Milwaukee County correctional facility tests inmates, staff for COVID-19
Wisconsin National Guard members were deployed Saturday to set up a COVID-19 testing site and collect specimens from staff and inmates at the Milwaukee County House of Correction in Franklin.
Milwaukee County requested help after reporting multiple cases at the facility. As of Friday, there were 27 confirmed cases of COVID-19 at the facility and 17 with pending tests, according to county data.
Twenty-three staff were self-quarantining at their homes for a variety of reasons, either after testing positive, showing symptoms or returning from out-of-state travel, Superintendent Michael Hafemann told reporters Friday.
They’ve had four staff test positive for COVID-19, although two have been cleared by medical providers to return to work, he said.
Another nine are presumptively positive for the virus, he said. Hafemann said all 623 inmates will be tested Saturday and Sunday, and then the testing will move on to staff.
“The superintendent and his staff are doing absolutely everything that can be done to control it, but this is a situation, probably the only one, where there’s an analogy to be made between the House of Correction and a cruise ship,” Milwaukee County Chris Abele said. “They’re both very confined spaces and no matter how much you do, you’re always going to have a harder risk to manage.”
The guard plans to collect specimens from around 950 staff and inmates, sending them to the state lab for analysis.
A statement noted that the guard is preparing for additional specimen collection missions “in the coming days and weeks.”
Milwaukee Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik said Friday that they’ve seen a surge in cases on the south side of Milwaukee. Sixty-five percent of the affected 53215 zip code is Latinx. Kowalik called that “very concerning.”
“We want to make sure that the outreach is happening, that things are being translated in Spanish and also understanding that there’s various cultures within the Spanish-speaking population in Milwaukee,” she told reporters. “So we can’t just again treat it as a cookie-cutter approach.”
Kowalik said additional testing initiatives on the city’s south side and its north side are underway, but declined to provide further details.
“We have to be nimble, flexible and provide very targeted approaches for the diverse populations in our community,” she said.
There were 2,193 confirmed cases in Milwaukee County as of Monday morning. There were 126 deaths.
Across Wisconsin, there were 220 deaths as of Sunday, according to the Department of Health Services. There were 45,323 negative and 4,346 positive test results.
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