Positive cases continue to be identified and investigated

SANTA FE – New Mexico state health officials announced on Tuesday that the Department of Health’s electronic laboratory reporting system was disrupted by an outage in the state government internet network, resulting in a delay of the daily COVID-19 case update.

While the New Mexico Department of Information Technology has since resolved the outage, which also briefly affected other state agency websites and email systems, it resulted in a disruption to various laboratory reports that are collected and subsequently reported by the Department of Health. Tuesday’s COVID-19 update will be reported on Wednesday as soon as the reporting system is able to resume operations. The state aims to publish Wednesday’s COVID-19 case update at the usual time – the information for the respective days will be published separately.

The Department of Information Technology is investigating the root cause of the disruption.

“The Department of Information Technology was alerted of intermittent disruption of Internet services this morning,” said DoIT Secretary John Salazar. “DoIT personnel immediately began troubleshooting the issues with Lumen CenturyLink engineers, who after several hours of troubleshooting discovered the source of the issue and were able to fix it in the early afternoon. DoIT and Lumen personnel are currently investigating the root cause leading to the disruption of services.”

NMDOH continues to immediately notify individuals with positive test results and actively investigate all cases that are reported to the state throughout the day. The disruption in the daily reporting will not affect the cumulative reporting of COVID-19 cases or the evaluation of the state’s epidemiological data.