On March 5, the first
confirmed COVID-19
cases appeared in the
state.
RESTRICTIONS SOON LOCKED
down the world beyond her walls.
Denver canceled its St. Patrick’s Day
parade; concert venues closed; ski re-
sorts suspended operations, then bars,
restaurants, and schools. Finally, the
governor ordered everyone to stay
home. Triplett, of course, had no choice
but to remain where she was: a prison,
where cramped conditions make even
basic public-health guidance hard to
implement. Just before Colorado’s out-
break, La Vista housed 694 male and
female inmates, slightly below its ca-
pacity of 707; even so, seven other
women shared Triplett’s cell.
Prisons’ crowded, communal na-
ture is the stuff of transmission
nightmares. People live, work, eat, and
recreate together—often in poorly
ventilated buildings. “There are con-
stantly new people coming in and out
of this very tightly occupied setting,”
says Andre Montoya- Barthelemy, a
doctor of occupational medicine who
has studied inmate well-being for the
American College of Occupational and
Environmental Medicine. “There areOhio, where an outbreak sickened more
than 80 percent of inmates and 160
staff by the end of April, health officials
traced around half of the county’s 112
cases outside of the prison back to it.
Local jails—where people have
shorter stays, often while awaiting
trial—present another risk. A June
2020 study published in Health Af-
fairs found that arrestees cycling
in and out of Cook County Jail in
Chicago were associated with 15.7
percent of coronavirus cases state-
wide. An April 2020 modeling report
from the American Civil Liberties
Union, in collaboration with data ex-
perts from three universities, found
that omitting jails from predictions
(which most public models do) could
mean underestimating forecasted
deaths by between 19 and 98 percent,
depending on how well communities
practice social distancing.
Given the propensity for spread,
governors, judges, and state and
federal corrections departments in-
creased options for early release
during the first months of the pan-
demic. Prisons stopped accepting new
arrivals, and courts sent fewer peo-
ple to the slammer, resulting in most
of the overall decrease in the prison
population between March and June- Now inmate advocates and pub-
lic health experts hope that officials
will continue to reexamine who should
transfers from other facilities. There
are medical and other staff who come
in and have their own exposures.”
Even something as seemingly
straightforward as the Centers for Dis-
ease Control and Prevention (CDC)
suggestions for hand hygiene present
challenges. Prisons often ban alcohol-
based sanitizer because of the potential
for abuse. Inmates sometimes must
buy soap from a commissary.
For those reasons, correctional fa-
cilities have always been a disease’s
dream environment. One of the first
documented outbreaks of the 1918
influenza pandemic happened in
San Quentin State Prison, the infa-
mous and overpopulated penitentiary
where Johnny Cash sang. Back then,
the deadly pathogen swept through
three separate times, when new in-
mates brought it in as a passenger.
It’s no surprise that US prisons
quickly became COVID hotspots.
The bug sneaked inside San Quen-
tin in late May 2020, when the facility
took in 121 men from a Chino, Califor-
nia, prison. The latter had not tested
them recently enough to ensure they
were virus-free. Within a month,
more than one-third of San Quen-
tin’s approximately 4,000 inmates
and more than 100 of its 1,600-person
staff had tested positive.
Infections within the correc-
tional system don’t always stay there.
They can drive community spread—
especially through staff, who go home
at the end of a shift. In Marion County,POPSCI.COM / WINTER 2020 / PG 98