About 20 percent of all U.S. state and federal detainees have contracted or have previously contracted COVID-19, according to a survey by The Associated Press and Marshall Project.
More than 275,000 detainees serving sentences for various crimes across the country have contracted the virus since early 2020, the investigation found, and more than 17,000 have died as a result of the virus and lack of access to basic health care.
Federal Penitentiary Bureau officials did not immediately send a request for comment from The Hill on the findings of the investigation. Some recently detained Americans told reporters during the investigation that they were assisting detainees in medical difficulties in common areas of prisons.
A former chief medical officer on New York’s Riker’s Island also told reporters that he saw facilities where people with COVID-19 symptoms went regularly without being tested or receiving any medical care.
“I still meet prisons and prisons where, when people get sick, not only are they not tested, but they do not receive care. So they get sick a lot more than they need to, ”said Homer Venters, a senior with community-oriented correctional health services.
In some states, the rate is much higher than 1 in 5 infected. In Arkansas and Kansas, more than half of all state and federal inmates were infected with COVID-19, and many prison staff also battled the infections. At the national level, the virus mortality rate is 45 percent higher in correctional institutions, according to the survey.
While the distribution of two vaccines for COVID-19, produced by Pfizer and Moderna, has begun in the United States, only a handful of states give priority to incarcerated populations for the first doses. Governor Colorado Jared Polis
Jared Schutz PolisCOVID-19: Where are the prisoners? The governor of Pennsylvania tests negative after being diagnosed with coronavirus. Government of Pennsylvania. Tom Wolf tests positive for COVID-19 MORE (D) would have rejected the idea after state officials initially announced that detainees would be among the priority recipients of a vaccine.
“That won’t happen,” he told reporters, according to Coloradoan. “There is no way for detainees to get it before members of a vulnerable population … There is no way to go to prisoners before they reach people who have not committed any crime. It is obvious.”