Two male inmates of the Cebu City Jail tested positive for COVID-19 after the City Health Department conducted testing on 199 swab samples from the jail.
One of the inmates has already died. He was brought to the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center last Saturday after he had difficulty breathing and died the following day. He was the sixth recorded death due to COVID-19 in Cebu City. The other inmate found positive is now being isolated.
The COVID-19 threat to our jail needs to be addressed immediately. Like many of the poorest sitios and puroks in our country, many of our jails are congested, often holding more than the number of people they were designed to accommodate.
Case in point, the Cebu City Jail was designed to hold only 1,000 people, but it currently has over 6,000, or six times its intended capacity. Meanwhile, the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center was built for only 1,600 inmates, but houses around 2,200.
You can just imagine how easy it can be for the COVID-19 virus to spread within such a confined jail population. This is not to mention the sanitary concerns that have plagued the Cebu City Jail on and off these past few months.
Perhaps something can be done to decongest the jail in the meantime, just to avoid the chance of COVID-19 spreading like wildfire among a prison population.
One way to help decongest the jail is to remove people who aren’t supposed to be there by expediting some case hearings. Majority of those in the jail are actually those waiting for their cases to be heard and resolved, and not those who have been proven guilty and are serving out their prison terms.
With that being said, we know how next to impossible this is right now since courts are on break and not everyone has access to the internet, especially those in jail.
There is no easy solution to this. We certainly don’t envy those who have to make the decisions or come up with the solutions, but if this problem isn’t nipped in the bud, our jails may soon not just house inmates and detainees, but also COVID-19 infected.