I was in the Cook County Jail for the last three years and that was stated to be the epicenter of the entire pandemic at one point. I think it was the end of March 2020 when a guy on my cellblock said that he couldn't smell anything. When my cellmate and I got back to our cell my cellmate started opening any packets of food he had and shoving them under my nose "SNIFF THIS!" Neither of us could smell anything. We all got it bad. I was on an "old man's" deck, so everyone was vulnerable and everyone got sick. The guard from our deck went home and died it from it.

They weren't doing proper tests. They would do very occasional temperature checks, but everyone wanted to avoid being moved to the COVID wing that had been set up as the conditions there were atrocious, so if you had a temperature you would drink a cold drink just before you put the thermometer in your mouth, and that seemed to get you through.

A thousand of us got sick in that one building alone, and ten of us died. They took all the soap away from the facility shortly before things blew up. Someone had beaten their cellmate to death with a soap-filled sock, which is a standard method, and they decided to stop that by removing socks and soap. So we didn't have soap for washing our hands for weeks, and then only a bar the size of your finger to last you for showering and washing your hands for a whole week. Plus, the workers were supposed to sanitize everything, but if you're paying people $1 to work 16 hours a day you can imagine how good a job you get.

I think it was about 9 months into the pandemic when I got my first COVID test. I didn't go to court for a whole year. They keep you in a county jail "to ensure your appearance at court", but I could not go to court because I was in jail. Basically everyone was quarantined, so jail detainees were not allowed in court. We weren't even allowed to use the laptops for Zoom appearances lest we infect the laptops. So, if I had been out of jail I could have gone to court by Zoom, but because I was held in jail I could not go. So COVID took a year of my life that way.

They eventually decided to move to single-man cells and get rid of all the double-bunking, but this requires twice as many cells. They didn't have working cell blocks to house everyone. Doesn't matter. They just opened up all the cell blocks that had been shuttered for years. Oh - none of the electrics, plumbing and heating works? Well, I'm sure someone will fix that eventually. I remember at one point my cell being 3C (35F) for three days. That was really cold. They did move some people when their cell dropped to 19*F. We went for weeks at a time with no hot water, so I was the only one brave enough to take a shower. [I was working on my Wim Hof method]

Basically, it was a fuck-up from beginning to end. Everything in jail is a fuck-up because there is no real oversight of anything. There's no conspiracy, it's just that is institutional laziness, and in jails the "customers" (detainees) can't complain about anything being fucked-up or you'll be punished for it. So as a jail employee you can easily get away with not doing anything that your job requires.

LOL. I've not even scratched the surface with all the things that went on during COVID in the jail. We were also locked in our cells for over 23 hours a day most days. Sometimes we didn't come out for days at a time.

"The jail in Chicago is now the nation’s largest-known source of coronavirus infections, according to data compiled by The New York Times, with more confirmed cases than the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., or the cluster centered on New Rochelle, N.Y."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/us/coronavirus-cook-count...
(and bear in mind that the NYT had to work with inaccurate data supplied by the Sheriff)

Also:

https://patch.com/illinois/oaklawn/burbank-gang-member-accus...