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COVID-19 by the numbers
New Mexico health officials yesterday reported 1,137 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the statewide total to 287,221; the health department has designated 250,621 of those cases as recovered.
Bernalillo County had 416 new cases, followed by San Juan County with 113 and Valencia County with 98. Santa Fe County had 42 new cases.
The state also announced 11 additional deaths, 10 of them recent, including the 175th from Santa Fe County: a female in her 50s who had underlying conditions and had been hospitalized; there have now been 5,135 fatalities statewide. As of yesterday, 470 people were hospitalized with COVID-19, 45 more than the day prior.
Currently, 83.2% of New Mexicans 18 years and older have had at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and 73% are fully vaccinated. Among that age group, 14.2% have had a booster shot. In the 12-17-year-old age group, 63.4% people have had at least one dose and 55% are fully inoculated. Among children ages 5-11, 0.5% have had at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine following last week’s rollout. In Santa Fe County, 94.2% of people 18 and older have had at least one dose and 82.9% are fully vaccinated.
New Mexicans can register for a COVID-19 vaccine here and check eligibility for a COVID-19 vaccine booster here. Parents can add dependents to their vaccine profiles here.
Yesterday, Pfizer and BioNTech announced they have asked the US Food and Drug Administration to amend the emergency use authorization for their COVID-19 vaccine booster and make it available to anyone age 18 and older; currently, the FDA emergency use authorization for Pfizer’s booster limits its availability to people 65 years and older, along with those 18 and older who are at risk of severe COVID due to underlying health conditions or living/work situations.
Acting Health Secretary Dr. David Scrase, Deputy DOH Secretary Dr. Laura Parajón and state Epidemiologist Dr. Christine Ross will provide a COVID-19 update at 2 pm today, which will stream live on the DOH Facebook page and with Spanish translation on Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s YouTube channel.
You can read all of SFR’s COVID-19 coverage here.
Advocates sound alarm over gov’s crime agenda
Members of the New Mexico SAFE coalition say some potential criminal justice reforms floated by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham could hurt innocent people and lead to more COVID-19 in county jails, among other consequences. Last summer, Lujan Grisham said she plans to focus on violent crime in January’s legislative session, with proposals to add 1,000 officers and changes to the state’s pretrial detention system, although the specifics of those ideas have yet to be unveiled. In a nutshell, the governor and others want to make it more difficult for accused violent offenders to be released prior to trial, although court officials have said there is scant evidence that people released prior to trial are committing new crimes. In a presentation to lawmakers on the Courts, Corrections and Justice Committee earlier this week, SAFE coalition members contend that changing the state’s pretrial detention law would require a constitutional amendment and is, moreover, unnecessary. In its presentation, SAFE lists what it characterizes as “disastrous effects” from changing the pretrial detention—in addition to increasing the potential spread of COVID-19 among the incarcerated—including: longer periods of detention leading to higher rates of new criminal activity and recidivism; innocent people being more likely to plead or be found guilty; decreased ability for people presumed innocent to provide for themselves and their families.
Lawmaker criticizes UNM athletics for gender equality
House Speaker Brian Egolf, D-Santa Fe, recently called out the University of New Mexico Lobos and Athletic Director Eddie Nuñez for charging less for season tickets for the university’s women’s basketball team versus the men’s. “Not a good look,” Egolf’s tweet said. “As a father of two daughters,” Egolf told the Albuquerque Journal, “I just don’t like the message it communicates to girls in the state—that their efforts on the basketball court aren’t as appreciated or valued as the work of the men.” Egolf said UNM should consider either equalizing ticket prices for both men’s and women’s basketball or offering season-ticket packages for both. As a public university funded with public money, he said, UNM shouldn’t be “communicating that women’s basketball is of inherently less value than men’s basketball.” Nuñez told the Journal he was aware of Egolf’s comments but did not want to comment himself, other than to say he was open to discussing the issue or any topic related to UNM athletics with Egolf and other lawmakers. Egolf’s comments arrive amid a national reckoning regarding gender equality in sports that includes a focus on ticket prices, marketing, budgets and compensation.
