Prisons: Amplifiers of the COVID-19 Pandemic Hiding in Plain Sight.

Prisons: Amplifiers of the COVID-19 Pandemic Hiding in Plain Sight. Am J Public Health. 2020 May 14;:e1-e3 Authors: Barnert E, Ahalt C, Williams B Abstract On February 29, 2020, nearly half of incident cases (233 of 565) of COVID-19 reported in Wuhan, China, were from the city's prison system. A separate prison outbreak, 450 miles away, in Shendong, China, was traced to officials who had visited Wuhan and infected seven prison guards and 200 inmates.1 Modern prisons have faced infectious outbreaks but none at the scale of COVID-19's. On March 26, 2020, the United States reported its first death of an incarcerated patient, in Georgia, and New York City jails reported an infection rate seven times higher than in the rest of the city, a current US epicenter of COVID-19. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print May 14, 2020: e1-e3. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2020.305713). PMID: 32407126 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Am J Public Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Am J Public Health Source Type: research