Simon Romero reported this story for the
New York Times last week, dateline Albuquerque, under the headline, "How New Mexico, One of the Poorest States, Averted a Steep Death Toll." The odds were against the state that calls itself the Land of Enchantment, which has fewer hospital beds per capita than most states. It is also a high-poverty state, and many of its residents are elderly.
Still, infectious disease specialists say New Mexico seems to have staved off disaster — for the moment, at least — with a coronavirus death rate that is lower than neighboring states like Colorado and Oklahoma.
New Mexico’s measures included shutting down schools before most states, aggressively expanding social distancing, ramping up testing beyond levels achieved in richer states and using a pioneering telemedicine initiative to quickly train rural health workers for coronavirus care.
Romero quotes Helen Wearing, a University of New Mexico mathematician who is an expert on disease ecology:
Hundreds of lives were saved because of what the state did early on, and that’s using conservative estimates.
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