New Mexico will reimpose its strictest restrictions since the initial outbreak of the novel coronavirus, ordering people as of Monday to stay at home for two weeks except for ''all but the most essential activities and services.''
The office of Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced the decree on Friday, using the public health emergency order she declared on March 11 to ban gatherings of more than five people; reinstitute closures of indoor malls, outdoor recreational facilities such as golf courses and public pools, and ''close-contact businesses'' such as barbershops, hair salons, gyms, etc.; and limit ''essential businesses'' and churches to 25% of capacity or 75 people — whichever is smaller.
Essential business also must close between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.
Grisham was reimposing the ''statewide order closing in-person services for all non-essential activities in order to blunt the unprecedented spike of COVID-19 illnesses and to attempt to relieve dramatically escalating strain on hospitals and health care providers across the state,'' her office said in a release.
New Mexico had the 30th-most new cases in the United States on Thursday, 1,742 according to worldometers.info. It has seen its seven-day moving average of new daily reported cases rise from 88 on Sept. 10 to 1,381 on Thursday. A moving average is a calculation to analyze data points by creating a series of averages of different subsets of the full data set.
Its seven-day moving average of deaths related to COVID-19 has correspondingly risen to 13 as of Thursday, up from two on Oct. 11.
''The rate of spread and the emergency within our state hospitals are clear indicators that we cannot sustain the current situation without significant interventions to modify individual behavior,'' Grisham said in the release.
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