Prisons battling COVID-19 face another disease threat this fall

At the Eddie Warrior Correctional Center in Oklahoma, over 90 percent of inmates have tested positive for COVID-19. Nearly every facility in the Oklahoma prison system has been touched by the virus, says Nicole McAfee, director of policy and advocacy at the ACLU of Oklahoma. She assumes that they still haven’t seen the worst of it — and to make matters even more complicated, flu season is about to start.

The flu regularly spreads through prisons and jails in the US for some of the same reasons that COVID-19 does. The facilities pack vulnerable people in close quarters, with limited access to soap or other ways to protect themselves against an infectious disease. Handling a single outbreak is already a struggle in these places, which...

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