CDC Report Warns of Potential for New Outbreak at ICA-Farmville
We must free them all before it’s too late
“The risk of reintroduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the FDC [ICA-Farmville] still exists”
This concerning statement is found in the conclusion of the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) ICA-Farmville inspection report. The 40-page document paints an appalling picture of the facility’s handling of the massive COVID-19 outbreak this summer and their ability to prevent or mitigate any future outbreaks.
In this report, there are four major issues and incidents that make a strong case for ICA-Farmville to be shut down for good — 1) the facility is not physically structured and equipped to handle an outbreak, 2) inadequate quarantining of potentially infected individuals led to the virus spreading, 3) sampling or processing error put detained people’s lives as risk, and 4) multiple staff self-reported that they went to work at the facility while experiencing COVID-19 symptoms.
Facility Layout and Equipment
ICA-Farmville has nine dorms each containing between 40–100 beds. The beds are bunk beds that are attached, with four top bunks and four bottom bunks for a total of eight people per bed structure. The four-stack bunk beds are lined up in rows in large rooms that house the whole dorm. Beds are separated from each other by a six-inch partition on each side. Each dorm has communal spaces for eating meals and watching TV and a shared bathroom. 80% of the detained people they interviewed reported that they were unable to socially distance, reasons included the beds being too close and proximity to other people in the dorms. With this infrastructure, there is physically no way for detained people to protect themselves and prevent the spread of COVID-19.
ICA-Farmville also has only nine medical isolation units, just three of which are negative pressure rooms. They also have twelve cells that are used for administrative segregation that can be repurposed for medical isolation and quarantining. This is a total of 21 isolation rooms for a facility that currently houses approximately 300 people, and housed 473 people during the summer outbreak. If another outbreak were to occur, 21 isolation units will not be able to provide sufficient quarantine rooms to prevent the spread of COVID-19 throughout the facility.
Inadequate Quarantining
On June 2nd, 74 people were transferred from Florida and Arizona detention centers to ICA-Farmville, 51 of whom later positive for COVID-19. By doing this, ICE and ICA violated their own protocols that required new transfers to first quarantine at Caroline detention facility before being transferred to Farmville. Out of the 23 transfers who tested negative, ICA-Farmville moved three into three separate dorms all over the facility that were not under quarantine despite knowing that the RT-qPCR tests have a 30% false negative rate. All three of these individuals later tested positive for COVID-19 and the virus soon spread to those dorms. ICA’s repeated breach of protocol and inadequate quarantining of potentially infected individuals heighten the chances of a new outbreak.
Sampling or Processing Error
Between June 18th and July 8th, ICA tested a total of 324 detained people, 64 of these tests were not processed because of either sampling error or processing error at the commercial laboratory. One of these samples was from James Hill, a 72 year old man who died in August due to complications from COVID that he contracted while detained at Farmville. The other 63 people were retested a week later, 41 of whom tested positive. We cannot rule out sampling error from the causes of the test failure which could be an issue in the case of future outbreaks.
Staff Working with COVID Symptoms
The CDC interviewed the staff at ICA-Farmville, 10 of whom reported working while experiencing COVID-19 symptoms including headaches, cough, diarrhea, nausea, muscle aches, fatigue and shortness of breath within the last 14 days. This is concerning because detained people report staff freely moving between dorms, thereby creating scenarios where they could spread COVID-19 to uninfected people. Moreover, at the time ICA-Farmville tested the people they detain, they did not offer testing to staff and only 34% of the staff reported having had a test for COVID-19.
Concerningly, out of the 40 ICA-Farmville staff that reported living with 2–4 other people, only 23 of them said they wore face masks in public all of the time. Out of the 68 staff that do not live alone, 41 of them reported that their housemates always practiced safe measures to reduce indoor COVID-19 transmission; only 36 when it came to outdoor COVID-19 transmission. This unsafe behavior by staff and the people they live with can easily result in the reintroduction of COVID-19 into ICA-Farmville, especially coupled with the fact that staff work while symptomatic and move freely between infected and uninfected dorms.
The CDC report spotlights multiple incidents of medical neglect that follow a long and dark pattern of abuse at ICA-Farmville. ICE and ICA have repeatedly shown that they are incapable of keeping the people they detain safe. We must shut down Farmville and release everyone before more lives are lost to this deadly pandemic.
Free Them All VA is an abolitionist coalition centered around amplifying the organizing of those incarcerated in Virginia detention centers, jails, and prisons. Our demand to free them all has no asterisk. All means all.
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