This story was told by a person incarcerated at Solano.
Caller: Okay. Well, at first, Solano, they had been doing a good job as far as keeping the numbers down, as far as the positive tests. It was very few at first, but then they started transferring people back in from places that had the COVID real bad, and they started mixing them up with us, and next thing you know, it’s gotten real bad around here to where you got like, I think it’s 24 buildings in this institution, and I think about like, more than 10 are quarantined right now.
And they’ve been moving a lot of people around. And a person will test positive for COVID and they’ll go up to 10 to 14 days, and then they’ll bring them out of the gym—that’s where they put a lot of people that test positive—then they’ll put us in buildings, where us people that haven’t tested positive, so next thing you know, then now they’re moving those guys out and moving them around.
They got a few isolated buildings as far as cell living goes, and uh, guys will move out of those cells, and they don’t even clean the cells before they move the next people in. You know, and I’d end up testing positive, I think December 22nd. And uh, my symptoms were just I lost my taste and my smell, but physically I didn’t feel anything as far as any aches or anything.
But, like right now they got us in a building where the social distancing is not that good. We’re in a dorm where the bunks are like four feet apart from each other. And some buildings like this they got like, 190 people in it when they shouldn’t have because there’s no social distancing. And then the COs, they come and go, you know, I think a lot of them have already tested positive, so they don’t really care about as far as, if they have their mask on. They don’t social distance between each other, you know.
So I just think at first, like I said, they did a good job around here, but once it hit I don’t think really, they understand how to deal with it, it’s just, that the way they’re moving people around, it’s—that should be pretty easy for them to figure out. If you have a building where guys have tested negative, you shouldn’t move people that have tested positive in that building. But uh, that’s about the gist of as far as how it’s going around here.
You know, a lot of us you know, not really anybody knows how really to deal with it, but the simple things that they could be doing, like I say, is not put people in the building where, if I tested positive, don’t put me in there with somebody that’s tested negative, you know, you’re putting them at risk now, with them doing that a lot around here. That seems like the worst part of it, they just don’t understand how to move people around, and that seems like the most simplest part, you know, to not put positive with negative.
