{"id":43812,"date":"2021-11-11T00:29:00","date_gmt":"2021-11-11T07:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/new-mexico-hospitals-struggle-amid-push-to-vaccinate-youths\/"},"modified":"2021-11-11T07:29:00","modified_gmt":"2021-11-11T07:29:00","slug":"new-mexico-hospitals-struggle-amid-push-to-vaccinate-youths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/new-mexico-hospitals-struggle-amid-push-to-vaccinate-youths\/","title":{"rendered":"New Mexico hospitals struggle amid push to vaccinate youths"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Rehoboth
Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital is shown on May 8, 2020, in Gallup, N.M. New Mexico\u2019s health officials said Wednesday that the state\u2019s health care system continues to be heavily burdened by sustained rates of hospitalizations from COVID-19 cases. (Morgan Lee\/Associated Press file)<\/span>Morgan Lee<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

SANTA FE \u2013 Hospitals in northwestern New Mexico were grappling Wednesday with a surge in coronavirus cases that has left only a handful of intensive care beds available and led to a rationing of care.<\/p>\n

State health officials said New Mexico\u2019s health care system overall remains heavily burdened with high rates of COVID-19 hospitalizations. Hospitals across the state had just eight intensive care beds available Wednesday, making it more difficult to attend to health emergencies such as heart attacks, said David Scrase, the state\u2019s top health official.<\/p>\n

But the situation is particularly concerning in the state’s far northwest, where hospital administrators recently invoked crisis standards of care to focus resources on critical patients. Federal and state authorities have dispatched medical and support personnel to shore up services at San Juan Regional Medical Center in Farmington.<\/p>\n

Coronavirus patients accounted for 90 out of 169 patients at the hospital Wednesday afternoon, with 15 patients sustained by breathing machines.<\/p>\n

Wednesday evening, hospital staff members and local government officials held an online town hall meeting, imploring unvaccinated residents to reconsider.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur crisis right now is a crisis of the unvaccinated,\u201d said emergency medical physician Brad Greenberg, noting that vaccinated patients in the area are 10 times less likely to die if infected.<\/p>\n

San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari lamented that personal decisions about the vaccine have become politicized. The county is a conservative stronghold where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs of right now, it\u2019s still a personal choice,\u201d he said of vaccination. \u201cYou need to have that conversation with your doctor, decide if that\u2019s the right avenue for you. If you choose not to do that, care for your neighbor. … Wear your mask, wash your hands, don\u2019t get out.\u201d<\/p>\n

State epidemiologist Christine Ross visited the hospital in Farmington last week and said she encountered dedicated health workers that have worked to exhaustion.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are amazing and they are really, really tired,\u201d Ross said during an online news conference.<\/p>\n

Hospital facilities are adequate but staff members have been struggling to keep up with the demands of coronavirus patients, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe surge staffing that the state was able to send out there, along with the federal team, it\u2019s making a real difference,” Ross said.<\/p>\n

State health officials say the resurgence of the virus corresponds with waning immunity from early rounds of vaccinations, as residents approach or pass the time they need booster shots.<\/p>\n

\u201cNew Mexico vaccinated faster than most states, so we\u2019re seeing breakthrough cases earlier than others,\u201d Scrase said.<\/p>\n

Just more than 60% of residents in New Mexico are fully vaccinated, including children. About 4% of eligible children ages 5 to 11 statewide made vaccine appointments during the first week of eligibility. Scrase said that response is similar to participation when a vaccine was first made available to children ages 12 to 16.<\/p>\n

Local elected leaders, including Farmington Mayor Nate Duckett and San Juan County Commissioner John Beckstead, said there are no plans to extend vaccine mandates to more public employees in their region. New Mexico requires health care employees, teachers and other \u201chigh risk\u201d workers to be immunized with few exceptions.<\/p>\n

Sheriff Ferrari and Farmington\u2019s police chief said their agencies don\u2019t ticket people for violations of the statewide indoor mask mandate but encourage compliance by example.<\/p>\n

Complicating matters in the hard-hit northwest is an an ongoing labor dispute at a county hospital.<\/p>\n

In Gallup, a city on the edge of the Navajo Nation, a union representing medical staff at a county-owned hospital has filed a complaint alleging unfair labor practices and retaliation against unionization efforts by doctors and nurses with the National Labor Relations Board, the agency confirmed on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital was overwhelmed with coronavirus patients in the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, when Gallup was briefly closed to outside visitors and encircled by police barricades.<\/p>\n

This year, medical staff voted to unionize as they expressed concern about the hospital\u2019s financial standing and whether it can sustain a high standard of care for patients amid recent layoffs. The hospital\u2019s labor and birthing unit reopened in late October after a weekslong shutdown.<\/p>\n

Hospital administrators had no immediate response to the complaint filed by the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, and have not filed an answer with federal regulators.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital is shown on May 8, 2020, in Gallup, N.M. New Mexico\u2019s health officials said Wednesday that the state\u2019s health care system continues to be heavily burdened by sustained rates of hospitalizations from COVID-19 cases. (Morgan Lee\/Associated Press file)Morgan Lee SANTA FE \u2013 Hospitals in northwestern New Mexico were grappling Wednesday with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43813,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[815],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-43812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-associated-press-new-mexico"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43812\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43812"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=43812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}