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A SHARP POST-MORTEM OF BOP’S COVID RESPONSE

COVID is largely dead and gone, having been demoted from pandemic to endemic, allowing for a sober review of the BOP’s response. Last week, Stat – a Boston Globe health science publication – ran a statistics-based study of how BOP managed the pandemic. The review wasn’t pretty.

The study found that

•    BOP facilities with high-risk patients didn’t prioritize them –

The study noted that FMC Devens – a medical center – did not vaccinate a single inmate for Covid-19 until Feb 11, 2021 — “almost two months after its counterparts across the federal Bureau of Prisons got started.” Other facilities, including FCI Sandstone and FCI La Tuna, a federal prison in Texas with one of the highest cumulative Covid-19 case rates, didn’t begin vaccinating until February 2021, either. Other facilities appeared to receive shots shortly after the FDA authorized them but only vaccinated a fraction of their residents.

•    Federal prisons weren’t testing residents to prevent outbreaks –

By 2021, tests were widespread and cheap. Despite this, BOP prisons weren’t “even coming close to the CDC’s March 2021 recommendations that prisons should consider, at minimum, testing a random sampling of 25% of their incarcerated population each week.”

•    The BOP’s own accounting of its early Covid response is incomplete –

The BOP lacks data showing how many tests it ran earlier in the pandemic. Records show, for example, that one medical center, MCFP Springfield, did not test any inmates until June 2020. A BOP spokesperson told STAT the BOP “administered COVID-19 tests to the inmate population as early as March 2020” but had no idea how many tests were administered or when.

• A slow booster rollout –

People housed in prisons were among the first eligible for COVID boosters because of their high COVID risk. While several BOP prisons did well mounting quick booster campaigns — FCI Bastrop, a 900-person prison, administered nearly 550 shots in just two months — “booster rates at several prisons were shockingly low, months after additional shots were authorized.”

Commentators have complained for several years that the BOP’s COVID stats were deeply flawed, especially because of the agency’s practice of deleting from the total number of inmates who caught COVID people who were subsequently released or transferred to another facility. To this day, no one outside the BOP has any idea of the extent of the pandemic from April 1, 2020, to May 11, 2023.  As of the last day COVID stats were reported, the BOP said it had 43,681 inmates who had recovered from COVID. At its peak, the BOP reported more than 55,000 cases.

The study represents a stark illustration of the poor quality of BOP health services treatment of inmates and sketchy reliability of its data.

Stat, ‘Worse than what we thought’: New data reveals deeper problems with the Bureau of Prisons’ Covid response (May 23, 2023)

DOJ Inspector General, COVID-19 Interactive Data (May 12, 2023) 

– Thomas L. Root