COVID New Mexico: An Update

 I follow New Mexico COVID trends and right now they are very, very bad  The state keeps a map of counties, marking them red, yellow or green depending on the outlook.  Right now one county is marked yellow and the rest are a sea of red.  The number of cases is consistently between 1,000 and 2,000 out of a population of 2.1 million.  And recently it has been a lot closer to 2,000 (nearly one diagnosis per thousand population per day).  The positivity rate ranges between 10% and 20%.  The last two days have been high -- and that has been on a weekend when resting is low.  And all of this follows a two-week shutdown and very high mask compliance.  It was never anywhere near this bad in the spring, except in the northwestern, highly Navajo, counties of San Juan and McKinley.

The governor is naturally trying to find a positive spin.  She argues that the R0 factor (the number of new infections for each case) is at an all-time low, so new infections should start going down any time.  I am not holding my breath.  In fairness, at least new infections are not going up at an alarming rate, but seem to be stabilizing, albeit at a very high rate. The number of people in the hospital has stabilized in the 900's.  In the spring it peaked at 223.

The percentage of people who have recovered is slowly inching up.  That hospitalization rate (i.e., percentage of infected people who are hospitalized) and the mortality rate, after dropping sharply, are stabilizing.  This might seem bad, but probably just means the system is not being overwhelmed with new cases.

But this does not mean the outbreak is declining.  It just means that approximately 1,800 new case per day is becoming the new normal and hospitalizations, deaths, and recoveries are catching up.  In the Dakotas, where over 10% of the population has been infected, the great majority have recovered.  Infection rates remain high; the high recovery rate just means this has been going on a long time.  North Dakota has imposed a mask mandate and experienced a sharp drop in cases.  South Dakota not imposed any sort of mandate and has seen a significant decline, though infections still remain high.*  I can only take this to mean one of two things.  Either South Dakota residents have been sufficiently alarmed by the outbreak to change their behavior, or the state really is achieving a degree of herd immunity.

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*New Mexico and South Dakota new infections relative to population are similar, both down from their peak, but South Dakota much further down from a higher peak.