North Carolina to test all 31,200 state prison inmates for coronavirus
Gov. Roy Cooper and Todd Ishee, the state’s commissioner of prisons, announced Thursday COVID-19 testing has begun on all inmates in the state prison system.
Ishee said it will take 60 days to test all 31,200 offenders throughout prison systems and will cost $3.3 million. The Department of Prisons had tested 2,809 offenders in its system as of Thursday with 717 testing positive for COVID-19.
Another 635 are presumed recovered per Centers for Disease Control and state DHHS guidelines.
“We’ve done some mass testing at prisons with significant outbreaks of this awful virus, but now we are going to test them all, the entire offender population,” Ishee said in a press briefing.
Tests are already being conducted on all incoming prisoners who arrive from county jails.
From this point forward, offenders being transferred between state facilities will be tested before they are transferred or, in lieu of testing, the prisoner will be placed in a 14-day quarantine.