New Mexico Quietly Closes COVID Isolation Shelters

POJOAQUE PUEBLO — Since April 2020, Buffalo Thunder Isolation

The shelter, run by tribal, state and federal fitness and emergency officials on Pueblo lands, opened with the sole purpose of isolating New Mexico natives who were tested for the deadly viral disease.

But it temporarily expanded to come with any major threat of dying or contracting a serious illness from contracting a coronavirus, said Shane Roberts, a New Mexico Medical Reserve Corps worker and a registered nurse who had been in charge of the shelter since July 2020.

During that time, it was “a central position to space out Native Americans,” New Mexico Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. David Scrase told reporters Thursday.

For the past two years, Roberts said, the Buffalo Thunder shelter “was the busiest test center outside of Albuquerque. “

At the height of the state’s reaction to the pandemic, the Buffalo Thunder shelter is one of 27 such shelters in New Mexico, according to Marina Piña, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

Its purpose was to provide other people who tested positive for COVID-19 but don’t have the resources to self-isolate in a position to do so, Piña said, adding first responders, other people living in multigenerational housing, homelessness and “several unique instances where an individual may simply not isolate themselves. “Piña said.

There have been many, many cycles of openings and closings since the beginning of the pandemic, Scrase said.

However, all those cycles, the Buffalo Thunder shelter has remained open, until now.

After 878 consecutive days of operation, the Pojoaque closed on August 31.

“There’s an explanation for why we’re the last status shelter,” Roberts said in an interview the day before the shutdown, “because we’re so much into what we do. “

Shelters such as pojoaque are definitive because “their use has dropped precipitously and the lack of isolation shelters in the network has decreased,” Piña said.

“As vaccination rates advanced and New Mexican citizens followed COVID-19 mitigation methods defined in the governor’s public fitness orders, usage dropped to 0 for weeks at many of our sites, leading to an assessment of the need for closures,” Piña said. .

Shelters in Albuquerque, Farmington, Gallup and Las Cruces “have experienced days or weeks without” other people in need over the past four months, Piña said. He did not respond to a follow-up inquiry about when those shelters will close.

But the lack of use is not the case with the Pojoaque shelter. Even if shelters across the state close, there is still a need for them that will no longer be met, Roberts said.

“We still get calls now, ‘Hey, can you take them?'” Roberts said in an Aug. 30 interview. “No, we can’t, because no one will be there tomorrow to make sure they’re safe.

Just two days before the shelter closed, some of the local tribes were looking to send other people into isolation, Roberts said.

“We had to turn it down because there would possibly be no one to care for them,” Roberts said. He doesn’t know where those other people might go.

The government paid 100% of the cost of running the shelter, Roberts said, but that ended on June 30, when the shelter was originally scheduled to close. The money came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It’s all about cash,” Roberts said. It costs a lot of money to run this shelter. “

A week before the shelter’s planned closure on June 30, Roberts said, staff were able to secure an extension apparently the shelter still wants to continue operating and can fill the investment gap.

Between that date and the actual shutdown, the shelter has housed a hundred COVID-positive people, he said.

In recent days, Roberts and the others gave the latest certificate for the latest organization of visitors and the dismantling of all their apparatus to make purchases at the emergency operations center of the pojoaque Pueblo government.

“Let’s say we have a bigger COVID outbreak in six months — it’s all there for them,” Roberts said. “They just have to take it out of the garage and rebuild everything as it is. “

It’s possible that the entire United States will see a hundred million coronavirus infections and a potentially giant wave of deaths this fall and winter, the Washington Post reported.

“We have been flexible with the opening and ending of those shelters and, if necessary, we will do so if the reopening of the shelters is necessary,” Piña said.

There is no concrete measure that HHS and DOH officials will use to make that decision, Scrase said, but “in general, as soon as we meet one or more people who want to be accommodated,” they will pay for other people to stay in a hotel until the number of positive instances decreases.

There is a COVID-19 isolation shelter still operating in Las Cruces, Piña said. However, there is no touch data or an address anywhere on the HHS or DOH websites.

When it was communicated by phone on Sept. 6, no one at the Las Cruces Public Health Unit or on the DOH’s non-emergency hotline knew of the shelter’s existence. Weeks.

Piña did not respond to follow-up questions asking for data about the shelter that only members of the public can know how to use it if they want to self-isolate, or even the existing number of other people staying there.

Piña said a medical reserve corps contractor has been managing the shelter for the past five months, but did not respond to a follow-up on who manages the site.

Roberts said the attitude of the public and the media largely “Oh, yes, COVID is over,” which frustrates him and the rest of the physical care staff like him, who have been dealing with the pandemic every day from the beginning.

“It’s not over,” Roberts said. That’s five times worse than ever. We have five times more deaths than a year ago, five times the infection rate. But that’s not what we hear. “

by Austin Fisher, Source New Mexico September 16, 2022