How Centre County Correctional Facility has adjusted amid the coronavirus pandemic

Vermont is the only state where no people incarcerated in prison died of COVID-19 in the first 12 months of the pandemic, and its infection rate is relatively low. The prisons took steps that other prison systems either didn't try or didn't do soon enough, including universal testing at least six times over the year; strict isolation of newly admitted prisoners for 14 days; occasional lockdowns of up to a month; early releases from prison; and keeping corrections officers housed separately from the community. The isolation measures hurt people's mental health, including one suicide and one attempt.

Pennsylvania prisons' relatively uncrowded conditions and approach to releasing people early when the pandemic hit have limited deaths in its prisons, making people incarcerated in Pennsylvania less than half as likely to die of COVID-19 as free Pennsylvanians. In neighboring Ohio, where COVID cases appeared simultaneously, the prison death rate has been nearly seven times higher than Pennsylvania's. Ohio's prisons are far more crowded, they rely much more on dorm-style housing, and their early-release rules were much more restrictive.

When Covid-19 threatened to disrupt Norway's correctional system, the country's prisons and jails were quick to pivot their practices to protect those who were incarcerated. Although it helped that the country's correctional system was already known for being "small, responsive, and humane," more protocols were put into place to allow some who were incarcerated to complete their sentence at home, while others were provided with iPads to decrease isolation while visits were restricted. So far, only 60 cases of Covid-19 have been reported throughout the entire prison system.

When the pandemic forced jails and prisons to ban educational classes and cut off visits between outsiders and their loved ones behind bars, some jailers opened their facilities to remote-learning and -visiting tools. The result is a boom in the use of video conferencing for literacy classes, vocational training, family visits, and even to enable incarcerated people to attend family funerals. Some advocates for the incarcerated worry that in-person interactions could permanently be replaced by video, even after the risk of viral infection has eased.

Disaster preparedness in the form of close inter-agency coordination and communication helped Cuyahoga County, Ohio, protect its unhoused population from COVID-19 to a greater extent than Lane County, Oregon. Although Cuyahoga (Cleveland) is larger, with more resources, its effective responses still offer a model to Lane County (Eugene), where a scattered approach and homeless-camp sweeps proved counterproductive. In Cleveland, hotels were quickly enlisted to house people, reducing crowding in shelters by half and street homelessness by 30%. Its largest men's shelter ended up with a low infection rate.

Solitary Gardens is an art project that protests prisons' solitary confinement conditions. Incarcerated people connect with volunteers on the outside who plant flowers, vegetables, or herbs in beds matching the tiny dimensions of the prison cell that confined Herman Wallace for a record 41 years in Louisiana. The people inside prison imagine their garden, often with memory triggers of what they have lost, and their gardener carries out their plan. The idea is to make a place for grief, healing, public service, and public education, as the gardens in four cities teach about solitary confinement.

When the coronavirus pandemic complicated matters for local government, the Teton County public health office devised a process to enact state mandate that was effective, transparent, and led to rational decision-making. Although discord continued to a degree, the model is still providing guidance to Jefferson County as officials determine "how to best serve the public health interests of its residents."

COVID-19 outbreaks in Iowa prisons have been contained through extensive testing, quarantines, and reductions in prison crowding. The state's prison population hit a 20-year low, down 13% from early April, because of accelerated parole hearings and reductions in new admissions. The state courts' slowdown and the prisons' temporary suspension in new admissions contributed to the population decrease. Since March, four people incarcerated in Iowa prisons have died of the virus while 833 have tested positive. An additional 126 staff have tested positive.

In the 1940s, typhus spread throughout the community living within the Warsaw ghetto, but cases dramatically decreased in the winter of 1941. While some researchers remain unsure why, others point towards a change in behavior that included increasing hygiene and nutrition practices and introducing social distancing.

Malaysia and India's Kerala state share a set of positive attributes that helped them contain COVID-19 outbreaks, including early and aggressive responses based on a trust in science, clear public communications, and long-term investments in public health informed by previous epidemics. Both regions began their preparations in January, heeding warnings that others ignored at that point. Their comprehensive responses enlisted their entire governments rather than just public health authorities as they relied on contact tracing, quarantines, and testing to limit illness and death.