Colorado Teachers, Child Care Workers To Get COVID-19 Vaccine Starting Feb. 8

By Faith Miller, the Colorado Newsline

January 29, 2021

In the coming weeks of the spring semester, thousands of Colorado teachers and child care workers will wield a formidable defense against the coronavirus. They’ll be able to receive the COVID-19 vaccine starting Feb. 8, Gov. Jared Polis announced at a news conference Jan. 29.

The state’s aiming to make sure teachers and child care workers can get their first doses of the Pfizer and BioNTech or Moderna vaccine within three weeks of Feb. 8, Polis said. There’s no requirement for them to get vaccinated.

The state is currently in phase 1B of its vaccination plan and focused on getting the lifesaving vaccine to people 70 and older. But phase 1B also contains a large swath of “frontline essential workers” — educators, agricultural workers, restaurant staff and more — and until Jan. 29, state officials had indicated that people in this level of the phase wouldn’t be able to get the vaccine until March 1. Officials had indicated, however, that teachers would have the highest priority of the remaining groups in phase 1B.

People ages 65 to 69 will also be able to access vaccine starting Feb. 8, Polis said.

Polis’ announcement on teacher vaccination came days after groups of Denver Public Schools teachers began holding walk-ins, hoping to call attention to the safety risks of in-person teaching and spread the message that they should have access to the vaccine. Groups of high school teachers gathered before class started and entered together, some carrying signs.

For the 2019-2020 school year, 55,600 public K-12 schoolteachers were employed in Colorado, according to the Colorado Department of Education. The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey estimated that a total of 165,000 Coloradans worked in educational instruction and library occupations in 2019.

Meanwhile, upwards of 550,000 Coloradans are 70 and older. The state aims to vaccinate 70% of those older folks by Feb. 28.

Given the laborious rollout of vaccines across the country, widespread mask wearing and social distancing are, overall, a far greater weapon against COVID-19 than the slow increase of the vaccination rate, state modeling shows.

Dr. Rachel Herlihy, the state epidemiologist, said Jan. 26 that if Colorado maintains current levels of “transmission control” — keeping the virus at bay by wearing face coverings and avoiding gatherings — an estimated 700 more Coloradans could die from COVID-19 before June 1. Effective vaccine distribution potentially reduces that number to around 500, according to a chart Herlihy presented.

But if fewer people wear masks and distance, and Colorado’s transmission control level drops significantly, the number of additional deaths could climb into the thousands — regardless of how many Coloradans get vaccinated.

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