Idiot California Gov. Moron Gruesome planned it that way. -San Quentin Prison Was Free of the Virus. One Decision Fueled an Outbreak. San Quentin Prison Was Free of the Virus. One Decision Fueled an Outbreak. The virus arrived in San Quentin after busloads of prisoners were transferred from another facility where infections were rising. What happened is a warning for the nation’s prisons, experts say. The coughing and complaints of sickness began as a procession of busloads of prisoners made its way late last month from a Southern California prison to San Quentin, California’s oldest and most widely known prison, perched on a bluff overlooking San Francisco Bay, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge. The inmates were being moved to San Quentin as part of a plan to halt the spread of the coronavirus by reducing the number of inmates at the California Institution for Men in Chino, where nine inmates had died and nearly 700 had been infected. At the time, there were no inmates known to have had the virus at San Quentin. Within days, some of the 121 prisoners from the buses introduced the virus at San Quentin, public health officials say. More than 1,000 of the 3,700 prisoners have since been infected at San Quentin, the foreboding structure surrounded by barbed wire fences and dotted with guard towers that was once famously home to inmates including Charles Manson; Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy; and George Jackson, an inmate who wrote “Soledad Brother,” a series of letters from prison. The transfer of inmates — an effort intended to slow the virus, which instead apparently created a new outbreak — has been denounced by health officials and a state lawmaker as a public health failure. How San Quentin went from being a prison that had held off the virus for months to a place inundated with sick inmates represents a cautionary tale for the nation’s prison system amid the pandemic. “What happened — what’s happening — it can really happen anywhere, particularly in an overcrowded prison, which unfortunately is the norm,” said Dr. David Sears, a physician and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who toured San Quentin on June 13 and warned state officials about the emerging crisis. “San Quentin’s not the first prison to have a large outbreak, and unfortunately it won’t be the last.” Days into the outbreak, the prison has grown increasingly chaotic, inmates and others say. Some among San Quentin’s death row inmates, in a secluded part of the prison, are infected, according to advocates for inmates. A number of older prisoners have hung handwritten signs outside their cells that read “Immune Compromised” so that guards will wear masks around them. Other inmates refuse to leave their cells out of fear of catching the virus, according to an inmate, and in recent days, guards have been heard screaming over their radios, “Man down!” after sickened inmates were unable to stand up. The conversation has been dominated by talk of death. “I don’t want to see them die,” Rahsaan Thomas, a 49-year-old inmate said of some of the older prisoners in a telephone interview. “I don’t know if I’m tough enough to survive Covid.” The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement that it was very concerned about the surge in infections in San Quentin, adding that prison workers had increased testing among inmates and had limited the number of transfers between prisons. “Public safety is our top priority, as is the health of our community,” said Dana Simas, a spokeswoman for the agency. Workers had begun to build “air-conditioned tent structures” at the San Quentin prison, she said, as officials work to determine the best use of spaces for housing and medical triage. Broadly, Ms. Simas said that California officials were confident that they could halt the spread of the virus given that the prison system had longstanding plans for managing other outbreaks of influenza, norovirus, measles and mumps. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/us/san-quentin-prison-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage