COVID-19 by the numbers
New Mexico health officials reported 1,339 new COVID-19 cases over the weekend. However, a news release from the governor's office said Saturday's case numbers—592 of them—were incomplete "due to a technical disruption of the electronic laboratory reporting system." On Sunday, officials reported 747 cases.
Bernalillo County had 411 new cases over the weekend, followed by Doña Ana County with 238. Chaves County had 76 new cases, while Santa Fe County had 66—33 new cases on each day. The state also reported 71 new cases among inmates over the weekend, 63 of which were New Mexico Corrections Department inmates at the New Mexico Correctional Facility in Valencia County.
The state also announced 19 more deaths, 11 on Saturday and eight on Sunday. There have now been 1,026 fatalities. As the state surpassed 1,000 deaths on Friday, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced state flags will fly at half-staff this week, beginning today through sundown on Friday.
You can read all of SFR's COVID-19 coverage here. If you've had experiences with testing or the virus, we would like to hear from you.
Demand fuels new Santa Fe testing site, jobs
Citing high demand, on Friday, the state health department announced a new COVID-19 testing location on Santa Fe's Southside, provided by the City of Santa Fe, at 2501 Camino Entrada at Fire Station #9, which will be open 9 am to noon seven days a week. Clients must register for the free drive-through testing beforehand on the DOH website and have their confirmation codes with them when they arrive. The testing site at the Public Health Office on Letrado Street in Santa Fe will remain open. With rising cases, the state also is once again seeking to fill contact-tracing positions statewide by people with education or experience in the health care fields. Applicants can apply by logging onto the State Personnel Office website and navigate to "View Job Opportunities and Apply" at the top right of the page. According to a news release, hiring is virtual, and work will be remote.
Election Day eve
By Saturday morning, nearly 740,000 New Mexicans—approximately 55% of registered voters—had already cast early and absentee ballots, according to data distributed over the weekend by the Secretary of State's Office. Of those, registered Democrats had cast 362,629 ballots; Republicans, 257,011. Saturday was the last day of early voting; polling locations will re-open tomorrow at 7 am. The latest Albuquerque Journal poll showed presidential candidate Joe Biden with a comfortable lead against incumbent Republican President Donald Trump. According to the poll, 54% of likely voters said they had or would vote for Biden; 42% said they planned to or had voted for Trump. "Trump hasn't been able to break into the Democratic support in New Mexico," Brian Sanderoff, the president of Albuquerque-based Research & Polling Inc., which conducted the poll, told the Journal. "The voters have made up their minds in this race." Neither campaign spent time or much money here. SFR also spoke with voters who had made up their minds for the most recent cover story, "Make it Stop," in which Santa Feans reflected on the four years of the Trump presidency and their hopes for the future.
State claims progress on climate change
On Friday, New Mexico's Interagency Climate Change Task Force released its second annual report, which provides an update on climate change initiatives from Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham's administration, and progress on the state's Energy Transition Act. Measures of progress cited by the governor in the report's introduction include: the Solar Market Development Tax Credit, passed by the Legislature in its last session; new transportation sector projects, such as funding for electric vehicle charging infrastructure and new electric transit buses; and progress on rules governing the state's methane and natural gas waste and volatile organic compounds. According to the report, New Mexico produces more than twice the national average of greenhouse gas emissions per capita, with most methane emissions coming from the oil and gas sector. The state has amped up its data collection as it relates to such emissions, working in a public/private partnership with Descartes Labs to create a methane detection model using satellite imagery. The state's Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department developed a publicly accessible online methane tracking map and dashboard "in order to promote data transparency and make the data usable to the public," the report says.
Listen up
Some might say the presidential debates were long on personality and short on specific plans. In Episode 15 of No More Normal, a wide array of experts discuss the specific plans they wish they were hearing about from politicians. These include potential policies addressing health care, climate change, immigration, criminal justice reform, education, the economy and democracy as a whole. No More Normal is a collaboration between SFR, KUNM and New Mexico PBS.
Flu fiction
While Albert Camus' The Plague might be the most common novel to spring to mind when contemplating infection-focused fiction, SFR book columnist Molly Boyle this week unearths a lesser known but—from the sounds of it— equally scary tale for the spooky season. Granted, Halloween has now passed, but the pandemic has not. And, as Boyle writes, Katherine Anne Porter's 1939 triptych of short novels, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, "reminds us that a pandemic raging across the world is indeed precedented." Porter herself nearly died during the 1918 flu pandemic while she was a newly hired reporter at the Rocky Mountain News. That near-death experience, Boyle writes, informs the title story in Porter's collection, in which a young theater critic at the fictitious Blue Mountain News enjoys "a fledgling love affair with Adam, a soldier bound any day now for the European theatre of WWI, when she contracts the deadly flu virus."
Protest art
No time like the present to view The Art of Protest, a documentary from anonymous art collective INDECLINE (among the collective's many actions, it installed a naked Donald Trump statue in the Castro in San Francisco in 2016). The film includes interviews with myriad famous protest and political artists, such as Ralph Steadman and Shepard Fairey, along with musicians such as Anti-Flag and Pussy Riot. Northern New Mexico painter Jodie Herrera, who is of Latina, Apache and Comanche ancestry, also makes an appearance in the film. "My weapon is my paint brush," Herrera says. "That's how I fight."
It’s always sunny before the storm
The sun will shine today, with high temperatures right around 63 degrees and north wind 5 to 10 mph becoming west in the afternoon. The whole week looks much of the same with temps in the 60s and sunny, with the prospect of more rain/snow not coming until next weekend—a lifetime away.
Thanks for reading! The Word confesses she is quite bored with cooking at this point, but the Paris Review's "Eat Your Words" column, in which writer Valerie Stivers "cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers," has provided some new inspiration.
