Over 70% of tested inmates in federal prisons have COVID-19

• At the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the New York City jail where Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, inmate Guillermo Zegarra-Martinez told his attorney in an email that his cellmate tested positive for the coronavirus and was put in isolation for more than two weeks.
• But Zegarra-Martinez was not tested even though he was shaking in his cell with a fever during nights while experiencing pain throughout his body in the week before his cellmate was taken out and the week after, the inmate wrote.
• The sick inmate was taken out of the cell only “because he was coughing on the face of the guy” who took his temperature, Zegarra-Martinez said, according to his lawyer, Sabrina Shroff.
• Advocates and even prison guards have been calling for reforms to head off outbreaks in a prison system plagued for years by violence, misconduct and staffing shortages.
• Nearly 350 staff members have tested positive.
• Staff are sent around the country to pick up shifts, and union officials say the shortages are still so severe that officers are sometimes working 24 hours in a row.
• At a prison in Elkton, Ohio, where seven inmates have died, the governor called in the National Guard to help supplement medical staff.
• Officers worry that the protective equipment they’ve been given isn’t adequate to protect them from daily contact with inmates, especially at facilities where dozens have tested positive.