Jails and prisons nationwide continue to be a hotbed for new coronavirus cases and deaths among inmates and staff. Advocates have urged officials to implement better safety provisions and increase testing to stop the spread. But increased testing won’t be happening, at least not right now.
During a meeting with the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Dr. Jeffery Allen, medical director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said that currently, the Bureau does not have a strategy to test all inmates in the federal prison system. Allen said testing all inmates is not recommended to prisons unless supplies are available. Using a priority system, only inmates who are symptomatic, new inmates or released inmates returning to the general population are being tested at this time. He added that as more testing supplies become available, the Bureau will expand its testing to include asymptomatic populations.
Michael Carvajal, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said as of Tuesday, about 1,400 federal inmates nationwide are currently infected with Covid-19.
More On The Pandemic
Despite the deadly toll the pandemic has had on populations worldwide, an ABC News/Washington Post poll reveals many Americans remain reluctant to get a no-cost vaccine when it becomes available.
Twenty-seven percent of those polled who say they will definitely or probably won’t get the vaccine label themselves as strong conservatives and/or evangelical Christians. Among this group, half express distrust in vaccines in general, while almost a quarter don’t think it’s needed in the case of COVID-19.
