid is likely here to stay, eventually morphing into something more like the common cold. “It’s probably going to be a matter of a couple of years,” Quandelacy said. “But that seems to be the trajectory that we are on.”

Raifman views that realization — paired with San Juan’s ensuing indoor mask requirement — as a success at a pivotal moment. The month-long mandate was then lifted Sept. 10, as the county had dropped back to a low covid transmission rate. At the time, it was the only county in Colorado with such low transmission.

“This is the moment where we kind of define: How are we managing the virus over the longer term?” Raifman said. “So far, we’re defining that we don’t manage it; we let it manage us.”