Four Dead, More Than 200 Infected on California Death Row as COVID-19 ​‘Tears Through’ San Quentin

Four California death-row pris­on­ers are dead and more than 210 have been infect­ed in a coro­n­avirus out­break that news reports say is ​“tear­ing through” the nation’s largest death row. 

Fueled by an influx of infect­ed pris­on­ers dur­ing a prison trans­fer at the end of May 2020, the COVID-19 virus has explod­ed through San Quentin State Prison (click to enlarge pic­ture). As of July 2, near­ly 1,400 San Quentin pris­on­ers and more than 100 mem­bers of the prison staff had been infect­ed. Sources tell DPIC that more than 210 of the state’s 725 death-row pris­on­ers (29.0%) have now test­ed pos­i­tive for the dis­ease, with dozens more await­ing test results.

The out­break killed Richard Stitely, 71, who was found dead in his cell on June 24 after exhibit­ing symp­toms of the coro­n­avirus. He was the first con­demned California pris­on­er to die of COVID-19. Stitely was among the numer­ous pris­on­ers who had refused test­ing because prison med­ical per­son­nel were not chang­ing gloves between tests. Although prison offi­cials would not con­firm his cause of death, Marin County offi­cials report­ed on June 29 that Stitely had posthu­mous­ly test­ed pos­i­tive for COVID-19. As of July 2, death-row pris­on­ers Joseph S. Cordova, 76, Scott Thomas Erskine, 59, and Manuel Machado Alvarez, 59, also have died in the outbreak.

Doctor Peter Chin-Hong of the University of California – San Francisco told NBC Bay Area that San Quentin was the ​“Chernobyl of COVID” and a ​“COVID wild­fire.“ ”[T]hey ran out of tests at San Quentin,” Dr. Chin-Hong said. ​”People are scared there.”

Death-row pris­on­er Tony Rodriguez said ​“most of us are already infect­ed. They’re telling us they’re going to test us and we’re wait­ing for that test every day, but it’s just get­ting worse and worse here.” He told NBC Bay Area that “[t]he alarms go off 10-to-15 times a day now. They’re respond­ing to some­one who’s not respond­ing or bare­ly mov­ing. There are a lot of old­er guys here who have been here for a lot of years and those are a lot of the guys they’re tak­ing out every hour on a stretcher.”

Marylou Hillberg, a lawyer who is rep­re­sent­ing two men on death row, not­ed that California’s death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers are espe­cial­ly vul­ner­a­ble to COVID-19. ​“It’s an aging pop­u­la­tion on Death Row,” she said. ​“There’s a lot of folks who have med­ical con­di­tions that make them espe­cial­ly frag­ile: heart dis­ease, lung dis­ease, dia­betes, hyper­ten­sion.” She added that she feels ​“total­ly help­less to do any­thing” for her clients in the midst of the outbreak.

In one month, San Quentin went from zero known infec­tions of the nov­el coro­n­avirus to more than 1,000. On May 30, 121 men were trans­ferred from the California Institution for Men in Chino, which at the time had the state’s largest num­ber of infect­ed pris­on­ers. Though prison offi­cials claimed the men had been test­ed pri­or to the trans­fer, many had been test­ed weeks before the move with­out being retest­ed. A fed­er­al judge over­see­ing med­ical treat­ment in California’s pris­ons called the trans­fer a ​“sig­nif­i­cant fail­ure.” San Quentin has now sur­passed Chino as the prison facil­i­ty with the most COVID-19 cas­es, and it accounts for more than 20% of the total 4,800 con­firmed cas­es in the entire California prison sys­tem. Twenty-three pris­on­er fatal­i­ties have been attrib­uted to COVID-19 across the state, includ­ing 16 at the facil­i­ty in Chino.

Public health experts from the University of California – Berkeley and UC – San Francisco warned prison offi­cials in mid-June that San Quentin’s pop­u­la­tion would need to be cut by 50% to avoid a major out­break. A few pris­on­ers have received expe­dit­ed parole, and pris­ons have halt­ed intakes from local jails, but the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has not under­tak­en the kind of efforts rec­om­mend­ed by pub­lic health experts. San Quentin offi­cials said they are in the process of erect­ing “[a]ir-conditioned tent struc­tures … to help pro­vide on-site loca­tions for addi­tion­al phys­i­cal dis­tanc­ing in hous­ing and for medical triage.”