FRANKLIN, La. (KLFY) — A St. Mary Parish nursing home has been a hot spot for COVID-19, but officials say they may have stopped the spread.

Legacy Nursing Home in Franklin reported their first case of coronavirus three weeks ago.

Since then, 45 other residents and 13 staff members have also contracted the virus.

“Of course, the number increased pretty quickly the first few days. We had 23 residents in the first three to four days,” St. Mary Parish Coroner Eric Melancon said.

Melancon says out of the 104 residents at Legacy Nursing Home, 46 have tested positive for COVID-19 since the outbreak three weeks ago.

In St. Mary Parish, COVID-19 has claimed the lives of 25 people. 13 of them were residents at
Legacy Nursing Home.

“It’s just very difficult once it gets into a nursing home to kind of control it,” Melancon said.

To control the spread, the nursing home turned their Alzeihmers wing into an infirmary. That’s
where the residents who test positive are quarantined.

Melancon says the nursing home’s efforts to stop the spread of the virus are working. They haven’t had a new case of the virus in three days.

“This is the flattening of the curve,” he said.

He says social distancing and wearing proper PPE’s have helped.

“When the first case came out, the curve was pretty steep going up. By reinforcing some of those
things and taking extra precautions even more that was recommended by the CDC, we helped stem some of that peak and flatten it so we didn’t get as a significant increase as what we’d expect,” Melancon told News Ten.

Melancon says they plan to test all of the residents at Legacy Nursing Home for COVID-19 this Sunday.