COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Colorado passed a grim milestone in the nearly two-year COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic: 10,000 deaths.
As of Tuesday, the state counted 10,018 deaths due to the novel coronavirus.
"This is largely a pandemic of the unvaccinated, with the arrival of the contagious variant delta the unvaccinated are at extremely high risk of hospitalization from COVID," Conor Cahill, a spokesperson for Gov. Jared Polis wrote in an email responding to the latest death toll.
"If we did not have over 70% of adults vaccinated when the delta wave began starting hitting our state and region this Fall, the impacts of deadly variant would have been far more devastating and our health care system would have been destroyed."
A surge of new cases in the past few months has led to higher daily COVID-19 deaths, pushing the number of lives lost past 9,000 less than a month ago, and past 8,000 a little more than two months ago.
The highest death rates in recent months have been in areas of the state with the lowest vaccination rates.
COVID-19 vaccines have been available for most adult Coloradans since April, and roughly two-thirds of the state's population is fully vaccinated. In areas below the statewide average, though, the death rate is almost three times the rate of areas with a larger portion fully vaccinated.
At times during the pandemic, which took hold in the U.S. in March 2020 and whose impact has ebbed and flowed in the 22 months since, the novel coronavirus has been the leading cause of death in the state, as it has been again for the past two months, outnumbering deaths caused by cancer and heart disease.
The current surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths began in late summer, and has been on the wane in the past few weeks, with cases and hospitalizations beginning to subside, but the number of daily COVID-19 deaths remains elevated, as the disease usually leads to death only after several weeks, meaning deaths associated with a surge in cases lag by weeks.
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