Coronavirus breaches Kenyan prison walls, 31 taken ill

Nairobi Prisons have been isolating newly admitted remandees so that they do not mix with inmates

At least 31 remandees and prisoners in Nairobi have caught the coronavirus, the Kenya Prison Service said on Sunday.

The positive cases were from 59 inmates who had completed a 21-day quarantine at the Nairobi Remand and Allocation Prison after being charged in various courts.
Kenya Prison Service Commissioner-General Wycliffe Ogallo said the test samples were collected on Thursday, May 28, as part of the ongoing mass testing and results returned yesterday.
“The Nairobi County Emergency Response Team promptly moved in and evacuated the patients to various treatment centres for case management,” he said in a statement.

He added that “perfect calm” had prevailed at the facility, allaying fears of a massive virus outbreak.
“We also wish to state that all the convicts and remandees currently in our custody are safe,” the commissioner said.
The 129 correctional facilities in Kenya, often crowded and with compromised hygiene practices, have had strict containment measures to prevent cases of the coronavirus.
11,000 petty offenders and convicts who had already served the entirety of their respective jail terms were recently released to decongest the prisons to achieve some social distance.
Visits to all prisons, borstal institutions and youth corrective training centres have been suspended.

According to Mr Ogallo, these measures are progressively being reviewed based on the current outbreak dynamics of the pandemic.
“If need be, we will adopt and deploy more radical approaches to prevent the spread of the virus within our correctional facilities,” he said.

Kenya yesterday confirmed 143 new cases of the virus to take its infection tally to 1,888, since March 13 when the first case was reported.
Nairobi contributed 86 of the new cases with 45 traced from Makadara while 21 were from Kibra. Embakasi South came third with six cases and Langata had one case.
Uasin Gishu reported 11 cases who were all truck drivers.

The disease has spread to 33 counties, where the latest is Kericho which reported one case in Ainamoi.
So far 464 people have recovered from the disease, while 63 have died.