While New Mexico is geographically the fifth largest state in the US, it is also one of the most rural, with a population of just over 2 million; it is ranked 47th in income out of 50 states and the District of Columbia. And yet, thanks to exceptional leadership by Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and the cooperation of many sectors of our statewide community, it is mounting one of the most proactive responses to Covid-19 in the US.
Part of New Mexico’s success in “flattening the curve” is the result of the willingness of its leaders to tell the truth, and of its citizens to chip in.
Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced the closure of schools on March 13 although only nine cases had been confirmed and before any deaths were recorded. By March 23, when she issued a stay-at-home order, the state had confirmed 83 cases with no deaths reported.
By and large, New Mexicans did not complain or try to evade the order. Churches closed or found ways to broadcast online or through radio. Events were cancelled. Parks shut down. Rio Arriba County, the Catholic Archdiocese and the Santuario de Chimayo have even cancelled the annual pilgrimage to the Santuario, in which thousands of pilgrims walk tens or hundreds of miles to a local shrine. Vecinos have formed networks to care for one another, distributing food, making protective gear, and finding ways to work remotely.
New Mexicans have revived the barter economy that still ties our social fabric together.
Almost every New Mexican understands one thing. As a poor rural and frontier state, our healthcare system will be quickly overwhelmed. Our only possibility of avoiding Armageddon is to work together.
The CDC issued it’s rose-colored-glass scenario using the IHME model that assumes perfect compliance on March 31, predicting that if everyone everywhere in the US did everything asked of them (NOT!...Thank you Deep South!), New Mexico would experience no shortage of general hospital beds, a shortage of 135 ICU beds and of 201 ventilators.
I wrote about it here.
By the morning, the state issued its own projection based on a realistic assessment of New Mexico’s moderate to high implementation of social isolation. The New Mexico Human Services Department issued a projected shortage of 998 general hospital beds, and 1,810 ICU beds. Hospital systems and the Army Corps of engineers came together to find ways to transfer patients and stand up field hospitals sufficient to meet peak need prior to the projected date of peak usage during the last week of April and the first week of May.
With the cooperation of New Mexicans, the growth curve has slowed from doubling every 2 days, to doubling every 3.7 days. We hope to do even better.
Teams of volunteers have pitched in across the state to feed seniors, homeless people and children. Groups of seamsters have coordinated in towns across Nuevo Mexico to make masks.
In Rio Arriba, my county, we call ourselves Rosie the Respirators. Our seamsters have experimented with a variety of fabrics, designs and filters to approximate, as closely as we are able, the effectiveness of N-95 masks. Women (and a few men) across Rio Arriba (which is the size of Massachusetts with 41,000 people and with one of the lowest median incomes in the state) are autoclaving materials in their instant pots and pressure cookers to see which one holds up best. We all have them because so many of us can produce from our farms, gardens and farmers’ markets. Veterinarians, dentists and private citizens are contributing.
We’ve distributed about 500 masks to health care providers, volunteers delivering food, and police so far with more to come.
This week, I convened groups of people such as infectious disease experts, jail personnel and hospital officials to develop clear testing protocols for inmates, based on the very limited number of tests available to us, and on the 7 day turn-around time required for analysis. We have reduced our jail population 70%, from 140 to 42. We also developed testing protocol for our residential treatment facilities and came up with a plan to establish drive up testing operations apart from the hospital to enable the hospital to concentrate all of its effort on treating sick patients in three weeks, when the peak hits.
It has been difficult to figure out how to create order from chaos, and to develop sensible plans with extremely limited resources and constantly changing conditions. Guidances and availabilities seem to evolve every few hours, often reversing themselves.
At this point, we have seen only five confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Rio Arriba County, but we know that number will grow.
Every weekday morning, I broadcast a corona update from my bed (we have three people working at home in different rooms and there is no desk in my room) on KDCE (Que Dicé) Radio at 7:30 am to tell our community what people here are doing to prepare. I want them to feel confident that the health care community and state and local government are working closely together to protect them. It is my goal to get us all to stay home as efficiently as possible.
We know that we will see a lot of sickness in our community. But we also know that by working together, we can reduce the number of people who will die.