Variant coronavirus could be cause of rapid spread in Winfield prison cluster, KDHE says

State public health officials are investigating whether a coronavirus variant is behind the rapid spread of COVID-19 in a new outbreak at a Kansas prison.

Dr. Lee Norman, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, said rapid spread at Winfield Correctional Facility is what alerted state health officials to test for potential variants in the cases connected to the prison.

“They hadn’t had any COVID-19 cases for weeks, and then a whole cluster of cases broke out,” Norman said Tuesday during a virtual media briefing hosted by the University of Kansas Health System. “We did the epidemiologic tracking and found it came in through the community through the food service workers, and then went from there to some other places. But it was very fast spread, and we’re going to test every one of those positive individuals with genomic sequencing.”

Norman said the prison will be named on the KDHE’s list of active outbreaks on Wednesday. He said prison officials there are “doing a great job.”

The Kansas Department of Corrections reported that Winfield’s prison currently had eight staff cases and 69 inmates cases as of Monday. The facility had four current staff cases and 12 current resident cases in the Jan. 14 report.

“It’s another great example of why correctional facilities are congregate settings that need to be immunized, because it was brought into the correctional facility and then taken back out into the community,” Norman said. “So the jail is not an island.”

Prisoners, as residents in congregate living situations, are included in Phase 2 of the state’s vaccine roll-out. Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s decision to include inmates before the general public has been criticized by Republicans.

“It’s a good thing @GovLauraKelly listened to us and moved vulnerable seniors up the vaccine priority list,” the Kansas Republican Party tweeted Jan. 7. “It’s a bad thing prisoners remain in the same phase as those seniors. Prioritize law-abiding Kansans first!”

The close living quarters of correctional facilities have turned them into some of the largest clusters in the state. As of last week’s cluster report, the KDHE had reported 44 total outbreaks so far at correctional facilities in the state, accounting for 6,437 cases, 63 hospitalizations and 17 deaths.

This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 6:15 AM.