INCLUSIVE HEALTH: MODELING COVID-19 IN CORRECTIONAL FACILITIES AND COMMUNITIES

Greenhalgh, S.; Provencher, A.

Mass incarceration, commonly associated with overcrowding and inadequate health resources for incarcerated people, creates a fertile environment for the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in U.S. correctional facilities. The exact role that correctional facilities play in enhancing COVID-19 spread and enabling community re-emergence of COVID-19 is unknown. We constructed a novel stochastic model of COVID-19 transmission to estimate the impact of correctional facilities, specifically jails and state prisons, for enhancing disease transmission and enabling disease re-emergence in local communities. Using our model, we evaluated scenarios of testing and quarantining infected incarcerated people at 0.0, 0.5, and 1.0 times the rate that occurs for infected people in the local community for population sizes of 5, 10, and 20 thousand people. Our results illustrate testing and quarantining an incarcerated population of 800 would reduce the probability of a major community outbreak by 6% and also prevent between 250 to 730 incidences of COVID-19 per year, depending on local community size. These findings illustrate that managing COVID-19 in correctional facilities is essential to mitigate risks to community health, and thereby stresses the importance of improving the health standards of incarcerated people.