Jails are different from prisons. I work for the prison system in my state, and one of the first things they did was shut down intake from the local jails. Jails don’t have that much control over who comes in- if someone is arrested and the judge remands them or they can’t make bail, they stay in jail. Even if they can make bail , they will often spend at least a couple of days in jail before being being released.
In my state, state employees won’t get extra sick leave* if they end up quarantined because they traveled to a state with a high positive test rate- so some of them lied when they were asked if they had traveled to such a state ( and got caught by the department of health). There really isn’t a good solution.
- They can use their sick leave- so most of them will get paid. But they won’t get the special COVID leave that they would have gotten if they hadn’t traveled to one of those states.
Yeah, that was real helpful for us for a while. But after 3 months, the powers that be just said “gotta get back to business, get folks moving from jails to prison again”. Now our infection rates are 5 x higher and we’re taking folks from jail into the prison system.
Not my institution, though. given our outbreak, we’re not accepting new ones, only discharging folks whose sentence is over.
Over 80% of my patients have it or are over it now. One death. 
Can you at least keep him wearing a mask? That’s what gets me: even at the hospital the one person without a mask is the cop walking around the place. Sure, he likely stays out of the COVID area since he’s more acting as security, but still.
I’m wondering more about the 20% who don’t have it. I’d think that in an environment like a prison, once 80% of the population has it, it’d be impossible to keep the remaining 20% from getting exposed. Which sounds like it might mean that some nonnegligible fraction of the population is naturally highly resistant. Maybe that’s from prior exposure to other coronaviruses?
Or maybe Qadgop is just doing an unbelievably good job of keeping those remaining prisoners isolated from the rest.
How can we enforce that when he’s not at work? We’re low on manpower to do our core job as it is.
I suspect many of them had mild to moderate cases between screening tests, and didn’t notice, or didn’t report their symptoms. They stopped shedding detectable virus before the next mass screening came along. We lack the resources to screen everyone weekly, or even every two weeks.
The only way to do that–and of course it will never happen–is to lock down the facility including all the staff. Students at universities in Beijing are complaining that they are restricted to the campus but the staff are not so that makes no sense; my mother-in-law’s mom is in an elder care facility and the patients are locked down, with no visitation permitted but the staff are free to return to their homes and again that makes no sense.
I’m curious what the protocol is – or, was? – after detecting virus on screening? Do you have a dedicated quarantine area?
Sorry, I was unclear. I’m asking whether they are required to wear a mask for their job. My experience is that cops refuse to do so. The person I described at the hospital was on duty, but refusing to wear a mask when the medical staff, patients, and administrative staff all had to.
I don’t think a prison would be a good place to establish herd immunity because I don’t believe herd immunity is an absolute number. Prisoners are much closer than people on the streets and have a much better chance of them all getting infected. Where on the streets we have primary carriers that take it back to lower spreaders etc and the chain is broken in most cases slowing the virus down to acceptable numbers.
Also people in prison are generally in worse health than the general population at the same age, since they come from poorer backgrounds and generally lead more dangerous and substance-using lifestyles. I’m not sure if that’s the case at this particular facility, but it’s a general trend.
What? You mean like our record number outbreaks right now?
Then again, they have access to affordable health care to a greater degree than their free cohort.
I think his point is that while 70% infected might give you herd immunity in the normal course of events, it might not in a prison. The one person with COVID would have a much high chance of contact with the other 30%.
Yes, this. The herd immunity concept is pretty meaningless in this environment, when it doesn’t apply to the population outside the prison.
With some social distancing I would imagine at about 40% infections we will start to see a slow down. I also believe it is going to get much worse before it gets better. For a long term strategy I think keeping the virus at its slowest possible spread rate is a horrible strategy. The high risk care facilities can easily be secured for a short amount of time but stretching that out over many years is much more difficult.
- it’s not clear that people with mild cases retain immunity long enough for us ever to reach meaningful herd immunity from natural spread.
- treatment is already much better than it was several months ago. I’d rather catch it now than then. And I expect treatments to continue to improve for a while. I’d rather catch it in 3 years than now.
- we might actually get a vaccine, and I’d prefer to keep my exposure lower now, in the hopes of remaining covid-free through the combination of vaccine, masks, and perhaps less aggressive social distancing.
Really? China strikes me as one of the few places that could and would take that approach.