San Quentin overseer: Prison virus response escalating

The court-appointed federal receiver for the state’s prison medical care system said Wednesday that steps are being taken to ensure that a massive COVID-19 outbreak at San Quentin State Prison doesn’t overwhelm Marin hospitals.

J. Clark Kelso spoke Wednesday during an oversight hearing on the spread of COVID-19 in state prisons held by the state Senate’s public safety committee.

“Our two biggest concerns now are insufficient resources at San Quentin to handle the enormity of the crisis and the capacity of local hospitals to deal with the flow of San Quentin patients,” Kelso told the committee. “We appreciate that MarinHealth Medical Center, San Quentin’s primary local hospital, does not itself have sufficient resources for our likely needs.”

“If it appears MarinHealth cannot handle the flow,” Kelso said, “arrangements will be made to transport patients directly to other hospitals so as to not overwhelm MarinHealth’s resources.”

Kelso said that as of Wednesday morning, 1,127 San Quentin inmates had tested positive for the coronavirus, including 809 in the last 14 days, and 42 had been hospitalized. One inmate who died tested positive for the virus.

Marin’s state legislators, Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, and Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-Greenbrae, participated in the hearing, even though they’re not members of the committee. McGuire also emphasized the need to ease the pressure on Marin hospitals.

“We need to develop a strategy to create surge capacity for intensive care unit and hospital beds in the greater Bay Area,” McGuire said. “As of 10 p.m. last night, 24 out of 25 ICU beds in Marin were full, and eight of the patients were San Quentin inmates. We need to create emergency medical service protocols for patient transfers. There is going to need to be some kind of onsite medical facility established.”

Last week, the Board of Supervisors sent a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom requesting the “establishment of on-site capacity to manage the care of inmates sickened with COVID-19 and the establishment of an Incident Commander at the facility with outbreak management expertise.”

Kelso said Wednesday, “The administration is responding to the resources problem by directing the Office of Emergency Services to establish an incident command to help manage the outbreak. That began yesterday I believe.”

The receiver also said that the state has flown in tents to provide additional clinic and housing space, and that Cal OES will be bringing in a field hospital.

Dr. David Sears, an assistant professor of infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, said he was glad to hear about the establishment of an incident command. Sears said that was one of the recommendations that Amend, a group of UCSF health experts focused on reforming correctional health, made after visiting San Quentin on June 13 at the receiver’s request. At that time, there were only 16 active coronavirus cases at the prison.

Sears said one recommendation in the report Amend submitted to the receiver supersedes all others.

“Our report recommends that the prison population at San Quentin be urgently reduced to at least 50% of the current capacity,” Sears said.

Sears said this also applies to preventing spread of the virus in the state’s other prisons.

“All remaining recommendations are absolutely dependent on decarceration for your success,” he said.

Ralph Diaz, secretary for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told the commission that since mid-March his department granted early release to about 8,000 inmates statewide in an effort to reduce crowding and provide more space for social distancing within the state’s prisons.

However, Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley,  who heads the public safety committee, said, “I want to make it clear to any public that is listening. The numbers that have been referred to of releases so far have all been releases that would have happened on the natural. Approximately, 3,000 people are typically released from our prison system every month.”

Diaz said another round of early releases is scheduled to begin in July. He said one problem the department faces in releasing inmates is ensuring they have a place to go once they leave prison.

The committee also heard from prison reform groups advocating for release of more inmates.

Sam Lewis, executive director of the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, said his coalition and other groups have been lobbying the governor on this issue for months now.

“We advocated for the release of people who were 60 or older, especially people who have underlying health conditions,” Lewis said. “We also consistently advocated for people who may have been released within the next six to nine months.”

“If the governor is serious about saving lives then these ideas should be seriously considered,” said Lewis, who recalled his personal experience surviving infection with norovirus while serving time in Salinas Valley State Prison in Soledad.

“It was brutal,” Lewis said, “I remember laying in my bunk and thinking to myself, ‘Am I going to die here like an animal that no one cares for?’”