In New Mexico, the number of COVID cases and hospitalizations spiked in the last couple of weeks. But state health officials remain pretty quiet about it — a big change from when there were weekly news conferences on viral spread and public health measures.
Julia Goldberg of the Santa Fe Reporter has been covering the pandemic since it began. Source New Mexico’s Austin Fisher spoke with Goldberg about her recent story on how officials stopped including breakthrough COVID case info in the data the state releases.
GOLDBERG: As you probably recall, back when we were having news conferences, this was a data point we were asking for a lot. Once there were vaccines, we were curious to see a breakdown of people who are getting COVID, even though they've had a vaccine, and that's the vaccine breakthrough. You know, you've had a vaccine, but you got COVID anyway.
I think we understood and it was explained pretty clearly by Acting Health Secretary Dr. Scrase and State Epidemiologist Dr. Christine Ross, obviously, as more people got vaccinated, there would be more breakthrough cases, and I don't think that was confusing at all. Then eventually they started reporting that data point.
Once we stopped having the news conferences, I would look at the breakthrough case rates every week, they're part of the vaccine report that the epidemiology department puts out. Then, I was looking at the report, I think it was the April 25 vaccination report, and suddenly the four-week look at breakthrough cases was gone. It wasn't there; there was only the cumulative breakthrough cases.
It's not like I think, "Oh, that suspicious," more, I just thought, "Why would you not tell people? You know people are interested in this data."
SOURCE NM: The Department has not held a news conference on the pandemic since March 11. It also stopped publishing daily news releases about the latest data on the pandemic. And when you asked the state's health secretary David Scrase about this, he said he does not know whether those news conferences will ever return. We haven't seen really a lot of public discussion about the fact that cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are on the rise in New Mexico and across the country. What do you make of this decision by the Department of Health to publish less information about the pandemic?
GOLDBERG: I'm a little confused.
Whenever it was last week that they updated the geographical trends for COVID, I was like, "Oh, Santa Fe has the highest case rate in the state. Well, I guess that's my lead today." And then when the CDC updated its community levels map last Thursday, I was like, "Oh, last week, only three counties were medium, and now six are like it's obviously rising." Okay, I can go look, and I can report that.
But I think it's kind of strange that the Health Department doesn't just put out a news release that says, "Hey, folks, these are the counties where we're seeing rising case rates, here's what the CDC recommends." I don't I don't really understand what's happening, to be honest.
And I keep thinking about various times when we were having these conferences, Dr. Ross would talk about situational awareness, you know, about people just being aware of what the levels are like in your county, so you can protect yourself. And I thought that made a lot of sense.
But I think people have to work kind of hard right now to be able to have situational awareness. I mean, I feel like I'm working kind of hard, and I know where all the data is. And nonetheless, every week, I'm like, "Do I understand what this says? Well, I guess I better ask because I don't want to make assumptions about what anything means."
But I don't think everybody and their brother has time to sort of write the health department and be like, "Does this mean this? Or does this mean that?"
SOURCE NM: And you know, you and I are journalists, we're trying to keep track of this as much as we can, we know how to find the data, as you said, but the average person might not know exactly where to find the data, or how to interpret it when there's less information out there. Do you think that that makes it harder for people to make voluntary decisions to protect themselves?
GOLDBERG: I think what happens is that we revert to anecdotal information.
Before the report came out that said, Santa Fe County had the highest case rates, I was hearing from a lot of people like "Oh, my God, everybody is COVID. COVID, must be so high in Santa Fe right now. Everyone I know as COVID." And I was like, "I look forward to seeing the data." And the data came out, and I was like, "Yep, that's correct."
But I feel like the entire push of having so much information in so many news conferences was to not have people just relying on that. And to kind of give people a way to check that.
I don't think it's impossible for people to have a sense of what's going on without the data, but I don't know why you would want people suddenly just relying on word of mouth and not everybody has the same networks or is going to hear things in the same way.
For more information, read Fisher’s full story at SourceNM.com.
