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The latest round of testing at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans has resulted in seven more prisoners, who had been in quarantine because of possible exposure, testing positive for the coronavirus.
The new positive results announced Friday follow earlier mass testing this month at the facility that revealed an outbreak of 38 inmates at the St. Albans prison testing positive for Covid-19 as well as 17 staff members.
The result of the recent second round of testing this week of the 154 staff members at the facility remains pending. The latest positive tests also reveal that the earlier outbreak has not been contained as corrections officials had earlier hoped, despite a lockdown of prisoners there.
The St. Albans prison remains the only correctional facility in the state that has had an inmate test positive for the coronavirus. However, the St. Albans prison is also the only correctional facility where mass testing of all the inmates and staff has taken place.
Mike Smith, Vermont Agency of Human Services secretary, has repeatedly said that such blanket testing at a correctional facility would only occur if at least one inmate at a facility had tested positive for Covid-19.
Smith spoke of the latest test results at the St. Albans facility during Gov. Phil Scott’s Friday press conference. Shortly after Smith’s comments, the corrections department sent out a press release announcing the new positive results at the Northwest prison.
Despite the seven new positive tests results at St. Albans, Smith struck an optimistic tone at the press conference and congratulated corrections officials on their work to contain the outbreak.
“They have done an amazing job in looking at how to move people, how to isolate people, how to make sure that they contain a spread in a facility,” he said. “And based upon this, these results, it looks like they’ve done a very good job.”
James Baker, interim corrections commissioner, said in the statement released Friday that the seven who tested positive had been in a quarantine unit at the facility as a resulting of contact tracing that showed they may have had contact with one of the inmates who in the first round of testing had tested positive for Covid-19.
“This is a challenging situation for the officers and inmates at all of our facilities who are being asked to make extraordinary sacrifices to keep the community safe, and they have my full gratitude and support,” Baker added in the statement.
A total of 155 inmates at the St. Albans prison was tested in the latest round, with the seven prisoners testing positive for the coronavirus.
Smith said those seven prisoners were being moved to the Northeast Correctional Complex in St. Johnsbury, which had been set up a “surge” to care for prisoners across the correctional system who have tested positive for Covid-19.
The first round of mass testing at the St. Albans prison took place April 8, according to the corrections department, after the first inmate there had tested positive. That came shortly after a total of three staff had also tested for the positive for the coronavirus in that facility.
Of the 38 prisoners who tested positive in the earlier round of testing, 16 have recovered and are returning from the St. Johnsbury surge site back to the St. Albans prison, Smith said Friday.
Another 19 of those inmates who initially tested positive and were moved to the St. Johnsbury prison are recovering at that facility and will stay there until they have two consecutive negative tests, according to the corrections department statement issued Friday.
That statement also said that three inmates have since been released from custody.
Mike Akey, an inmate who said he found out a day after he was freed from the St. Albans facility that he had tested positive for coronavirus during that first round of testing, told VTDigger this week he blamed corrections for that result. He cited what he called the department’s lax efforts in protecting inmates from the spread of the virus.
Baker, earlier this week, defended the corrections department’s actions at the St. Albans facility, saying that the department was also following state Department of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.
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