Coronavirus Update March 19:  The Status of Testing in ABQ and Santa Fe
Coronavirus Testing Hotline Number is  855-600-3453
or Presbyterian Hospital's website:  www.phs.org

If You Think You Need a Test Go to the Hotline Now
28 Positive Cases Found as of Today in NM

An excellent article written by Jens Gould for the Santa Fe New Mexican can be accessed here
It is the best summary I've seen so far about the status of testing in Albuquerque and Santa Fe and it would be nice for someone to check out the status of testing in other areas of the state.

Some findings:

• Only persons who "need" testing can be tested, at least so far, due to the lack of laboratory ability to evaluate a large number of test samples.  Presbyterian Hospital defines "need" as someone who is exhibiting symptoms, presumably sore throat, coughing, and fever; or else have come in contact with someone who has tested positive; or has traveled to one of the no-no countries on the CDC list.  This screen will hardly catch all or even most of the people potentially infected, but it is a start.
• New Mexico at the time of Gould's writing, could handle only 600 tests per day, split between the state's own lab and the TriCore Reference lab in Albuquerque.  According the the NM Dept. of Health website as of this morning NM had tested 2354 cases, more, as far as we know, than El Paso or Juárez combined--the closest large urban area (population over 2 million) to most New Mexicans.
• TriCore is apparently the only lab in the state capable of evaluating test samples--but it is struggling to ramp up.  It has a machine that can evaluate a lot of tests, but it hasn't been able to purchase the necessary reagents to use if specifically for COVIS-19 tests and hasn't been able to purchase them from the pharmaceutical company Roche.  Note:  Roche, readers may recall, was mentioned a few days ago by President Trump as having agreed to help out the nation with more testing.  The TriCore machine is capable of running 1000 test samples in one batch.
• Note:  South Korea is capable of running 10,000 tests per day.  If New Mexico could do this we would be much clearer about how many persons have already been infected and have a clearer idea of what needs to be done.
• Lovelace hospital closed its drive-up site Monday due to overwhelming demand and limited resources. Some 50 cars were lined up around midday at the provider’s Santa Fe facility

My Take:  Four comments:

• New Mexicans understand the urgent need for testing, as evidenced by the long lines. Unfortunately the capability to satisfy this need in a timely fashion is highly limited, and this limitation is going to make the crisis much worse than it otherwise would have been. 
• The inability of state government and the private sector to  provide adequate testing in New Mexico at a time of need is not so much a failure of the state's health system as it is the overall failure of the federal government to have kept it's promise to Americans to protect the nation's health at a world-class level.  Much of what has happened is banana republic stuff, if you will pardon the expression. The state has done its best, at the helm of capable, concerned leadership, but a global pandemic must be dealt with at the national level, and the national health system let us down, beginning at the very top.
• A final accounting is premature at this point, but in spite of all the frustrations, our leaders from the Governor to our top health officials have managed to ramp up testing, to keep the public reasonably informed (the flow of information has been spotty, but this may be due partly to a lack of concern by news sources owned by distant corporations), and to ramp up our hospital capabilities as best we can.  I'm not quite sure what may be going on in El Paso and Juárez behind the scenes, but from what I have seen from available sources, New Mexico is well ahead of our closest neighbors to the South.
• Given our proximity to El Paso and Juárez, it would be nice to see evidence that we in the borderland region--Southern NM, El Paso, Juárez--are dealing with this pandemic the way Governor Cuomo has explained New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Jersey are cooperating with each other to help mitigate the potential spread of the virus, and share health resources available in the region.  A US-Mexico Border Health Commission was created twenty years ago with great fanfare to begin regional cooperation in health along the border.  Its home web page (click here) lists infectious diseases as a priority (under "commission activities," but there is no link to coronavirus except for a link to the generic CDC home page and the phone numbers listed were not answered and the mail boxes are full so I couldn't leave a message.  The CDC has a web page (click here) titled US-Mexico Border Health, with a nice picture of the urban swath that is El Paso-Juárez.  There is a link there about crossing your dog into Mexico, but there is no link to the coronavirus crisis.