The federal Bureau of Prisons reported that 620 inmates and 357 staffers had been infected, while 24 prisoner deaths have been attributed to COVID-19's spread.
Officials said that the agency had obtained additional testing capacity that would be deployed at especially hard-hit facilities across its 122-prison system.
"Asymptomatic inmates who test positive for COVID-19 can transmit the virus to other inmates," the agency said."The testing of asymptomatic inmates will assist in slowing transmissions within a correctional setting along with increasing the number of COVID-19 positive tests..." In Ohio, authorities have tested the entire inmate population at three separate prisons, revealing startling numbers of new infections. The expanded testing has pushed the number of infections at one prison, the Marion Correctional Institution, to more than 2,000 – the largest outbreak in the country.Officials in North Carolina recently completed mass testing at a prison near Raleigh where more than 90% of the 458 infected inmates displayed no common symptoms.
For more than a week, a Justice Department team has been reviewing conditions at coronavirus-plagued federal prisons.
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