From The New Yorker:
On March 11, 2020, I spent a morning walking from dorm to dorm in one of the jails on Rikers Island, talking to the people who lived there about COVID-19. I was a physician at Correctional Health Services, the independent public agency that provides health care in the New York City jail system. The majority of the patients I worked with were in pretrial detention at the North Infirmary Command, a converted bus depot where you can feel the wind blow through the walls. My patients were all either older, seriously or terminally ill, or significantly disabled. They lived in barracks of around forty beds spaced three feet apart, and shared bathrooms where toilets were separated by low dividers instead of walls. They seldom went outside to spend their allotted hours in the yard, which is a fenced-in concrete square with nowhere to sit.
People in jail have access to television and the newspaper. Our patients knew that a novel virus was killing people in China and Italy, and that cases had already been detected in New York City. They were angry and scared; they’d started hearing rumors—unfounded, but spreading quickly—that people were dropping dead in other jails. At that time, we didn’t yet have the capacity to test people in the jail system for SARS-CoV-2. We also didn’t know that the virus was airborne, or that it could cause asymptomatic infection in people who could then pass it on. Had we known those things, we would have been more worried than we were. Still, we already had plenty to worry about.
The Diamond Princess, a cruise ship with more than three thousand people on it, had been the site of a SARS-CoV-2 outbreak a month earlier. By the end of the ship’s quarantine period, almost twenty per cent of the people on board had contracted the virus, and an estimated fourteen passengers had died. My colleagues and I joked grimly that Rikers Island was like the worst cruise ship in the world: our patients were held in close proximity, in violent, unsanitary conditions, without freedom of movement, in a setting that required an excess of human contact because detainees were permitted to do so few things for themselves. If we could expect fallout similar to what we had seen on the Diamond Princess, we would be looking at the possibility of more than a thousand cases, and dozens of deaths, in a period of weeks. Those numbers were unfathomable to us. In 2019, we’d had three deaths in custody, total. Continue reading >>>
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