After steady declines through the latter half of September, Colorado’s COVID-19 case numbers and hospitalizations have stalled in recent days, top health officials said Friday.

“There’s not a clear increase,” Rachel Herlihy, the state’s epidemiologist, said in a press conference, “but more of a plateau than we were hoping to be seeing at this point.” 

Cases are still below where they were in mid-September, state data shows. But Colorado reported more than 2,000 cases Thursday for the first time in nearly a week. Though the state has typically had lower rates than the national average during this most recent surge, national rates have continued to fall and have now caught up with Colorado, Herlihy said.

She and Scott Bookman, the state’s COVID-19 incident commander, pointed to two metrics they said were concerning. The first is hospitalizations. As of Thursday afternoon, 909 Coloradans were hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 infections, along with another 81 who are suspected to have the virus. Both of those numbers are down from Wednesday but are still high compared to even the peaks of this most recent wave. The 909 confirmed patients is the fourth-highest total since January. 

Intensive care bed use remains higher than at any point in the pandemic, Bookman said. State data indicates 91% of ICU beds have been in use on average over the past week. Herlihy said that as of late September, roughly 40% of the 1,519 occupied beds were in use by COVID-19 patients, with the rest filled by the “what we would typically see in ICUs.” 

“In conversations I’ve had with hospitals, there really is a significant amount of churn right now,” Bookman said. “Patients come in, many are admitted for a short period of time, and then are discharged. We’re starting to see a larger number of just kind of long-stay (COVID-19) patients in the ICUs who are on ventilators, and (providers) really are unable to get them off and discharged.”

While hospitalizations are considered a lagging indicator — meaning they should fall a couple of weeks after sustained case drops — the positivity rate is a leading indicator, the officials said Friday. Herlihy said the state’s goal is to keep that number below 5% — meaning fewer than 5% of COVID-19 tests are returning positive. 

As of Friday, the average positivity rate from the past week is 7.2%, the highest since January. Herlihy said that figure is particularly concerning now, as “fall is a transition time” and “it’s really difficult to predict what’s going to happen as more individuals move indoors and behaviors change.”  

Bookman said state data shows vaccinated Coloradans are eight times less likely to be hospitalized as unvaccinated residents. That data shows that 76% of COVID-19 patients currently in Colorado’s hospitals are unvaccinated.