The Douglas County Board of County Commissioners on Tuesday will consider asking the state of Colorado to “fully reopen” the county, so that residents can “exercise personal responsibility” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“57,716 residents of Douglas County have received one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine as of March 3,” a board resolution reads in part. “[T]he number of people with some level of immunity to COVID-19, either through contraction of the disease and/or receiving a COVID-19 vaccine has increased dramatically and Colorado is approaching herd immunity, especially amongst the most vulnerable.”

According to The New York Times’ vaccination tracker, approximately one in five Coloradans has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it does not yet know how many people have to be vaccinated for society to reach herd immunity – the prevention of disease spread from person to person.

The resolution, if passed by the board, would constitute a formal request to “immediately issue a full reopening plan,” because county residents “are capable of exercising personal responsibility and making meaningful and safe decisions.”

Douglas County officials have bristled against pandemic-related health restrictions since nearly the beginning. In March 2020, six Republican state lawmakers from the county asked the board to secede from the multi-jurisdictional Tri-County Health Department following the first stay-at-home order. Then in July, Commissioner Lora Thomas accused a registered nurse who represented Douglas County on Tri-County’s board of health for dividing the community by voting in favor of a mask mandate.

“It became clear that the expectation of Lora Thomas was that I vote on various issues the way she wanted me to,” the board member, Paulette Joswick, told Colorado Politics at the time. “That is not how an appointment to the board of health by the commissioners works.”

Joswick resigned her seat earlier this year. County commissioners will also vote at their Tuesday meeting on appointing Joswick’s replacement, Linda M. Fielding. Fielding is the director of Nuclear Medicine for Denver Health Medical Center and is an associate professor of Radiology at the University of Colorado Medical School.

Douglas County has seen a fairly consistent average since mid-January of between 60 and 100 COVID-19 infections per day. Cases in Arapahoe County, by contrast, have lately declined. More than 6,000 Coloradans have died from the disease.