This story was told by a person incarcerated at Solano.
Caller: Well, the current situation is we had an outbreak about two weeks ago because they brought in a busload of people from Old Folsom, which had an outbreak there. And we didn’t have no cases. We maybe had one or two in and out here and there. But once they brought these guys to our building – and some of them told us straight out of their mouths that they weren’t even quarantined.
And all of the buildings that they put these guys in, there was an outbreak. And now they have all these guys testing positive. We’re over 100 cases now here at Solano. So, we’re being placed in a gymnasium that’s filthy. The stucco from the roof is falling down. There’s dust everywhere. There’s dirt all on the floor. We’re not six feet apart. It’s just filthy, and it’s not even ventilated properly.
And they’ve got mice running around in here. We’ve got roaches up in here. It’s terrible.
UCI: I’m really sorry to hear that.
Caller: Yeah. And I lost my smell. I lost my taste. It’s freezing in here.
UCI: When did you find out you were positive with COVID?
Caller: So, they’ve been – we’ve been testing multiple times, and we have a bunch of negatives.
And then I guess we supposedly have a positive, but nobody actually came out and told us. The officers had to tell us before the medical staff even told us, and we still haven’t gotten papers that actually say that we are positive. But we got all the negative papers, but they wouldn’t give us the positive papers for some reason.
UCI: Hmm.
Caller: So, how we found out actually was they – the police came to my cell because they moved me over to the quarantine because somebody in my dorm had tested positive.
And so then what they did was they rolled up our whole dorm and took us over to the level three side and threw us in a cell. From my understanding, when you’re in those cells, we don’t have the proper ventilation for the virus to escape through the vents. There is no ventilation system. The air just circulates in there. So, everybody that they’re sending to this cell situation are coming up positive. And then they’re taking us and they’re moving us to the gymnasium.
So, the officer comes to my door, and he says, “Hey, man, pack up.”
And I’m like, “Where am I going?”
He says, “You’re going over here because you’ve got a positive.” And that’s just one positive supposedly. So, nobody has come around and did a double test.
Now, I heard something about an influenza test that would give us a false positive where they just do the rim of our nose, and then I heard – and they did the one before where they went all the way up our nose, all the way up in our cranium, so far up there. Have you heard anything about that?
UCI: I unfortunately haven’t. I’m sorry.
Caller: The two tests are different. You know how they do the rim of your nose and then they go further up your nose?
UCI: Mm-hmm.
Caller: Yeah. So, once they started doing the rim of our nose, all of these people started coming back positive. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s a correlation or some type of connection. But this is what we’re experiencing right now.
