After months of giving the cold shoulder to the media, the Notorious MLG finally agreed to a one-on-one Zoom interview with KOB’s Tommy Lopez on Tuesday.
Lopez asked the governor about criticism she had received for waiting to fully reopen New Mexico until July 1, 2021. Never one to miss an opportunity to praise her pandemic policies, Lujan Grisham threw another Democrat-run trifecta state under the bus.
Lopez: What do you say to people who are concerned that we are opening far later and felt like it would have been worth it to reopen a month or two or more early?
Lujan Grisham: …We did it based on the science. Colorado had a much lower vaccination rate. They decided to open up, and then, you know, for a long period of time, they had the single — right? — breaking records for new cases of COVID.
What’s she talking about? Let’s take a look at the numbers.
Colorado began allowing counties to control their own pandemic response in mid-April 2021, lifted all COVID restrictions by June 01, 2021, and unlike New Mexico and several other western states, has seen a downward trajectory of cases for the past two weeks.
As of this writing, The New York Times’ COVID map shows cases in New Mexico are up 12% in the last 14 days, compared to a 27% drop in Colorado. Deaths are also up here, 22%, compared to Colorado’s 37% decline in the last two weeks.
The RealClearPolitics COVID Tracker shows the following:
New Mexico: 204,961 confirmed cases, 4,326 deaths, and a case fatality rate of 2.11%.
Colorado: 554,090 confirmed cases, 6,918 deaths, and a case fatality rate of 1.25%.
To the governor’s credit, New Mexico has conducted more than triple as many COVID tests as Colorado despite having a third the population (1,728,332 tests per 1 million population compared to Colorado’s 546,258). But what’s the point of testing if it doesn’t change the outcome? Testing only shows that you’ve spent a lot of money, and on that metric New Mexico ranks 10th to Colorado’s 48th.
The metric that matters is deaths.
New Mexico is 13th in deaths per 1 million population. Colorado is 40th.
MLG wants us to believe that a state with nearly three times our population and a lower fatality rate is doing worse than we are because they reopened earlier.
“We did it based on the science,” she said.
If the science shows that more tests and a higher fatality rate is better, science is bullshit.
Categories: COVID Counterpunch
The Conservative New Mexican 
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