BELIZE CITY, Thurs. Dec. 10, 2020– Just over two months after a number of COVID-19 positive cases were recorded among staff and inmates at the Belize Central Prison, the facility has now been declared free from infection.
At the height of a COVID-19 outbreak at the prison, there were 135 active cases, which followed on the heels of the diagnosis of the first positive cases on September 28. In an effort to mitigate the spread, the administration of the institution decided to put in place a three-week quarantine lockdown of the facility on Wednesday, October 28.
By November 17, 181 persons of the 195 infected persons at the facility had recovered, and only 14 active cases remained. Those 14 cases have recovered, and according to the latest update from Prison CEO Virgilio Murillo, the facility is once again COVID-19 free:
“The doctor pretty much pronounced the prison as being COVID-free. The remaining cases have recovered and are out of quarantine. So with them [inmates] being cleared, it means that the prison is once again COVID-19-free. We made every effort to have mitigated the spread as well as to try and bring it back to where we were,” Murillo said.
CEO Murillo says that the proposed mid-November soft reopening of the prison for visits was postponed until further notice and attorney/client visits are still being considered on a case-by-case basis.
Additionally, he says, the supplementary health and safety measures that were put in place in October, will remain in effect.
“Currently, those measures will remain in place, simply because the government recently instituted a curfew and I don’t know that it would be the smartest thing to do because the purpose of the curfew is to mitigate the spread in the larger community.
“And for us to just open up visits and have people come to the prison with the explosion that is taking place on the outside wouldn’t be the smartest thing to do. So, we have to just monitor what the government does, and try to tailor our adjustments to go in line with what the national contingency plan is.
“So, yes, we had spoken last time about trying to do what you call a soft reopening [of the Belize Central Prison]. We are still thinking of that, but we want to at least let this 21-day curfew that the government has instituted, pass first”, stated CEO Murillo.