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DENVER (KDVR) — Colorado avoided the post-Thanksgiving COVID-19 spike against the national curve, but the state’s rural counties are lagging – a unique issue for Colorado among similar states.

National and state health authorities have warned for weeks of a post-Thanksgiving spike, and elsewhere they have been correct. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data shows the U.S. overall 7-day cases per 100,000 average still climbing after a brief dip in late November.

In Colorado, however, daily case averages have gone down in the same timeframe.

This trend ought to bring Colorado’s numbers back down beneath the national average. The state spent most of the pandemic beneath the national average of cases per capita before surging beyond it in October. However, the sharp downward state trend will likely meet the national average in days if it continues.

Colorado is not noticeably outperforming states with similar populations, either in its downward trend or in its overall cases per 100,000 people.

In one regard, Colorado performed worse than similarly-sized states. It started beneath all their averages and swung past most of them in the fall.

Colorado’s population sits among Maryland, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Carolina and Alabama. The October spike in cases here carried it well above a gentler upswings in Alabama, South Carolina and Maryland, but Minnesota and Wisconsin both outpaced it.

Where Colorado is performing poorly is its rural counties, unlike similarly sized states. Federal definitions group counties by metro and non-metro. In Colorado, all Front Range counties are classified as metro and the remainder non-metro.

Colorado’s rural counties have seen their daily case average fall 11 cases per day in the last week, but that number hasn’t tracked with the counties in more populated metro areas.

Metro counties began to fall on Nov. 20 and have stayed more or less on that track since then. Non-metro counties, however, continued to rise after Nov. 20 and only began declining on Dec. 5.

Colorado is unique in this trend among states of the same population size.

In most of those states, rural and urban counties move largely in unison. Only in Minnesota did average rural daily cases exceed urban daily counts, and even then, the two moved up and down at the same times.

Whatever made Colorado’s rural counties COVID-19 cases going up after Thanksgiving was a uniquely Colorado issue.