This letter was written by a person incarcerated at New Folsom.
Dear PrisonPandemic,
I hope this letter finds you doing good in these hard times of ours right now. Thank you for reaching out to me and letting me know that you and others are thinking about us in here. Since COVID our whole program changed up.
At the beginning of the pandemic we were, I believe any one of three prisons that had it under control. The correctional officers came up with a different program that worked good for social distancing to where we still got what we had coming like, dayroom yard and phone calls.
For about nine months we didn’t have no outbreak, no inmate had tested positive. There was a few COs that got it and if they happened to work in your building or you were around them, they would quarantine your building for two weeks and you would only get a phone call and shower one cell at a time.
When winter came there was a huge outbreak, I think. We had 200 cases one day, we were good the next. Bam it started like wildfire it seemed like overnight. It was crazy.
For a while though my building was the only one that had zero positive tests and we were getting tested two times a week with a temperature check. At the beginning I wasn’t really concerned about COVID because I thought you know were away from society: there should be no reason why any of us catch COVID-19.
Around the middle of January, I caught COVID. Our building was on quarantine at the time because a few inmates had tested positive. I felt fine at first and I didn’t have no symptoms. I got moved to a different building on a different yard to quarantine for two weeks.
The next day after I tested positive, I was going through it. I couldn’t eat, I was very fatigue, body aches, had the chills bad to the point where I was chattering my teeth. I had a higher fever for a couple of days. It’s weird though because as I was getting better, I was losing my taste and my smell. I lost it for about a month and a half after I already had got over COVID.
I’m in this vocational computer class, I’ve been in it for over a year now, but because of COVID I barely started going back to it at the beginning of this year. I go once, maybe twice a weeks sometimes and it’s a easy class. I would have been done with it if I could go to it every day like I’m supposed to and would have got my six weeks off for passing it.
It sucks I can’t see my family as much. The prison started doing video visits a few months back and recently about three weeks ago started doing contact visits, but with a lot of stipulations. I’ve just been doing my same routine every day and working out to cope with everything that’s going on.
Every inmate here has been offered the vaccination or at least the majority of us have. They didn’t take it though. Everything is pretty much under control for the most part.
The prison is starting to slowly open things back up. We are in phase two right now, so hopefully here in the next couple of months it’s back to normal even though there is nothing normal about this place lol.
I appreciate your message it means a lot. If you have any more questions or wanna know anything else I’m all ears. And I will always write back. I hope all is well. Thank you.
Best wishes.
