CORONAVIRUS CASES LINKED TO PRISON INCREASE TO 46
ST. ALBANS: The Department of Corrections announced this afternoon that the total number of inmates who have tested positive for COVID-19 at the Northwest Correctional Center in St. Albans has risen to 32 inmates and also 14 staff members have tested positive.
28 of those inmates have already been moved to the Correctional Center in St. Johnsbury, where the State plans to place all the inmates who test positive within the state. The remaining four inmates will stay at the Northwest Correctional Center for treatment in the negative pressure cells.
The state worked diligently to test all 199 inmates at the facility, as well as every employee that works at the site. That’s a total of 328 people being tested. All but a handful of tests have come back from the lab, according to state officials.
Of the nine units at Northwest Correctional Center, the positive tests came from six of those units.
The only test at other correctional facilities throughout the state that has yet to come back is a test originating at Chittenden Correctional Center.
There are a total of 80 beds in St. Johnsbury, however the staffing in St. Johnsbury can only handle 56 inmates at this point in time.
Many of the people who tested positive are asymptomatic, according to the Department of Corrections.
Many of those tests were transported to Boston in order to process all of the tests in a quick turn around time. Officials used law enforcement relays between Vermont and Boston in order to rush the tests to the lab that processed them in the Bay area.
Corrections Commissioner Mike Baker said that no other inmates are being moved from prison to prison at this point in time.
Baker said that as part of the pandemic, the State of Vermont is not sending personnel to the prison in Mississippi, as they normally do. Baker said that there is a staff member or two in that prison that has tested positive for the virus.
Baker said that one of the sick correctional officers became severely ill due to the virus, with life-threatening symptoms.
Corrections is working with probation and parole officers in order to meet the staffing requirements as employees are being sent home to wait out the virus symptoms.
The County Courier will continue to update you with information related to the COVID-19 state of emergency.
