Colorado Public Radio: Nine months of the pandemic had passed before a Durango area nursing home diagnosed its first case of COVID-19 last November. It took just a couple of hours until it had its second. From there the outbreak at Four Corners Health Care Center moved with astonishing speed.

There were 46 positive residents just more than a week later. Then 84 total cases the next.

Deaths followed. So many that La Plata County Coroner Jann Smith had to deploy a freezer truck to hold the bodies.

“We were going over there two, three, four times a day there for a little while,” she said. It was more bodies in a day than Smith would typically handle in a week.

By the time the COVID outbreak was over at Four Corners, 24 residents were dead. 

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