Mass Testing Reveals Two More COVID-19 Hot Spots in Tennessee Prisons

Once Tennessee started testing everyone in its prisons, the state started finding COVID-19 in almost all of them. To date, only two prisons in the state are reporting that they have no positive cases of the deadly illness, but those prisons — South Central Correctional Facility and Whiteville Correctional Facility, both run by CoreCivic — have only tested two prisoners each. 

Two Tennessee prisons had already seen two of the worst outbreaks in the country within their walls.

Bledsoe County Correctional Complex had 586 inmates test positive. The Tennessee Department of Correction announced on May 7 that 580 of those prisoners had recovered, "completing 14 days of isolation and showing no symptoms." Five remain sick, though, and one man died. At Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, run by CoreCivic, 1,299 prisoners — more than half of the inmate population — tested positive. Two men have now died there after testing positive, bringing the death toll in Tennessee's prisons to three. (The TDOC announced the first inmate death in a press release but has quietly added the next two to its regularly updated spreadsheet of results. Autopsy reports for all three are pending.) 

As of May 12, mass testing in the state's prisons has revealed two more hot spots. At CoreCivic's Hardeman County Correctional Facility in Whiteville, 148 prisoners tested positive. At the state-run Northwest Correctional Complex in Tiptonville, 311 inmates tested positive.

TDOC spokesperson Dorinda Carter tells the Scene that she doesn't have mass-testing results for staff yet, but that so far 62 TDOC employees had tested positive, 29 of whom have since returned to work.