Michael Taylor thought he might die alone in the Shelby County Detention Center.
Taylor had been sick with the coronavirus for weeks. It was early March, and he was living in a cell with 19 other people, some of whom had not yet tested positive for the virus. Taylor’s symptoms got worse and worse until medical staff quarantined him in the cell usually reserved for people in solitary confinement.
On March 3, the first night he spent in what he calls the hole, Taylor said he was having trouble breathing.
“I could die in here and nobody’s ever even come around and said anything,” Taylor said the next day, when jail staff let him out for an hour to make phone calls. “I feel like this little sentence that I got just turned into a life sentence.”
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The Calloway County Jail in Murray, Kentucky made it through the first nine months of the pandemic without any confirmed COVID-19 cases. Then in December suffered an outbreak of 30 confirmed cases. Inmates say they’re concerned about how the jail is managing their health because the ill are not always separated from the well. Rachel Collins with member station WKMS reports.
David Allsop, who’s in for a probation violation on a burglary second degree charge, caught COVID-19 during the December outbreak. He said he has pre-existing conditions including asthma and COPD, which require medical treatment, yet when he first started showing symptoms, it was his cell mates who provided care for him.