The Bureau of Prisons announced that it had finished construction on a 20-bed hospital care unit at the Lompoc federal penitentiary on May 4. According to the bureau’s website, 52 inmates were sick with COVID-19 at the prison as of May 5. Neither the bureau nor Lompoc Valley Medical Center is currently releasing the number of inmates hospitalized at Lompoc’s community hospital.
Bureau spokesperson Emery Nelson told the Sun via email that the prison “has finalized the contract with a third party company to supply medical staff to the facility effective May 6, 2020,” with the facility scheduled to open on the same day.
The unit, according to a press release, features 10 negative air pressure, acute care treatment rooms, each with capacity for double occupancy. The project was proposed on April 9, 10 days after the institution’s first positive COVID-19 case. By then, 40 inmates were infected.
After the bureau gave an initial estimate of four to six weeks to get the field hospital up and running, U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara) and California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris penned a letter on April 15 to ask the bureau leadership for quicker action. On April 21, the three legislators wrote a second letter, reiterating the need for the on-site hospital and increased medical equipment for staff, as well as asking for an update from the bureau as to what immediate actions they were taking.
After hearing the news of the new hospital care unit through the bureau’s May 4 press release, Carbajal told the Sun that “it’s better late than never,” but he found the bureau’s communication to be insufficient.
“They are communicating with members of Congress—Sen. Feinstein, Sen. Harris, and myself—via press release when they have something to say,” Carbajal said. “They have chosen not to write us any official or formal responses to our requests. They have refused to give us timelines. When this pandemic subsides, looking into communication and protocols into the whole Bureau of Prisons system is really warranted.”
Carbajal said he is pleased to hear that the bureau completed what he called “phase one” of what he hopes will be a larger project. In the initial April 15 letter, Carbajal and his colleagues requested that the prison establish a facility with at least 50 beds.
“There is no timeline,” Carbajal said. “When will phase two happen? When is the rest of the field hospital going to be implemented, other than what they’ve done in phase one? My hope is that they continue and implement phase two sooner rather than later, that they are able to lessen the impact on the broader hospitals so that it doesn’t stress the health care system for the general public.”
Bureau spokesperson Nelson told the Sun that “the majority of inmates who tested positive [for] COVID-19 are not exhibiting the outward symptoms or ill-effects, and do not require hospitalization. … Symptomatic inmates, whose condition rises to the level of acute medical care, will be transferred to a hospital setting; either a local hospital or one of the acute care treatment rooms at the institution’s hospital care unit.”
Regarding phase two for the hospital care unit, the bureau said that there is “no additional information to provide at this time as the project is still in the evaluation and planning stage based on necessity.”
This article appears in May 7-14, 2020.
