Nearly 3,300 inmates test positive — 96% without symptoms
When the first cases of the coronavirus surfaced in Ohio’s prisons, the director in charge felt like she was fighting a ghost.
“We weren’t always able to pinpoint where all the cases were coming from,” said Annette Chambers-smith, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
As the virus spread, they began mass testing.
They started with the Marion Correctional Institution, which houses 2,500 prisoners in north central Ohio, many of them older with preexisting health conditions. After testing 2,300 inmates for the coronavirus, they were shocked. Of the 2,028 who tested positive, close to 95% had no symptoms.
“It was very surprising,” said Chambers-smith, who oversees the state’s 28 correctional facilities.
As mass coronavirus testing expands in prisons, large numbers of inmates are showing no symptoms. In four state prison systems — Arkansas, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia — 96% of 3,277 inmates who tested positive for the coronavirus were asymptomatic, according to interviews with officials and records reviewed by Reuters.
That’s out of 4,693 tests that included results on symptoms.
The numbers are the latest evidence to suggest that people who have no symptoms — contagious but not physically sick — may be driving the spread of the virus, not only in state prisons that house 1.3 million inmates across the country, but also in communities across the globe. The figures also reinforce questions over whether testing of just people suspected of being infected actually is capturing the spread of the virus.
“It adds to the understanding that we have a severe undercount of cases in the U.S.,” said Dr. Leana Wen, adjunct associate professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University. “The case count is likely much, much higher than we currently know because of the lack of testing and surveillance.”
Some people without symptoms when tested, however, may go on to develop symptoms later, according to researchers.
The United States has more people behind bars than any other nation, a total incarcerated population of nearly 2.3 million as of 2017, nearly half of which is in state prisons. Smaller numbers are locked in federal prisons and local jails, which typically hold people for relatively short periods as they await trial.
State prison systems in Michigan, Tennessee and California also have begun mass testing — checking for coronavirus infections in large numbers of inmates even if they show no sign of illness — but have not provided specific counts of asymptomatic prisoners.
Tennessee said a majority of its positive cases didn’t show symptoms. In Michigan, state authorities said “a good number” of the 620 prisoners who tested positive for the coronavirus were asymptomatic. California’s state prison system would not release counts of asymptomatic prisoners.
Ohio has 49,000 prisoners in 28 facilities. A total 3,837 inmates tested positive for the coronavirus in 15 of those facilities. But the state has not yet provided results on symptoms for 1,809 of them and did not identify the total number of tests conducted across the prison system.
Arkansas and Tennessee also have taken a targeted approach by conducting mass testing in several of their facilities. Michigan, North Carolina, California and Virginia have started with one facility each.