STILLWATER, Minn — Looking strictly at the numbers, the outbreak looks grim. Positive COVID-19 numbers at the Stillwater Prison more than quadrupled in a week from 25 to 115.
But there are more to the numbers.
"Many of them, the vast majority of them, were asymptomatic," Minnesota Department of Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell said.
Schnell said after a few inmates started feeling sick with symptoms of COVID-19, the prison isolated them and tested the entire population. By this weekend, 115 came back positive but most infected inmates had no outward signs of the virus.
"You can begin to see how easy it is to miss spread if you're not doing testing," Schnell said.
Schnell said the cases are limited to two housing units. That's been the top strategy this year at Minnesota prisons to prevent the virus from overtaking an entire prison population.
"We really do a lot of work to keep people with their housing units, so at least what ends up happening is we contain spread to people in and among people living in the same housing area," Schnell said.
The prison in Faribault saw a slightly larger outbreak earlier this year. But overall, infections at jails and prisons have only made up 2% of the state's cases. Forty have been hospitalized and two people have died.
Some feared those numbers would have been higher when you consider how hard it is to isolate inmates from each other, especially in older facilities like Stillwater.
"These are all open-front cells or bars as opposed to steel doors. So the ability for the virus to spread in that type of environment is that much greater," Schnell said.
But one of the keys to preventing mass-spread so far, Schnell says, is mass-testing.