1/ For this week’s show, we teamed up with @MarshallProj and talked to people hit hard by COVID-19 in two of the most vulnerable places: nursing homes and prisons. revealnews.org/episodes/covid…
2/ In late February Carrie, a woman from Maryland, went to visit her mom at a Florida nursing home. She’d just seen the first news reports about outbreaks, and feared her mother was in danger.
3/ Before Carrie left her mom at the nursing home to go back to Maryland, she had a bad feeling. “I stood there in the hallway for several minutes just looking at her. And I wanted to memorize the scene because I knew I would not be seeing her again..."
4/ The federal government didn’t require nursing homes to report COVID cases and deaths until May. Since they started keeping track, nursing homes have reported more than 345,000 residents confirmed or suspected of getting COVID, and more than 53,000 of them died.
5/ Carrie's mom was one of the residents who died. She was 84. “I think it is a national tragedy. I think it could have been avoided. That I believe to my soul. It could have been avoided,” Carrie said. (Photo courtesy of Carrie)
6/ Like nursing homes, prisons are supposed to have protocols for stopping the spread of illness. But with COVID-19, things didn’t go according to plan.
7/ By late March, the risk of a massive COVID-19 outbreak was so serious that Attorney General William Barr ordered prisons hard hit with coronavirus cases to increase early release programs. But that's easier said than done.
8/ Of the federal prisoners we feature in this week's show, only one is released from prison during the pandemic. When COVID-19 hit, Chad Marks was 37 days away from getting out and was eventually released. But Byron Miller was denied early release.
9/ Even though Byron is healthy, the prison denied his bid for home confinement in part because they said he could put his sick father at risk. @MarshallProj's @Nikki_Lew reports that half of 1% of all federal prisoners were found eligible for home confinement.
10/ We end this week’s show by meeting Kimini Randall who was recently paroled from a California prison, and got a job working to protect the homeless in San Francisco from catching COVID-19.
11/ For the full story on how nursing homes and prisons have been affected during the pandemic, listen to this week’s episode here: revealnews.org/episodes/covid…
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