‘This seems at best neglectful.’ How a once-healthy NC prison became a COVID hotspot.
As the coronavirus took hold at Nash Correctional Institution early this month, 45-year-old inmate Donald Burks began to feel worrisome symptoms.
“He said his lungs burned, his joints ached, he had a headache,” said his mother, Carol Taylor. “He said it was miserable.”
Burks is healthier now. But Taylor worries about what will happen if he’s infected a second time. And she questions why the prison didn’t lock down every unit and test each inmate after the first cases surfaced.
“No matter what these inmates have done, they don’t deserve to be endangered like that,” she said.
Nash Correctional, a mid-sized prison about 45 minutes east of Raleigh, had no COVID-19 cases in mid-November. A month later, officials there were wrestling with one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the state prison system.
As of Friday, 149 of the roughly 630 inmates there had been infected, and one had died, according to the state Department of Public Safety.
How the virus entered the prison is unclear. Some prisoners and family members interviewed by The Charlotte Observer said they believe it started with an inmate who was transferred there from another prison that had an outbreak.
Audra Williams, who has a relative at Nash, said she was told that a prisoner who worked as a janitor there was asked to clean the cell of another inmate who’d tested positive. Williams said she was also told that the inmate janitor contracted COVID-19 and then spread the virus to others in Unit 1, a part of the prison where most inmates have now been infected.
Prison spokesman John Bull said state officials don’t know how the virus entered the prison. But in most recent prison outbreaks around the state, it appears that staff members inadvertently brought the virus into prisons after picking it up in their communities, Bull said.
Nash Correctional , a medium-security prison just west of Rocky Mount, is surrounded by counties with critically high rates of new COVID-19 cases, Bull noted. Earlier this month, Nash County also had a dubious distinction: It had the zip code — 27804 — that topped all others in the state for the number of COVID-19 deaths.
Twenty-five staff members at Nash have tested positive and 13 remain under quarantine and off the job, Bull said.
The CDC has found that close contact from person-to-person — not touching surfaces — is the main way the virus spreads, Bull noted.
Several inmates complained that too little testing has been done at the prison.
”Many of us have had contact with people who tested positive,” inmate Robert Odom said. “We let staff and administrators know and they still haven’t tested us.”
Williams, the woman whose relative is at the prison, agreed.
“They didn’t do anything proactive to prevent it from happening,” Williams said. “They could have tested everybody. You would at least have a hold on it and it wouldn’t be as bad as it is now.”
Bull said about 500 tests were done this month inside the prison — most of them in Unit 1, where the outbreak occurred. Many inmates in Unit One were tested multiple times, Bull said, and more inmates in other units will be tested if circumstances dictate it.
“Anyone who has symptoms, we pull them aside for quarantine and for testing,” Bull said. “We don’t want this virus to spread. We want to contain it as soon as possible.”
Prison outbreaks are widespread
Michele Perry, who has a friend at Nash, said she’s been told that one inmate who had tested positive was allowed to remain unmasked in a block with uninfected inmates for several hours. She said she has also heard that some staff members at Nash often did not wear masks inside the prison.
“I understand the prison system is understaffed,” said Perry, who previously worked for a nonprofit that offered counseling to women in prison. “But this seems at best neglectful.”
Many of the inmates at Nash work in two on-site plants: one that does much of the document and publication printing for state government agencies, and another that manufactures eyeglasses for prisoners and Medicaid patients.
Some of the inmates there have health problems, and could be particularly vulnerable if they become infected, inmates and family members said. The prisoner there who died of COVID-19 on Dec. 6 — a man in his mid-60s — had underlying health problems, DPS said. And according to fellow inmate Cadell Kivett, the man used a wheelchair.
That victim was one of 29 state prison inmates who have died of COVID-19 so far. The death toll from the coronavirus inside state prisons has more than doubled since the end of September.
At least five staff members have also died.
By now, most of North Carolina’s roughly 60 prisons have experienced outbreaks. The worst of them happened in late November and early December at Tabor Correctional Institution, near the South Carolina border west of Wilmington, where more than 560 of the roughly 1,400 inmates have tested positive. The prison only has three active cases now.
Viruses often spread rapidly inside prisons because inmates live so close together. And when prisons experience COVID-19 outbreaks, it can endanger people on the outside, too. That’s because staff members can carry the virus to their families and communities. So can some of the 2,000 people who are released from state prisons each month.
Nash County Health Director Bill Hill said he thinks the prison is doing “the best it can” to contain the virus. But he said the situation there still troubles him.
“I’m concerned about the 250 employees on three shifts who are going in and out of there and could spread it to the community,” he said.
This story was originally published December 18, 2020 at 4:39 PM with the headline "‘This seems at best neglectful.’ How a once-healthy NC prison became a COVID hotspot.."
.JPG)