Colorado is in a “different place in the pandemic” now that many of its most vulnerable residents have been vaccinated, a top health official said Monday, which is why the state is looking to further loosen some infection control measures.

The state announced over the weekend that it was preparing to change its dial – the COVID metric-driven framework used to determine how tightly controlled various counties should be.

While the tweak so far is just a proposal, the draft would make it easier for counties to face looser restrictions on various businesses’ capacities.

At a news conference Monday, Colorado chief medical officer Eric France said tinkering with the dial “is absolutely what we should be doing.”

“Now we’re in a place where health care workers and our most vulnerable (who) are most likely to die or be hospitalized, are becoming vaccinated,” France said.

“It’s a different place than we were in six months ago when the dial was built in partnership with communities.”

He said with the vaccine and increased control of the pandemic in Colorado, officials are considering “the important desire to open up businesses and solve for the crisis at hand.”

Under the proposed changes to the dial, the most stringent levels of restrictions would require a higher number of cases in a community.

As of now, for instance, having 300 cases per 100,000 residents would put a county at Level Orange. Under the new dial, 300 cases would put counties at the upper limit for yellow, one step looser than orange.

The new dial would have higher benchmarks for positivity rate, though.

An 8% positivity rate under the current dial would land a county in yellow; under the new dial, that county would be in orange based on their positivity rate. 

By every metric, the presence of COVID in Colorado is far lower than it was in November or December.

The seven-day average of new cases added here is at its lowest since late October, and hospitalizations – long the boogeyman that threatened to overwhelm the state – are the lowest they’ve been since before Halloween.

Ninety percent of the state’s health care workers have been vaccinated, and most vaccine clinics within the state’s skilled-nursing homes are also complete.

Just less than 40% of the state’s 70-and-older population has been inoculated, which is more than halfway toward the state’s end-of-February goal. 

All of the state’s allocation of vaccines for this week will go to those older than 69 years old, National Guard Brigadier Gen. Scott Sherman said at the news conference.

After that, as much as 65% of the state’s allocation will go toward that group to ensure at least 70% of those 70 and up are inoculated by the end of February. 

He added that the state is hoping to get enough vaccine in the coming weeks – 300,000 doses per week or more – to begin doling out shots from as many providers as possible.

“We’re certainly hoping here in March that the amount of vaccine increases substantially so we can get vaccine at every pharmacy, every provider,” he said.

“We think that’s somewhere above 300,000 a week, where we can make sure everybody’s included so we can do that. Once we get above 300,000, that’s also where we look at bringing in (Federal Emergency Management Administration and the Department of Defense) to run larger clinics, too.”