NEW MEXICO (KRQE) – Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham announced Thursday the state will stay under the same public health order through much of the month of August.

The waiting game continues for New Mexico, but one thing the governor said would help us inch back toward normal is being honest with doctors and contact tracers if you do test positive for COVID so teams can notify other potentially infected people faster.

“If you don’t do that, we can’t run to the outbreak. If we can’t run to the outbreak and mitigate and prevent, we don’t get to get to full-time in-person school, we don’t get to open up businesses, we don’t get to do the things that all of us miss. I’m hoping that sometime this year all of us might get to go to a movie in a theater. None of that happens if we don’t do a better job,” the governor said in Thursday’s press conference.

The governor said the occupancy restrictions for businesses and churches will remain in place and mass gatherings are still prohibited. The state’s new seven-day case average map shows we are finally starting to drop off from the skyrocketing numbers we saw throughout July, though we are clearly still far above where we were at our lowest point in June.

Dr. David Scrase also presented a new graph in the press conference showing the seven-day average of hospitalizations and deaths. He says at the beginning of this latest spike in cases, they saw a slight uptick in deaths, but not nearly as high as they did back in April and May. “Why is that? Why are we seeing something different? We believe, actually, it’s the demographic changes we presented. The fact that more younger people are getting COVID infections, a lot more in the 20-30 age group and in fact, more in the 10-19 age group as well,” Dr. Scrase said.

Dr. Scrase says if the hospitalizations would’ve risen at the same rate they did the first time, New Mexico’s ICUs would have been full. He also said there may be a light at the end of the tunnel if New Mexico stays on this course. The governor says if the spread does reduce, the state can potentially relax some occupancy restrictions in September.