To get past pandemic, follow Townsend’s lead
Fighting a pandemic should not have been contentious. Had the nation pulled together — with everyone eligible getting vaccinated — we would not be facing our current crisis. Hospitals are being overwhelmed, medical workers are fatigued, and looming are potential school closings and the return of remote learning.
In New Mexico and the nation, hospitals are being overrun with COVID-19 patients. State public health officials warned last week they might need to begin rationing health care — their more elegant term is “implementing crisis standards of care” — as soon as early September.
As of last week, some 50 people were on a waiting list for a bed in an intensive care unit. The state has never had to do that before, officials said.
And the current crisis has yet to peak. Hospital officials expect admissions to increase 20 percent to 30 percent in the next two weeks. That’s in a system already overloaded.
Yet it is clear vaccinations protect individuals from the more contagious delta variant of COVID-19 causing the latest wave of cases. Even when vaccinated people contract COVID-19, they have less serious cases and generally do not have to be hospitalized.
The southeastern corner of New Mexico is proving this in real time. Lea County, with a population under 75,000 people, has been averaging 95 to more than 100 cases a day for the past couple of weeks. Its vaccination rate is around 44.5 percent, well below a sufficient level to prevent community spread.
The state is around 77 percent fully vaccinated, and we must increase those numbers. That won’t happen without more vaccinations in counties where people are refusing the shots.
According to state epidemiologist Dr. Christine Ross, Department of Health data shows nearly 90 percent of new cases, 92 percent of hospitalizations and almost 97 percent of deaths in New Mexico since February were among residents who lacked vaccinations.
It’s disheartening to health care workers and to individuals who cannot be vaccinated — because of medical conditions or age — to watch otherwise healthy people throw away an opportunity to halt the pandemic.
Vaccinations remain the way out. That only happens if enough people get them before mutations blunt the efficacy of these life-saving shots.
People who are refusing vaccinations and who define it in terms of personal choice — despite the reality that such a “choice” affects their neighbors — aren’t likely to listen. They don’t pay attention to doctors. They’ve turned a deaf ear to public health experts. They aren’t even listening to dying people who now say they wish they had been vaccinated.
That’s why it’s important for people they trust to make the case.
To House Minority Leader Jim Townsend, a conservative stalwart, let’s give credit for making a case for vaccinations though he likely knows many of his constituents oppose them.
In a tweet Thursday, Townsend, R-Artesia, wrote: “This is why I chose the vaccination. To me it made sense.” His tweet came with a graphic from Texas about hospitalizations there. Of 458 COVID-19 hospitalizations, 422 were unvaccinated, and only 36 cases were vaccinated.
Townsend’s sound advice is important because his home county, Eddy, has a vaccination rate of only 43.2 percent. Yet his tweet received pushback, with one commenter saying, “Enough with the vaccinations, already. Just stop,” or others spouting discredited conspiracies and one stating simply, “RINO” (Republican in Name Only).
And there’s the problem. Treating a disease should never have become partisan.
Yet here we are in the summer of 2021, when a substantial minority of Americans turned their backs on vaccinations. We need more Townsends so that instead of enduring a pandemic divided, we use all the tools — vaccinations, face masks, distancing and hand-washing — to put this behind us.