County close to yellow

Quay County appeared to be tantalizingly close to improving from the red zone to the yellow zone when the latest two-week COVID-19 risk evaluations are reported Wednesday for all New Mexico counties.

Being in the yellow zone would loosen health restrictions in the county, especially for restaurants that could resume some indoor dining.

Quay County will fail one of the evaluation metrics — daily cases per 100,000 people. Quay County can tolerate only 10 confirmed coronavirus cases during a two-week period. It had recorded 21 cases from Dec. 14 through Monday.

The other metric, test positivity rates, showed Quay County was very close to meeting that criteria.

According to Quay County Sun calculations, the county had a 5.16% test positivity rate from Dec. 14 through Monday. A rate of 5% or below would put the county in the yellow zone by meeting one of the two benchmarks.

Being in the yellow zone would allow restaurants to offer indoor dining at 25% capacity and 75% for outdoor dining. Counties in the red zone, which Quay County has been for weeks, disallow indoor dining and 25% capacity outdoors.

The yellow zone also would allow lodging establishments with NM Cafe Certification to go from 40% to 60% occupancy. Restrictions also would be loosened for other businesses.

The state’s Department of Health will announce the latest two-week evaluations Wednesday. The next evaluation period would be from Dec. 29 to Jan. 11.

Human Services Secretary David Scrase and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham predicted several counties would improve from the red to the yellow or green zone this week. All 33 counties in New Mexico were in the red zone Dec. 14.

Quay County continued to see improvement with its COVID-19 numbers during the latest two-week period. Its test positivity rate was 14.3% for the previous period ending Dec. 14. The rate was 20.4% the period before that.

Quay County Sun calculations indicate the county’s daily caseload from Dec. 14 through Sunday was 19.4 per 100,000 people, above the benchmark of 8 per 100,000.

The county’s daily cases per 100,000 people was 63.5 the previous two-week period and 77.4 the period before that.