New Mexico Coronavirus Update:  March 10, 4 pm

On the Governor's website this afternoon was a link on coronavirus which takes you to a website (click here) of the New Mexico Department of Health.  Click there and you find there have been 69 tests for coronavirus in New Mexico, and of these none were found to be infected.  That appears to be good news, but it leaves a lot to be desired.  There is more information on this site, but:

I found one paragraph in the report to be misleading and, in part, inadequate:

New Mexico has not yet had a patient with the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.  We are currently working to identify cases as early as possible and implement isolation procedures to prevent further spread of the virus, should we have a case.  Those procedures currently focus on 1) monitoring asymptomatic travelers from China, South Korea, Iran, and Italy during the time when they might develop disease if they were exposed to the virus and 2) supporting screening and infection control procedures in healthcare settings to identify illness in travelers or contacts of known COVID-19 patients.  We have also begun to test symptomatic individuals with a negative flu test to ensure that the virus causing COVID-19 is not circulating in New Mexico. 

The first sentence--"New Mexico has not yet had a patient with the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19" is misleading.  We don't know if doctors have had patients come to their offices with novel coronavirus because we have only tested 69 cases.  Only after a large number of people who show flu symptoms have been tested will we know much about the incidence of coronavirus among those showing flu symptoms.  69 cases is simply not enough, and with the spread of the virus in the US, the probability that some persons with flu symptoms will have the virus is increasing quickly every day.  The last sentence--"We have also begun to test symptomatic individuals with a negative flu test to ensure that the virus causing COVID-19 is not circulating in New Mexico"--is unintelligible.  What does "a negative flu test mean?"  that the patient does not have the virus?  If so, that amounts simply to saying that we've tested 69 cases and none has tested positive.  We already know that.  A better question is, how many persons do we think need to be tested, and another is, do we have enough tests to fit this need?   The language needs to be cleaned up in the interests of transparency to the public.

The only way we will know anything about the condition of New Mexico vis a vis coronavirus is to test persons with symptoms ranging from a common cold to that of a severe flu, and at least a serious sample of these, spread out geographically.  And if we don't start testing widely, and soon, the virus, undetected, will spread.  The only relevant questions the public needs answers to about the incidence of coronavirus in New Mexico are:

**If you have symptoms, where can you go for testing?
**What is our best guess for estimating the number of persons who need testing?
**How many tests are there available now in New Mexico, and where?
**How many tests does the health delivery system intend to administer in the next few days?
**If there are delays in getting testing capabilities, how long will these likely last?
**How will we treat patients who have flu symptoms but have not been tested?