This story was told by a person incarcerated at Chuckawalla.
Caller: We have been COVID free for, until recently, last month. We’ve had outbreaks in all other three yards to where the whole community was pretty much sick with the virus.
But for some reason, or just maybe just dumb luck, our yard, remained COVID free. And we were kind of like the trophies, the trophy yard because all these officers would come down and all the brass would come and look at us, you know, wonder why it was that we remained COVID free. And then officers and free staff started to come to work sick.
They would actually come to the building and escort these people out of the building because they have failed to check up on their emails from the test site they do, they run here. So, officers, you know, either they’re too lazy or just don’t care come to work or fail to check in and look at the test site to see if they’re positive or negative and then come to work.
And I guess they check here at work, and they come, and they escort them out of the building. Now this happened three different times in three different occasions. So, they’re putting us at risk that way. Another thing they do is – I mean half of them don’t wear their mask correctly, or wear a mask or wear it correctly. The other half, they work on other affected yards. Now I’m not saying they’re actually, you know, they catch it – well, they might’ve caught it from there. Or whatever, you know, like residual contamination they might have.
They come over here, sit at the podium, work with other inmates, the porters, and the porters spread it around. We had one that worked inside the chow hall. And she tested positive. And she got her workers sick. They went back to the building. That one building got sick, it spread throughout the … and then it slowly bled over into our building.
So, another thing they did too is they – so, a building gets infected, or one or two guys get infected. They used to round up the whole cube and move them out. And that’s pretty good. But like the experts say, there’s no true way to tell the infection rate or how infectious a person is. So, they move, they probably move the wrong people.
But what they were doing this time around was they weren’t doing that. They were just taking the individual that was either felt they had sick or had a symptom, and they took them out. Before they would take the whole cube and remove them as well. All the, and anybody they hung around with. Now they’re just taking single individuals. So, we got one case in our building. And what was their idea? To move the whole building and spread it throughout the whole prison. A lot of us thought, well, why would they do that?
I mean just leave us where we’re at. If it’s going to spread, you know, let it spread amongst here inside of our building instead of taking it somewhere and almost guaranteeing that we get it. So, it turned out like 160 guys in this building ended up getting it. Fourteen of them went to the hospital, and so far, we’ve had two fatalities in just our one building. I ended up catching it. I was I guess a lucky one. The worst thing that happened to me was a bad headache and I lost my …
