HJNO Jul/Aug 2020

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF NEW ORLEANS I  JUL / AUG 2020 21 Henry said. Thenmany of them stopped, see- ing the protection as insufficient, meaning- less or just bothersome. Other efforts at social distancing were minimal at best, inmates said. As late as early April, prisoners were still being taken out into the fields to work in crews of as many as 160. When inmates became concerned about their close quarters, guards suggested they bunk “head to foot” to avoid contact. Before Henry was released in May — his conviction was overturned and a judge or- dered a new trial after exculpatory DNA ev- idence emerged — his dormitory had been under quarantine almost continuously since the pandemic hit. Even so, he said, some ob- viously sick inmates were left in their bunks for days. Others were removed to treatment areas or designated isolation quarters only to return, after more contact with sick inmates, a few days later. Morrison, in consultation with the Cen- ters for Disease Control and Prevention, in- structed doctors to look out for fever, cough and difficulty breathing. But at Angola, doc- tors and nurses generally saw only a small fraction of patients who made it past their screening teams. And the screeners, a com- bination of guard-paramedics and untrained staff (including assistants from the dental office), appeared to interpret the criteria dif- ferently, many inmates said. As Morrison was leaving the department, oneAngola prisoner, John Cantrello, 69, be- gan to have trouble breathing. Cap, as he was known, an obese man who used a wheelchair, called for help four or five times, men in his dormitory said. Each time, his temperature was below the 100-degree threshold that Morrison had set. (The CDC recommended 100.4.) Cantrello was left in his bunk. “He looked like he was hyperventilating on the phone trying to call his people on the street,” recalled Haller Jackson, who lived in the same dorm. “He was flailing. It was like watching a drowning man.” Cantrello was finally taken by ambulance to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital in Baton Rouge, where he tested positive for COV- ID-19. He died three days later, on April 18 — the first inmate death reported by the cor- rections department. In another dormitory not far away, a sec- ond 69-year-old man, Lloyd Meyers, was having similar troubles. Meyers, an inmate minister, had difficulty breathing, wasn’t eat- ing and couldn’t get out of bed. But he, too, failed to register a temperature high enough to get seen by a doctor. “He was sick as a dog,” said Michael Zi- hlavsky, who lived in the same dormitory. “He tried to get help two or three times through sick call, but they wouldn’t do anything for him. They said, ‘Call us back if you have a fever.’” Finally, Meyers was taken by ambulance to the Baton Rouge hospital, where he, too, tested positive for COVID-19. He died there a day after Cantrello. Late on the morning of April 25, after Pres- ident Donald Trump suggested in a White House news conference that sunlight might kill the novel coronavirus, Jackson watched in disbelief as guards ordered the occupants of his dormitory to haul their mattresses and pillows out to a prison yard to be purified. The men left their beds on a basketball court for about an hour, while a team of inmates scoured the dormitory with undiluted bleach. By then, Jackson estimated, most of the 86 men in his dormwere already infected. Ten of them had been taken to a makeshift corona- virus isolation ward in a shuttered part of the prison. Jackson estimated that an additional 30 men had symptoms of the virus — cough, aches, fatigue, shortness of breath — but they were never tested. Jackson was sick, too, as he had antici- pated. A former lawyer who was caught in a sting operation after arranging online to pay for sex with a person he thought was a 10-year-old boy, Jackson had completed the coursework for a doctorate in epidemiology at Tulane University. (Several years before his arrest, he graduated from Tulane’s law school with the highest grade-point average in its history.) In Jackson’s dormitory, as in others, men shared just a handful of showers and toilets. “Some obviously sick inmates were left in their bunks for days. Others were removed to treatment areas or designated isolation quarters only to return, after more contact with sick inmates, a few days later.” –Darrill Henry