Prison Talk - Missouri doctors, advocates call for release of prisoners

Ticking time bombs’: Missouri doctors, advocates call for release of prisoners

Two Missouri prison inmates were not given proper protective gear when they were instructed to clean an area where another incarcerated man was monitored for a suspected respiratory condition, the men wrote from the state prison in St. Joseph.

The ill prisoner, they would later learn, has since tested positive for the new coronavirus.

“We had direct contact with all of his bed linens as well as clothes he had been wearing,” William Swarnes, one of the inmates, said through the prison’s email system. “In addition to that we cleaned all the surfaces in the room.”