After weeks with refugee camps as one of the leading Covid-19 hotspots in the country, the Ministry of Health on Monday announced that Nsinda Prison located in Rwamagana district had also confirmed 13 new Covid-19 infections. Since then, according to the ministry, a total of 14 positive cases and four Covid-19 fatalities have been reported in the prison. Speaking to The New Times on Wednesday, November 11, Dr Tharcisse Mpunga, the Minister of State in charge of Primary Healthcare at the Ministry of Health explained that several measures have been put in place to contain Covid-19 in the area. He said: “We have already deployed our medical team in the area and they are carrying out contact tracing and testing as many people as possible, including workers, suppliers, inmates, and the surrounding community to make sure that we leave no loophole for the Virus to spread widely.” “In bid to prevent further Covid-19 fatalities in Nsinda Prison, we have already separated elderly inmates from others. We have also isolated symptomatic people,” he added. According to the World Health Organization, elderly people and those with chronic diseases have high risks of succumbing to the Covid-19 pandemic, due to how weak their immune system is. Among other measures put in place, according to Mpunga, include establishing a Covid-19 treatment centre in the prison, which will accommodate up to 100 people and has an intensive care unit that may be used in case of an emergency. Additionally, no new inmate is allowed to enter Nsinda Prison in the meantime, and every discharged prisoner will have to first be tested for Covid-19 before joining the community, in bid to avoid any possible spread of the Virus between the community and the correctional facility. Rwanda has so far confirmed a total of 5,262 Covid-19 cases of whom 4,967 have already recovered. The country’s Covid-19 death toll stands at 40. Testing exercise taken to other prisons Mpunga told this paper that there is an ongoing exercise of taking Covid-19 sample tests from different correctional facilities across the country so as to assess the state of the Virus in these facilities. “After getting the results from the sample tests, we will take appropriate preventive measures,” he said. During a senate session held recently, it was disclosed that in the last couple of years, the number of inmates to the capacity of prisons has been increasing steadily, rising from 99.6 per cent in 2014-2015 to 124.8 per cent in 2018-2019. This being said, it poses a threat to containing the Covid-19 in correctional facilities because overcrowding hinders social distancing.
