6th Las Cruces nursing home sees virus infection as Doña Ana County sets weekly new case record

SANTA FE, New Mexico -- State health officials said Doña Ana County posted 56 new cases of coronavirus on Saturday, accounting for nearly 20% of the 291 additional infections across New Mexico.

Saturday also brought to a close a record-setting week for Doña Ana County, with 230 new cases recorded. That easily topped the previous record from the prior week of 167. To date, Doña Ana County now has a cumulative count of 1,094 cases.

As of Saturday, Good Samaritan Society in Las Cruces in Las Cruces became the latest of dozens of assisted living facilities across the state where health officials are now reporting at least one confirmed case recently among staff or residents.

The facility is now the sixth nursing home in Las Cruces and the seventh in Doña Ana County to make the list at some point during the pandemic. Previous infections were reported at Blue Horizon Assisted Living, Haciendas of Grace Village, Casa De Oro Center, Casa Del Sol Center and The Village at Northrise in Las Cruces, as well as The Jim Wood Home in Hatch, which has also seen a death from the virus.

Only Bernalillo County (the Albuquerque area) at 79 and McKinley County (the Navajo Nation area) at 34 posted more new cases Saturday than Doña Ana County. State officials earlier this week noted the troubling rise in virus spread in the southern part of the state that includes Doña Ana and Otero counties.

Doña Ana County's death toll held steady, after reaching ten on Friday, The state reported two new deaths Saturday, both in McKinley County in the northwest corner of the state.

In Otero County, there were seven new cases reported among the county's residents to bring its total case count to 58. There was also one new infection reported Saturday at the Otero County Prison, which is tallied separately. Between the prison and the adjoining ICE processing center, the total number of inmates and detainees impacted by the virus outbreak grew to 872.

There were no new deaths reported Saturday among either Otero County residents or the inmate population following a fatality on Friday. There have been five inmate deaths to date, accounting for the majority of Otero county's seven deaths.

For the entire state of New Mexico, there have now been a total of 13,063 confirmed virus cases and 513 known deaths. The state has tallied 5,845 virus recoveries since the pandemic's start.

Health officials on Saturday indicated 121 New Mexicans were hospitalized, much less than the 200 hospitalized in Texas border neighbor El Paso alone - even though New Mexico's state population of over two million dwarfs the city of El Paso's roughly 700,000.

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.