Folsom Prison COVID-19 cases double, now California’s largest active inmate outbreak
A coronavirus outbreak at Folsom State Prison has more than doubled in size in the past week, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, now representing the largest current outbreak among the state’s nearly three dozen prisons.
Folsom had 223 inmates with active COVID-19 infections in its custody as of Wednesday afternoon, according to a COVID-19 tracker on the CDCR website. All tested positive in the past two weeks.
Just four inmates at Folsom State Prison are listed as having recovered, and another four were released with infections still considered active, the online dashboard shows. None have died.
A week earlier on Aug. 12, the prison reported 99 inmates with active cases, plus another seven who were either inactive or were released. The day before that, CDCR noted in an Aug. 11 update that it was sending “nursing/health care strike teams” and deploying five small isolation tents that each can handle 10 patients, as well as a “large tent structure” capable of handling about 80 patients. Those were added to four 10-person tents that had been proactively set up in mid-July, prison officials said.
CDCR in a brief written update this Tuesday listed the prison’s active infection total as 126, adding that more than 1,000 inmates had been tested since Aug. 12 “with less than 1 percent of results coming back positive.” CDCR hasn’t publicly announced or addressed the 100 new, active cases that poured into the system one day later.
Folsom Prison had just under 2,500 total inmates incarcerated in its custody as of the most recent weekly CDCR inmate population report on Aug. 12.
CDCR also wrote Tuesday that a “large tent” with a 90-bed capacity has been made available for COVID-19 patients at Folsom State Prison, but it wasn’t clear if this was referencing the same tent structure as the roughly 80-person tent mentioned last week or an additional one.
Another dashboard for CDCR staff shows 14 employees at the facility — sometimes called “Old Folsom” to distinguish it from nearby California State Prison, Sacramento — have tested positive for COVID-19 during the pandemic, with five having returned to work.
An employee of the California Prison Industry Authority, a semiautonomous agency that trains inmates to join the workforce upon release, died of coronavirus after having worked at the prison, CalPIA confirmed to The Sacramento Bee last week.
California’s prisons remain severe hotspots for coronavirus activity, and though Folsom State’s outbreak is currently the largest in terms of active cases, the deadliest and most explosive outbreak came several weeks earlier at San Quentin State Prison, where at least 25 inmates have died among over 2,200 positive tests to date.
About 60 cases at San Quentin are still active and at the prison, 54 were transferred or released while active and the remaining 2,100 who haven’t died are marked “resolved.”
In total, CDCR reports 55 inmate deaths among its prisons out of over 9,700 lab-confirmed cases, of which nearly 1,400 were active as of Wednesday. Nearly 2,400 CDCR employees have contracted the virus, of which 1,100 have gone back to work.
State lawmakers attribute the San Quentin outbreak to a “botched” inmate transfer.
This story was originally published August 19, 2020 at 2:38 PM with the headline "Folsom Prison COVID-19 cases double, now California’s largest active inmate outbreak."
