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Late last year — to avoid having to ration care at the height of the pandemic — ventilators and patients were being moved around Albuquerque-area hospitals to keep up with the jam.
“It became an hour by hour placement,” recalled Dr. Vesta Sandoval, the chief medical officer at the Lovelace Health System. “Where is there a bed? How can we get this patient moved? Where is there available staff? It was, at that time, very, very close.”
Top physicians at Albuquerque-area hospitals held a teleconference Thursday to mark the first anniversary of the declaration of the pandemic and the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 in New Mexico.
They said despite the tragic death toll that continues to rise — the state reported six more deaths and 236 new cases Thursday — New Mexico could have had a worse outcome.
Dr. Jason Mitchell, the chief medical officer at Presbyterian Healthcare Services, said New Mexico’s aggressive approach in the early days of the pandemic helped the state avoid massive outbreaks during the spring and summer. That helped health systems avoid having to go into a crisis mode where they would have needed to ration care.
“If the first and second (waves) would have come through and we had not paid attention, we would have been in crisis standards of care … and we would have lost just a ton of life and devastated our state for years to come,” Mitchell said. “In a state like New Mexico where you have a lot of multi-generational households, you have lots of rural areas and you don’t have that many hospital beds, it would have been a level of catastrophe that unfortunately you see in other countries.”
What stopped the worst-case scenario? The physicians credited state public health orders, which by some accounts were some of the most aggressive in the country, and collaboration between hospitals to share resources and ideas.
“Our Department of Health and our governor used data, and they used science, to make decisions,” Mitchell said. “And it worked. Because a pandemic is all about data and science.”
Despite those efforts, New Mexico did see a tremendous amount of the death. Exactly one year after the first case was reported in the state, the deaths reported Thursday brought the statewide toll to 3,845.
There have been a total of 187,720 cases. And 161,650 designated recoveries.
