Roughly a third of a million people live in Boulder County, perhaps one-tenth of whom are Jewish, according to recent demographic studies.
Of those human beings, as of Dec. 19, 166 individuals had perished at the hands of the coronavirus pandemic since it began its deadly progression early in 2020; more than 13,000 had tested positive or were considered probable for COVID-19; nearly 400 were hospitalized; and over the previous two weeks, some 400 new cases per 100,000 people had been diagnosed.
As sobering as those numbers are — and as tragic as each of Boulder County’s pandemic-caused deaths were — the metrics in Boulder are far better than a great many other American communities. That translates into the fact that in the midst of a pandemic that has already taken just about as many lives in the US as reside in Boulder County altogether, it’s a relatively safe place to be, even by Colorado’s better-than-average standards.
While many factors have contributed to those results, the region’s health care infrastructure is certainly a major player, and Boulder Community Health (BCH) is on the vanguard of that infrastructure.
An integrated, community-owned and not-for-profit regional health system with multiple facilities throughout Boulder and Broomfield counties, BCH employs more than 2,000 people, about a fifth of whom are physicians.
Its anchor facility, Foothills Hospital on the east side of the city of Boulder, has an intensive care unit that has been one of the county’s primary treatment centers for people suffering from the most severe effects of the virus.
BCH’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Benjamin Keidan, told the Intermountain Jewish News on Dec. 18 that as of that date, some 700 of the network’s health care workers, including physicians, had already received the newly-approved Pfizer vaccine.
He hoped that by the following week, a shipment of the Moderna vaccine would also arrive in Boulder, enabling the rest of BCH’s frontline workers (including himself) to receive their vaccinations.
A native of suburban Detroit, Keidan was educated at Wayne State University, the University of Michigan and CU as an internal medicine specialist and health care administrator.
A member of the teaching faculty at Harvard Medical School, he has been affiliated with BCH as a primary care and hospital medicine physician for over 15 years and became the network’s CMO in 2018.
Although under intense pressure as BCH juggled the dual challenges of treating COVID patients and vaccinating its medical staff at the same time, Keidan took time for a phone interview to provide insights into how and why Boulder has done such a comparatively good job in handling the virus, as well as offering advice as the pandemic continues.
IJN: In a broad sense, doctor, how has the pandemic most dramatically affected Boulder Community Health since it began in February or March? What has been the overall impact on your whole system?
Keidan: There have been so many impacts. I was just talking to a colleague about this sense that we’re all coming together and dealing with this as a team and as a community. That’s been pretty impressive and amazing to me, and I really mean that for the community, too, like the support of healthcare workers and first responders. It’s just really been touching.
And it’s also created a lot of stress for all of us. You know, people are working longer hours they’re under more scrutiny, there’s a lot more meetings and planning. So it’s been both of those things.
Are you treating COVID patients exclusively at the main hospital?
We treat them in the hospital, but we also have ERs in multiple urgent care and primary care clinics, so we’re treating throughout the continuum. The bulk of the care is at the hospital.
Is your ICU facility full or close to full; are you worried about that?
I’m cautiously optimistic. We haven’t really had major capacity issues, although we have certainly been busier than usual and we’ve had to be creative and expand our capacity in lots of different ways.
It’s been really, really busy and challenging, but I’m not overly worried that we’re going to hit capacity during this pandemic.
Could you comment on Boulder in general, the other medical facilities and ICUs; are they roughly in the same place you are with regards to this?
It’s been a little bit variable depending on the location. Some of the east county hospitals have certainly been busier and some of those in the northern part of the county have also been busier.
My understanding from talking to my colleagues is that they’ve had times where they had to have ICU patients in nontraditional settings, like, step-down units and things like that, but they’ve managed, they’ve come together and they haven’t really hit a crisis. But it’s required a lot of creativity and effort.
I assume you’ve been working in conjunction with Boulder Public Health and other institutions.
The county has been a great supporter and partner and we are meeting regularly with the other institutions to coordinate, as well as with the Colorado Dept. of Public Health and Environment and the governor’s office. It’s been a really good collaboration.
What has been most difficult for you and Boulder Community Health to respond to this crisis?
At the beginning it was the unknown and the uncertainty, and that’s continued with the predictions that we were going to exceed capacity, that we were going to be four times capacity and all this uncertainty. I think that was probably the most difficult for me personally.
The most difficult for the team has been this constant adaptability, stretching, sometimes working outside of our comfort zones. That has been a big challenge.
Nationally, a lot of doctors and nurses and other medical professionals are saying the emotional toll has been devastating. Have you seen that?
Yes. I will caveat that in Boulder it has not been as bad as you’ve read in other locations in the news.
However, we are still facing a significant emotional toll, and I think it’s a combination of our work environment — it’s stressful that we are seeing patients suffer — but also we all have the same personal stresses that everyone else is going through with their kids at home, having work and business challenges and the loss of our usual outlets.
That combination of work stress and home stress has been hard for all of us.
How has the Boulder area in general fared compared to metro Denver and Colorado overall in terms of the infection rate, hospitalization and death rates; and also compliance with the government mandates and advisories?
I think the whole state has been pretty good at following compliance. The governor has demonstrated pretty good leadership.
Boulder has been particularly good, and Denver has been doing pretty well, too, with complying with public health orders, etc.
We have people who believe in government and who believe in science and who have the opportunity and means to socially distance and work remotely and buckle down when they can.
I think because of all of those factors, many of which are socioeconomic, we are doing maybe better than most, and we’re grateful for that.
Were you worried at any point that Boulder, like many college towns, would see infection rates going way up during this pandemic?
Yeah, for sure. We were very concerned about what would happen when the college students came back with all the associated things that go with that, including busier businesses, restaurants and bars, as well as the high schools. And we definitely did see a bump, but actually the University of Colorado did a pretty good job of getting on top of that, doing rapid testing and isolating people.
It didn’t affect us as dramatically as we had worried.
We’ve sort of tried to take it day to day and not get overly worried about all the predictions.
Anything else you think is valuable for our readers to know about the pandemic and Boulder?
The most important thing is for us, over time, to get vaccinated. Vaccine compliance in this country, generally speaking, is not as good as we would like to see, and this is going to be the crucial way for us to get back to work, back to school and back to our normal lives in a safe way.
So if I have one thing to say it would be to get vaccinated as soon as you’re able to.
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