MADISON, Wis. At the City-County Building in Madison, where two floors house some of Dane County’s highest security inmates, a row of narrow isolation cells stands mostly empty.
At least for today, when few inmates are falling sick with COVID-19, the absence is a good sign. Designed for discipline, throughout the pandemic they’ve also been used for quarantining the sick or exposed when other cells filled up, jail administrator Captain Kerry Porter said.
But with the delta variant sweeping through the nation, low (or nonexistent) rates of infection may not remain a constant. To Porter’s recollection, at its highest point when measured as a percentage of population, only a quarter of the county’s inmates have accepted a vaccine. When News 3 Investigates checked in on two separate Mondays in July, that rate fell at 19% and 22%, respectively.
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