Santa Fe Institute receives $50 mil donation
Complexity science and the people who study its application across disciplines received a big financial boost yesterday in the form of a $50 million donation to the Santa Fe Institute. The donation, from investor and philanthropist Bill Miller—a life trustee and chairman emeritus of SFI’s board—is the largest in SFI’s history and, a news release notes, possibly the “largest gift explicitly dedicated to support the science of complex systems.” SFI, founded in 1984, was the first research institute dedicated to studying complex adaptive systems and remains the only stand-alone institution focused on the field. “This gift comes at a moment when the world needs radically new ideas and quantitative frameworks to engage with the growing connectivity and complexity of life and the accelerating pace of change in both technology and society,” SFI President David Krakauer said in a statement. “Bill’s gift supports the search for new foundational ideas bearing on our understanding of complex reality, which includes consideration of the planetary future, our increasingly hybrid nature with machines, and potential existential issues around climate, our democracy, and rationality.” For his part, Miller has previously cited his association with SFI as inspiration for four major investment decisions he’s made during his career (Miller founded the investment firm Miller Value Partners and spent 35 years at global investment firm Legg Mason). “My long affiliation with SFI has been among the most rewarding of my life, both personally and professionally,” Miller said in a statement. “SFI scientists have been and remain at the forefront of the most exciting and important scientific problems and challenges we face. I am delighted to be able to contribute to the critically important work SFI is engaged in.”
Listen up
No time like the present to consider energy and water efficiency—the mainstay of the Energy Smart Academy at Santa Fe Community College. On the most recent episode of Build Together: The Santa Fe Home Builders Association Radio Hour, host Miles Conway, executive officer of SFHBA’s board, talks with the academy’s director, Amanda Hatherly, about the program, the resources for retrofitting your home and what’s happening at the confluence of energy efficiency science and social justice in Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico.
Rust fallout continues
In the wake of last month’s fatal and tragic shooting on the Rust film set, actor Alec Baldwin this week said, via an Instagram post, “that every film/TV set that uses guns, fake or otherwise, should have a police officer on set, hired by the production, to specifically monitor weapons safety.” Baldwin fired the gun, shooting and killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza. Baldwin’s comments arrive as the shooting continues to spur debate within the industry about gun protocols on film sets. Dwayne Johnson, for instance, told Variety last week his production company would no longer use live guns on set, and more than 113,000 people have signed onto a Change.org petition calling for real guns to be banned from film sets—an initiative with an accompanying Twitter account called @HalynasLaw. No charges have been filed yet—nor is it clear if there will be—in the Oct. 21 shooting, but the LA Times speaks with legal experts about who would be most likely to face charges were any to be filed. Not Alec Baldwin, they say. Rather, they argue, Assistant Director David Halls and set armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed seem more likely to be held culpable, should New Mexico 1st Judicial District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies decide to bring charges. “Both of them failed to do their job,” Los Angeles plaintiffs attorney David Ring tells the Times. “For a gun to be laying around a movie set with a live bullet in it, is unfathomable. So, the two people who somehow let that happen are the assistant director and the armorer, and they’re both going to be exposed to criminal liability for it.”
Fighting fire with fire
As environmental journalist Laura Paskus has reported, wildland firefighters face increasingly dangerous work, as fire seasons grow longer and more intense. For its Nov. 15 edition, the New Yorker explores what wildland firefighters experience in an era of megafires (harrowing and life-threatening situations), as well as the growing conviction among some that forest policies geared at suppression of such fires are merely contributing to larger blazes later. The story includes reflections from Jeremy Bailey, a former hotshot who left wildland firefighting after he worked on the Santa Fe Interagency Hotshot Crew, which he joined in the late 1990s. That work often involved lighting prescribed burns, he says, in the Jemez Mountains. “Almost immediately, I had this awareness of the need for fire,” Bailey says, alongside a realization that the Forest Service’s mandate to suppress fires quickly would continue. In 2008, he went to work for the Nature Conservancy, where he heads up its prescribed burn program and advocates for “good fire,” aka “fires of low to moderate severity that result in ecological benefits, including reducing the fuels that create megafires.” Bailey and others advocate for a workforce to not just fight fires in the warm months, but also set them in the cooler ones, with Bailey writing in a 2019 essay: “Imagine if for every firefighter poised and ready to extinguish any start, we also had a fire lighter.”
Hold onto your hats
Looks as though Santa Fe’s temperatures will slide down into the 50s for the rest of the week, the National Weather Service forecasts, with a high today near 57 degrees, sunny skies and a “breezy” northwest wind 15 to 25 mph.
Thanks for reading! The Word doesn’t know if the polar bear cam set up in Churchill, Canada is supposed to be soothing, but she’s finding it to be so.
