New Mexico is doing it right


My post two days ago discussed the fact that New Mexico had developed a plan with its hospitals to ration healthcare when and if the hospitals are all completely full. The Democratic governor is one of the sensible governors who actually believes that the health of her state’s citizens shouldn’t take second place to following a discredited ideology that has gotten us in the mess. She was pleading with New Mexicans not to drop their efforts to control the spread of the coronavirus. Two weeks ago, New Mexico implemented some of the most restrictive anti-coronavirus policies in the country, as new cases were growing exponentially.

In today’s Washington Post, an article points out that the state did activate the plan. But it also points out that this might not necessarily lead to New Mexicans dying because they were denied care. This is because, over the past two weeks, new cases have fallen by a third – obviously because of the measures the governor put in place. The test positive rate has also declined significantly.

Most importantly, “…the growth in hospital admissions has slowed.” So assuming the state doesn’t relax the restrictions too quickly, New Mexico may turn out to be one state that doesn’t need to ration healthcare – even though it was the first to announce an explicit plan to do so.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The tragedy in India

For a great account of what’s going on in India, read this WaPo article. And read this Atlantic article for a good commentary on how India’s wealthier class ignored the lessons of the 1984 Bhopal disaster and let the health care system stagnate, leaving the country unable to handle this sudden surge in the virus. Although it's wrong to say the system stagnated. For the wealthy, it became (and remains) world-class. Does this remind you of another health care system that, at least in the early days of the pandemic, was overwhelmed?  Both articles call attention to the Modi government’s failures, but they both try to spread the blame around. Yes, others are responsible, but the fact that – after a terrible response to the first wave of the virus – the government got lulled into thinking they’d beaten it, so they could open up completely (including holding big political rallies and allowing the annual Kumbh Mela to take place – this year in Haridwar, which I’ve visited and can ...
Read more

The Indian variant

The numbers keep improving every week. Both new cases and deaths grew at the same 0.7% rate in the past week, vs. 0.9% for both cases and deaths the previous week. And average daily deaths in the past week were 573. For perspective, the last time deaths were this low was March 31, 2020. But given that daily deaths hadn’t gone above 10 until March 15, the fact that they’d accelerated to 468 on March 31 was a bad sign (at the time, my big concern was that total deaths would end up in the low tens of thousands. In fact, they passed 600,000 last week). This morning, WaPo ran a story on the new Indian variant’s arrival in Britain, where it passed 2,000 cases recently. It seems to be at least 50% more transmissible than what we used to call the UK variant, but which is now the dominant variant in both the US and Britain. And that variant in turn easily displaced what had been the previous dominant variant in both countries, since the beginning of the pandemic (in fact, I remember a lot o...
Read more

More than ever, we’re on our own

Leana Wen, a physician and former public health commissioner for Baltimore, wrote another great op-ed piece for the Post today entitled “We’ve reached 200,000 deaths. Our response has gotten even worse than it was at 100,000.” It makes the stark point: By the most important measures of public health, we’re doing worse on a national scale than we were in late May, when the US passed 100,000 Covid deaths. Here are some of her points: “In late May, we had about 20,000 new infections per day. Now we are at double that, with  around 40,000  new daily infections. This is a high baseline to have entering the fall and winter, when the combination of quarantine fatigue and cold weather could drive people to congregate indoors and substantially increase transmission.” “In addition, restrictions keep getting lifted, even in states with surging infections. The nearly 2  million  students returning for in-person instruction will surely lead to more outbreaks, as some colleg...
Read more