New Mexico Gov. condemns Thanksgiving COVID-19 crackdowns
Democratic New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham admitted on Friday that attempts to enforce limitations on private Thanksgiving gatherings would be impossible in her state as and everywhere else.
In an interview with PBS News Hour, Grisham was asked to comment on the possibility of enforcing a lockdown in her state, which has seen a rise in coronavirus cases over the past two months.
“So, it depends on personal compliance — really incredibly hard to attain in any state,” Grisham replied. “This one’s no different. We’ve had a mandatory mask mandate since May.”
“Getting our businesses to support us more productively, I think, has been a bit of a challenge,” Grisham added. “But I have to say, today, they get it. And we’ve been incredibly firm about if you’ve got four different rapid responses, positive case, we come in, we close for 24 hours, get everybody tested. If you get four of those in a two-week period, you’re closed for two weeks.”
“And so they’re now really coming to the table with solutions. So, I’m feeling better about enforcement and compliance. But we need a reset in our state and we’re gonna get it,” she stated.
Grisham also weighed in on a recent health order that bans “a group of more than 5 individuals who do not regularly reside with one another” from gathering, Grisham admitted that enforcement is virtually impossible.
“You can’t enforce that,” she stated. “There is no way anywhere in the country we’re going to be able to say, ‘Look, you brought another household together. There [were] 10 of you having Thanksgiving dinner.’
But we are hopeful that people will really take heed. We lost our first child in New Mexico. We have more in the hospital. This deadly virus doesn’t care how old you are. It doesn’t care who you are, where you live, your political affiliation.
And we are very nervous about what Thanksgiving could produce, right, a month later. And we’ve been doing as much productive messaging — and while we appreciate that Dr. Fauci is doing that, this is really what the federal government did by telling people, “You don’t have to listen to your governors, you don’t have to care about public health issues or the public health order, and this virus is a hoax.”
And it just gives people an opportunity to say, “We don’t have to worry about it.” And that is the most dangerous set of circumstances moving forward until we get a vaccine.
So, we’re nervous. But we’re doing all the right messaging. And we — that’s part of the reset, right? If you limit where people go after they’ve been exposed, then I can limit the spread of the virus. So we’re taking all of that into consideration.
Grisham’s comments come in light of recent lockdown orders issued by other state governors calling for the shut down of local “non-essential” businesses.
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