The growing coronavirus epidemic at San Quentin State Prison is imposing taxes on local hospitals, prompting Marin County leaders to ask Governor Gavin Newsom to intervene.
Katie Rice, chair of the Marin County Board of Supervisors, sent a letter to Sacramento requesting “on-site capacity building to manage the care of sick inmates with COVID-19 and the establishment of an Incident Commander in the sprout installation. ” management experience. “
The virus has devastated the institution, infecting 1,016 as of Monday. The Marin County coroner’s division said Monday that a death row inmate who was not responded to in prison on Wednesday tested positive for the disease.
An autopsy was planned Tuesday for Richard Stitely, 71. If the virus is found to have caused his death, Stitely, who had been sentenced to death since 1992 for rape and murder, would be the first coronavirus death in prison.
Figures released through Monday show 22 San Quentin inmates hospitalized, seven at the MarinHealth Medical Center in Greenbrae or the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Rafael. Some 40 San Quentin inmates have been hospitalized since the outbreak began.
Dr. Matt Willis, the county’s public health officer, said that while the plan is for hospitals throughout northern California to share responsibility for caring for San Quentin inmates, protocol dictates that inmates who are Seriously ill in prison and in need of immediate care should be brought by ambulance to the nearest hospital.
“So Marin County ends up being burdened by those kinds of patients,” Willis said.
He said that some hospitals no longer accept transfers. Saint Francis Memorial Hospital in San Francisco stopped accepting inmates after admitting 12, and Seton Medical Center in Daly City declined to accept new inmates on Monday, although it indicated it would do so again at a future date.
“This list changes,” Willis said, “but the point is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for San Quentin medical personnel to find hospitals capable of accepting inmates.”
Lee Domanico, CEO of MarinHealth Medical Center, said Monday: “I have also requested, through Assemblyman Marc Levine’s office, that the state declare a regional mass casualty event, which would establish a regional classification function for the management of patients who need to go to hospitals, as they would have if there were a plane crash.
“There are capacity limitations in all hospitals,” said Domanico. “That is why we need to have a regional distribution of these patients so that no hospital is flooded.”
Willis said the prison needs to develop a field hospital or a similar strategy to handle the increase.
“We have over a thousand cases now. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have more than 2,000 by the end of this, “she said. “If even only 10% of them require hospitalization, it’s 200 people.”
Last week, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation confirmed that it planned to transfer San Quentin inmates to the less crowded North Kern State Prison near Bakersfield. On Monday, the Department of Corrections said the plan was halted after two inmates scheduled for the transfer tested positive for COVID-19.
Despite the change in plan, Newsom, at its Monday afternoon press conference, said the state is “updating plans to move people,” without specifying details. Newsom highlighted the outbreak in San Quentin, noting that 42% of inmates there are at increased risk for complications due to age or comorbidities.
The first cases in San Quentin were among some 121 inmates who were transferred to San Quentin from the California Institution for Men in Chinese on May 10. The inmates were transferred from Chino prison because a major outbreak was occurring there and prison officials wanted to clean up space.
At this point, the outbreak in San Quentin has outpaced any previous outbreak in other California jails.
“This is the largest prison catastrophe in state history, and we are not getting the attention we need from the administration to make sure it can be contained,” Levine, D-Greenbrae, said Monday.
In April, Levine asked the prison department to develop site-specific plans to address a possible increase in COVID-19 infection in San Quentin.
Levine said Monday that San Quentin began installing air-conditioned tents to allow for greater detachment of prisoners, as well as medical triage.
Regarding the transfer of inmates to less crowded prisons, Levine said: “If they can evaluate and isolate prisoners for 14 days, they can build confidence in their ability to make more transfers. It has to be done with extraordinary care based on evidence of how easy it was to ruin it last time.
“San Quentin is essentially a burning house, and they are trying to get the inmates out as safely as possible.”
