This story was told by a person incarcerated at Solano.
Caller: Well, from what I understand is, staff are being tested twice a month and we were being tested, at that point, every two weeks. Because it had become an outbreak, so they had started giving these COVID tests every two weeks.
And they just come in the middle of the night and say, “Pack your stuff, you’re going” and you’d be like “Well, why am I going?” So, you didn’t know if somebody in your dorm tested positive, or you tested positive, it was just, “Come here, you’re gone.”
And, you know, we didn’t see any nurse or nothing, and it was the officers that were actually coming around and telling us to pack your stuff without giving us any information, so it’s kind of scary in the sense that, you know, we know that this COVID is I mean, it’s deadly.
You know, you don’t know, it’s like Russian Roulette, are you the one that’s gonna die if you get it? And here, we’re just being told pack our stuff without knowing anything. So, I mean, we’re like scared, you know, we’re like, “hey what do you mean? Do I got COVID? Am I going to die?”
Or, you know, “why am I not getting treatment?” And it was just kind of like a nonchalant approach to like “Hey well you know what if you guys aren’t dying, you’ll be okay. Just drink some water” type of thing.
Real kind of, I guess not, real impersonal treatment, and I know the consensus is kind of like, you know, we don’t have any visits, meaning that the only place we could get COVID is from staff, either correctional officers or free staff.
And then, they would bring people in from other prisons that were infected, and we were like “why are they bringing them in?” Because all of a sudden, they brought a bunch of inmates from Folsom, and we had an outbreak of corona.
So, there’s kind of a lot of, confusion, and just not knowing, and lack of information that was going around that was kind of fueling the fear of people that you know “Am I going to die?” You know, you see the refrigerator trucks, on TV, and it’s just like, wow, you know, it’s kind of like surreal.
