COVID Update & Five Commitments | A Message from CEO Dave Ressler

This is a pivotal time for our community.

In our continued battle against COVID-19, together we have gained ground recently as many of our local services are carefully reopening, including our restaurants and our hotels at 50% capacity, in keeping with the Pitkin County Roadmap to Reopening plan.

This is good and hopeful news for our community, which has sustained significant economic, social and emotional effects of COVID-19 and (for some) deadly consequences. We are able to take this important step forward because, together, we have upheld our Five Commitments to Containment and will continue to cover our faces when in public spaces, maintain our social distancing, wash our hands frequently, and get tested when we have symptoms, and then stay at home. For more information, check out the newly-launched Pitkin County Response and Recovery Website.

For our part, Aspen Valley Hospital is providing the COVID testing for those who are referred by their primary care physicians with symptoms, without any cost after insurance. This past week, we also rolled out our communications tool, called the AVH Capacity Matrix, which provides the Hospital’s real-time status to the community. You can find it on the Pitkin County COVID-19 Stats webpage. This is important information for our community to have readily available, because it will indicate if the virus spread is becoming a problem again, for Aspen Valley Hospital and for our community’s safety. Public Health is also relying on this information, along with other metrics, to determine when it is safe to keep advancing along the roadmap, or when we need to pause or take a step back.

Meanwhile, our patients who need us continue to receive our safe and special brand of extraordinary care. Since we reopened to elective and other non-urgent services on May 1, we have been providing care to the many in our community who were waiting for essential in-person care – such as surgeries, procedures, doctor visits, studies, consultations and therapies. Thanks to our staff and physicians, these services are being delivered in a safe environment that continues to protect us and our patients from the virus. We want to assure our community and our patients that it is safe to return to AVH and our off-site locations when they need our care. That is, after all, why we are here.

Thank you again for playing your part, as a community that cares, in getting us to this point where we are cautiously moving forward as a hospital and a community to safely restore our lives and our economy. If we work together, along with our guests and visitors, we can continue to move forward with the County’s plan for reopening.

I am proud to be a part of the AVH organization that has provided the first line of defense against this virus, and I wouldn’t want to be living in any other community than ours.

Sincerely,
Dave Ressler