Over 850 inmates at Folsom Prison have caught COVID-19, most of them in past 2 weeks
A major coronavirus outbreak that has lasted more than a month is growing rapidly again at Folsom State Prison, where more than 850 inmates and close to 40 prison staff have now tested positive for COVID-19 during the pandemic.
More than half those inmate cases, 484 of them, are currently considered active, including 482 who’ve tested positive in the past two weeks, according to a Wednesday afternoon update to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s online COVID-19 tracker, up from 464 reported active cases a few hours earlier.
Another 380 inmates at Folsom had the virus previously and have recovered. Ten others were released with their cases still active.
In a separate data dashboard for employee cases, CDCR says 38 staff members at Folsom State Prison have tested positive, and 33 of them have returned to work.
No inmates have died of the highly contagious respiratory disease as of Wednesday, according to the CDCR tracking webpage.
The CDCR employee coronavirus dashboard also does not list any staff deaths at Folsom State Prison. But the California Prison Industry Authority, a semiautonomous agency under the umbrella of CDCR that trains inmates to join the workforce upon release, confirmed to The Bee last month that one of its employees who’d worked at Folsom State Prison died of COVID-19.
In mid-August, The Bee reported that Folsom State Prison was experiencing a coronavirus outbreak, first at just over 100 active inmate cases and then surging to more than 220 a week later. The prison, sometimes called “Old Folsom” to distinguish it from the adjacent California State Prison Sacramento, remained roughly at that level of active cases for the next three weeks.
Folsom Prison had 208 active inmate cases as of Sept. 7, a data chart from CDCR shows. Two days later, on Sept. 9, it had 366 — an increase of 158 infections. And this Monday, the total spiked again by over 160, from Sunday’s tally of 369 to an all-time high of 532 before dropping slightly in the past couple of days, data updated Wednesday afternoon shows.
“The department is monitoring the situation very closely,” CDCR spokeswoman Dana Simas told The Bee in an emailed statement. “There is an incident command post which is in coordination with the court appointed Federal Receiver at the prison. We have, since the beginning of the outbreak, implemented serial testing for inmates, increased staffing, and facilitated isolation for those that have tested positive to COVID-19.”
The prison has 2,438 incarcerated inmates, according to CDCR’s virus tracker, and it has tested 1,989 of them in the past two weeks. The 482 new cases equate to more than 24% of tested inmates getting a positive result in those 14 days.
CDCR reports testing more than 500 Folsom inmates a day from Sept. 8-11, then another 450 this Monday.
CDCR on its website has a page dedicated to brief updates relating to COVID-19, including developments and response measures at prisons that have been significantly impacted by coronavirus. The updates haven’t mentioned the situation at Folsom since Aug. 18, when CDCR said it set up a large 90-bed tent for COVID-19 patients. In that same update, the prison agency said its active case count was 126, that it had tested more than 1,000 patients since Aug. 12 and that fewer than 1% of those recently tested inmates returned positive.
But according to the CDCR chart, later in the day on Aug. 18, nearly 100 new infections flooded into the system for a new total of 223 active cases.
How or why COVID-19 cases have exploded to their current level after plateauing from Aug. 18 through early September isn’t clear, but it doesn’t appear to be an issue of just testing, which the chart shows has been conducted at a fairly consistent rate since the middle of last month.
Simas said that CDCR has “installed tents at the site to create additional space to manage the patient population” and is providing both staff and inmates with “appropriate PPE (personal protective equipment)“ and access to hand sanitizer.
Sacramento County notes on its data dashboard for COVID-19 activity that as of Monday, Folsom State Prison cases are now being counted as part of unincorporated territory. They’d previously been added to the count for the city of Folsom. This led the city’s all-time infection total to drop from more than 720 last week to just over 350 this week, as Capital Public Radio first reported.
The current outbreak gives Folsom Prison the highest current active case total among California state prisons, the tracking webpage shows. Avenal State Prison is next at 225, and four other institutions have at least 125 actively infected inmates. San Quentin and Avenal have each had outbreaks in which more than 2,000 inmates tested positive, with the majority of cases considered “resolved.” At least 26 San Quentin inmates have died of COVID-19 as of Wednesday.
In total, CDCR institutions have recorded more than 12,300 cases of COVID-19 in inmates, more than 1,700 of them still active as of Wednesday. More than 3,300 CDCR staff have tested positive, 1,061 of whom still had active infections this week.
At least 60 inmates, and at least nine staff members, have died of the virus throughout California’s state prison system, CDCR says. The latter total, listed on the CDCR website, does not include the CalPIA employee who worked at Folsom before dying of the virus.
This story was originally published September 16, 2020 at 1:08 PM with the headline "Over 850 inmates at Folsom Prison have caught COVID-19, most of them in past 2 weeks."
