COVID-19 outbreak hits prison east of Charlotte, leaving at least 60 inmates infected
A mass testing effort at Albemarle Correctional Institution has found that at least 60 inmates have been infected with COVID-19 — making it one of the largest coronavirus outbreaks in the North Carolina prisons.
Prison officials say they are in the process of testing all of the roughly 750 inmates at Albemarle Correctional, a medium custody prison about 50 miles east of Charlotte. As of Monday afternoon, about a third of the inmates there had been tested, according to the state Department of Public Safety.
None of the inmates who tested positive at Albemarle are showing symptoms so far, prison spokesman John Bull said Monday.
“We will be separating the negatives from the positives and working on a plan to manage the outbreak,” Bull said.
On Thursday, DPS announced that it was initiating a plan to test all 31,000 inmates in the state prison system. That followed a ruling by a North Carolina judge, who ordered that the prisons devise a plan for testing all inmates.
The ruling by Wake County Superior Court Judge Vinston Rozier came in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of North Carolina, the NAACP and other civil rights groups, which have argued that the actions of prison leaders have left inmates vulnerable to contracting COVID-19.
So far, the COVID-19 outbreak at Albemarle is the third largest in the state prison system.
The largest was at Neuse Correctional Institution, in Goldsboro, where more than 460 inmates were diagnosed during mass testing in April. The second largest has been at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, in Raleigh, where more than 90 inmates have tested positive.
COVID-19 and other infectious diseases thrive inside prisons and jails because inmates live so closely together.
Earlier this year, DPS continued to transfer thousands of inmates as COVID-19 raced through the state’s prisons — actions that public health experts say raised the risk of spreading the virus, according to a story published last week by the Observer, in collaboration with a network of other North Carolina newsrooms.
Several inmates interviewed for that story said people transferred to their prisons were simply housed in open dormitories, where prisoners sleep in beds just a few feet apart from one another. One of them was Quincey Hill, an inmate at Albemarle Correctional in Stanly County.
“They’re not getting quarantined, they’re just coming in,” Hill told the Observer. “When they get transferred, they’re coming right into an open dorm.”
This story was originally published June 22, 2020 at 12:38 PM.
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