Michigan corrections officials say hundreds of state inmates and prison staff tested positive for COVID-19 over the past week-and-a-half, but officials fear the Omicron variant is driving the outbreak.
When Covid hit Michigan last year, it hit the prison system hard.
The virus infected about half of the roughly 32-thousand inmates and 140 of them died from it.
Corrections department spokesperson Chris Gautz says the number of Covid cases dropped as vaccines became widely available.
But now Gautz says infections are increasing again, fast.
“Just in the last less than 10 days we’ve seen more than 240 employees test positive, along with more than 400 some prisoners. So, while we’ve not yet seen the sequencing to prove that we have Omicron in our facilities, certainly there are many who believe that it could be there, just because of how transmissible we know that it is.”
Gautz says the corrections department was already operating short-handed and is actively recruiting for new employees.