Otero County Prison inmate among half-dozen additional virus deaths across New Mexico
CHAPARRAL, New Mexico -- An Otero County Prison inmate is among six new coronavirus deaths reported across New Mexico by health officials on Monday.
The southern New Mexico inmate's death, along with five others that happened in the northwest corner of the state, raised New Mexico's virus death toll to 362.
The deceased inmate was a man in his 30s being held by the New Mexico Corrections Department at the Otero County Prison Facility in Chaparral, which houses both state and federal inmates.
That prison, which is operated by a private contractor on behalf of the federal government, has been the scene of a massive virus outbreak which has infected 132 inmates to date. Monday's was the first death from among those cases.
The outbreak also extends to an adjacent federal detention facility, the ICE Otero County Processing Center, which holds migrants and has recorded 92 infections thus far.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has previously criticized federal agencies for failure to take adequate precautions to prevent those outbreaks from occurring among inmates at the pair of facilities.
Elsewhere in southern New Mexico, there were ten additional virus cases reported in Doña Ana County, taking the case total there to 476. The number of cases statewide rose by 113 on Monday for a cumulative tally of 7,800.
Below you can see county-by-county data for virus cases and deaths across New Mexico. The data comes from Johns Hopkins University, so the numbers may sometimes vary a bit from what's reported by the state health department.
