Rich communities like Aspen have the ability to create their own rules within Gov. Polis’s color-coded wheel of COVID because it turns out science can be bought.
It all started when the coronavirus ignored the thousands of affidavits signed by Aspen’s visitors swearing they were not contaminated with the COVID.
As the Aspen Times reports, the virus continues to spread at “astronomical” levels.
But instead of going to Red Level along with 33 other Colorado counties, Aspen declared they are elevating health codes to “Orange Plus Plus.”
It’s like Red Level, because they’re at Red Level metrics, only they’re not going to close restaurants like other counties with roughly the same two-week positivity rate, incidence rate and hospital metrics as Pitkin County.
Because it’s Aspen.
Polis Law says communities must follow all the same protocols at every level of his color-coded wheel.
“The only things that change across levels are the capacity limits.”
So Aspen changed the capacity limits for restaurants from “Indoor dining closed,” or zero capacity, to 25% capacity.
If Aspen can tweak the capacity from closed to 25%, why can’t other counties in Level Red?
Because they’re not Aspen with five-star restaurants and rich patrons, that’s why.