A troubled Brooklyn federal jail now has two quarantine units: one for coronavirus, another for chickenpox.
The chickenpox virus is sweeping through the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, forcing jail administrators to separate the afflicted from the healthy, according to inmates and lawyers.
“There was a major breakout in a number of units. They removed the inmates from those units and put them in quarantine,” one man housed at the MDC told the Daily News over the phone Friday.
He added the disease has been spreading for weeks, and that the jail has been checking people’s blood to see if they’ve been exposed to chickenpox in the past. If they haven’t, the jail is offering vaccines to the virus, the inmate said.
The federal Bureau of Prisons disputed the claims of a spreading outbreak and said chickenpox was found in one isolated case, and steps were taken immediately to quarantine those who might have been exposed.
“Recently, one inmate was diagnosed with chickenpox and placed in medical isolation at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) Brooklyn,” a BOP spokesman told The News.
Every inmate who came into contact with the chickenpox positive inmate was checked for the virus, the BOP spokesman said.
“Any inmate who did not have an immunity to [the virus] was placed in quarantine, and will remain in quarantine until a 21 day period can be completed. No new cases have been identified,” the spokesman said.
But defense attorneys for inmates at the jail said the news of a chickenpox infection was particularly distressing for those in detention who are already living in fear of getting COVID-19.
“We have not been told what measures are being taken to protect our clients from the further spread of chickenpox, which is even more contagious than COVID-19 and very dangerous to adults,” said Deirdre Von Dornum, head of the Federal Defenders in Brooklyn.
It takes up to 21 days for an exposed person to develop chickenpox, according to a note sent out by the feds in 2018 when there was an outbreak at a California federal jail.
Chickenpox, caused by the Varicella virus, spreads along the body causing between 250 and 500 itchy blisters, according to the CDC.
“Chickenpox is much more dangerous for adults than for children,” said Brown University Dr. Josiah Rich, who treated a chickenpox outbreak in Rhode Island prisons in 2016 and 2017.
“It’s highly, highly contagious. The one blessing is that most people have some antibodies.”
He knew of no research on how chickenpox and COVID interacted.
“It’s probably not a good idea to get them both at the same time,” he said.
“We really don’t understand the immune response to COVID all that well.”
Cameron Lindsay, a former warden of MDC Brooklyn who now works as a corrections consultant, was surprised to hear about the disease at the jail.
“Chickenpox was never an issue in 30 years I’ve been involved in this stuff,” he said.
