This story was told by a person incarcerated at Solano.
UCI: Okay now, what has the COVID situation been like at Solano?
Caller: You mean for me or in general?
UCI: For both, for you and in general?
Caller: Well, when we were first notified that something was going on, it was in March, March last year. Nobody, none of the administrators or custody, of which I’m aware, actually knew what it was or, you know, what was going on, or how serious it would be. I remember I was at my job, at my prison job, obviously, and I was doing the podcast, and an officer came upstairs and said, everybody has to go back.
And, of course, we’re gonna ask questions like little children. You know, why? “Why?” And they just said, “Look, you gotta go back.” And when we, there was only a handful of us that work at that job. So, when we went downstairs, we asked another officer, at least I did ask another officer what was going on. And they said there’s been an outbreak of some sort at another facility within the prison, but another prison yard.
And so we didn’t get any details in, you know, it wasn’t until I came back to the building, was locked up, and it was they, they really made it seem scary in the beginning, you know, like what’s really going on? Why say outbreak? Say exactly what’s going on. So that’s how it started from my memory.
And initially, I do recall that there seemed, there seemed to be no rules in place early on, you know, when we were able to move, very limited movement, there were no masks in the beginning. There was nothing about distance, even though I finally started seeing something on TV after a couple of weeks. None of that was happening at this prison, nothing.
People were close together. Staff, everybody that had been working had continued to come to work, and that’s where we would’ve gotten the sicknesses from. That’s where we would’ve contracted COVID-19, would have been from staff, prison staff, because they immediately stopped our visitors from coming in. So, there’s no way possible we would’ve gotten it from visitors after a certain point.
I think that I may have gotten COVID-19 in December 2019 because I had one of the symptoms. I was coughing really hard in the middle of the night with no phlegm, and it hurt my chest really bad. You know, I will wake up and just cough and cough and cough. I felt like my lungs were gonna go inside out, but as I was saying, this is what I remember early on in the beginning.
