New Mexico health officials today said the Dec. 8 daily report on COVID-19 cases, deaths and hospitalizations will be delayed until tomorrow following an internet outage.
According to a news release, that outage resulted in a disruption to various laboratory reports that are collected and then reported by the Department of Health. Today's report will be posted as soon as the system resumes tomorrow, and the state will aim to publish Wednesday's numbers at the usual time (4ish) tomorrow.
The cause of the disruption—which also briefly affected other state agency websites and email systems—is being investigated.
"The Department of Information Technology was alerted of intermittent disruption of Internet services this morning," DoIT Secretary John Salazar said in a statement. "DoIT personnel immediately began troubleshooting the issues with Lumen CenturyLink engineers, who after several hours of troubleshooting discovered the source of the issue and were able to fix it in the early afternoon. DoIT and Lumen personnel are currently investigating the root cause leading to the disruption of services."
The health department will still notify people who have tested positive and today's disruption will not impact "the cumulative reporting of COVID-19 cases or the evaluation of the state's epidemiological data."
While the state was unable to report on COVID-19 today as usual, Human Services Secretary David Scrase earlier today 1,007 people were hospitalized, an all-time high. The image below indicates the status of available beds yesterday, although Scrase emphasized the situation is very "dynamic" and changes "by the hour."
Nonetheless, Scrase said officials expect hospitalizations and deaths—which follow at about a two-week interval from cases—to remain high in the immediate future, with a likely move to allowing for crisis standards of care by the end of the year.
The environment department did post today's COVID-19 watchlist for establishments with two or more cases of COVID-19 among employees. That list currently includes 137 places, 10 in Santa Fe County: Cafe Castro; Chick-fil-A; McDonald's on Airport Road; the Netflix production of The Harder They Come; Pepsi Bottling Group; Sam's Club; the Santa Fe Animal Shelter; the Smith's Food & Drug stores on Pacheco and Cerrillos Road; and Santa Fe High School.
