A Yale expert says some groups like prisoners and the homeless may be especially vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gregg Gonsalves with the Yale School of Public Health says prisons and homeless shelters aren’t set up to protect people during an outbreak. And he says there’s no realistic way for Connecticut’s Department of Correction to handle an outbreak of this size in the state’s prisons and jails.
“And so what you have to do is think about how do you get elderly prisoners furloughed, and put into situations where they’re not at risk for acquiring infection? How do you not keep piling people into local jails as they await trial or await arraignment, where they’re not subject to infection risk?”
Gonsalves says there are also people whose jobs don’t let them practice social distancing, embraced by many schools and workplaces.
“If you’re a gig worker, you’re an Uber driver, you’re a delivery person, or you clean houses, and it’s all sort of cash in hand, how can those people socially distance and remove themselves from the chain of infection? They can’t.”
But he says Yale’s public health experts have been thinking for months about how to protect the most vulnerable groups in New Haven and elsewhere.
“Our social service agencies are now getting into the action, trying to think about how do you deal with people who use drugs in New Haven and people doing sex work over in Fair Haven? They’re on the street all the time. How are they gonna be protected? I think people are sort of scrambling for a response in real time.”
The Connecticut Department of Correction has suspended all social visits to prisons and heavily limited other interactions, like prisoner transfers.
