COVID-19 infections continued to rise in Colorado as rates in other states fell, putting the state in the 14th spot in the U.S. for the highest seven-day incidence rate of infections as of Thursday.

appears to have seen a decrease in cases this week over last week, there are still a few days of data yet to collect. State epidemiologist Dr. Rachel Herlihy said in a news conference Friday that officials want to see several weeks of declines in COVID cases before they feel confident saying

they are decreasing.

“We’re certainly not there yet, even if we see a slight improvement as this week goes on,” Herlihy said.

The state’s seven-day rate was 268 cases per 100,000 people Thursday, up from 166 on Oct. 1, which at that time ranked Colorado at 41st highest among the states.

Colorado had 982 coronavirus hospitalizations Thursday, which state health officials said is the highest number in 2021. Seventy-eight percent of those patients — 765 — are unvaccinated, the state health department’s COVID-19 incident commander Scott Bookman said.

He said 89.9% of Colorado’s ICU beds were occupied between COVID and NONCOVID patients.

Herlihy and Bookman called the difficulty reaching a sustained drop in case numbers a “stubborn plateau.” But Herlihy acknowledged she doesn’t know with certainty whether Colorado’s trend represents the top of a plateau or the beginning of a new surge like the one seen last winter.

“This is one of those times where my crystal ball isn’t very clear,” she said. She added she hopes Colorado will follow the rest of the country in seeing cases drop, but that it’s “counterintuitive” to knowledge that respiratory viruses tend to spread most in the fall and winter.

Herlihy said she also isn’t sure why Colorado’s cases have been rising when other states’ COVID infections have been decreasing. Southeastern states might have had earlier spikes than Colorado associated as higher temperatures drove people to stay inside, while the opposite might be true in Colorado, she said, but acknowledged other cold, Northern states aren’t having uniform experiences with their COVID numbers.

“I think there’s a lot we still don’t know about the temporal nature of these waves of illness and how they occur with delta. So I think, really, lots more for us to learn and try and understand and at this point.”

COVID-19 case rates continue to be highest among the 6-to-11 age group, followed by 12 to 17-year-olds, then adults. Children ages 0 to 5 continue to have the lowest rates, Herlihy said.

Counties on Colorado’s Eastern Plains showed particularly high case rates, including in Cheyenne, Kiowa, Bent, Kit Carson, Lincoln, Otero and Yuma counties.

In El Paso County, transmission was higher than the state as a whole, with 314 cases per 100,000 over the last seven days or about 2,274 new cases, public health statistics show. The county has no public health mandates in place to slow the spread.

The county’s hospitals remained strained with 189 people receiving care for COVID-19 or related symptoms.

Uchealth reported Friday that it was caring for 298 patients across its system, the highest since late December, of those in need of ventilators 89% were not vaccinated, spokeswoman Cary Vogrin said.

Herlihy and Bookman once again urged people to get vaccinated. To be fully inoculated by Thanksgiving on Nov. 25, Thursday was the final day for getting a first shot of the Moderna vaccine. Oct. 21 is the final day to get a first shot of the Pfizer vaccine to be fully vaccinated by Thanksgiving, Bookman said. People getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine should get the shot by Nov. 11.

“[We] really want to make sure that people are thinking about the safest way to celebrate our holidays this year,” he said.

Findings from a large study of 600,000 COVID-19 cases released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found those who were unvaccinated as the delta variant surged in early summer were over 10 times more likely to be hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die, The Associated Press reported.

Herlihy encouraged other measures to decrease risk of COVID transmission associated with gatherings, such as testing before attending an event, keeping gatherings small and limiting them to people who have been vaccinated.

Bookman urged people to get a flu vaccine as well, to keep hospitalizations down. Colorado had an unusually mild flu season last fall and winter, influenced by COVID-19 measures such as masking, social distancing, and remote learning for schools. State health officials also pushed flu vaccinations in an effort to reduce hospitalizations in the face of surging COVID cases.

But health officials said this week they expect this flu season to look more like typical, nonpandemic years.

Taken together, COVID and flu vaccines “really do have the opportunity to protect your hospital capacity as we go into our winter months,” Bookman said.