Several detainees in Port-au-Prince prison, overcrowded and unsanitary, have the new coronavirus, the director of prison administration confirmed Thursday to AFP, as the epidemic spreads in Haiti . "I confirm that the Covid-19 entered the prison," said Charles Nazaire Noël by telephone. "We fought a tough battle to avoid this but, unfortunately, it happened. We will not give up, we will continue to strengthen the prison sanitation system , ” added the director.
Last week, around 50 detainees from the country's largest prison center suffered from fever, prompting health officials to make a diagnosis. Of the sample of twelve prisoners tested, eleven were hit by Covid-19, according to the results obtained on May 15 but made public on May 21. "I sent a correspondence to the MSPP (Ministry of Health, editor's note) to have a screening of all the prisoners of the national penitentiary," announced Thursday Charles Nazaire Noël.
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“All the staff will also be screened: it is sure that it will not be done all at once but step by step. But the MSPP has confirmed that there is ( no ) no problem: in the coming days, it will start in groups of fifty, ” explains the high ranking Haitian police officer.
Since the detection of the first cases of coronavirus on March 19, Haiti has carried out just over 2,100 tests, of which 663 have been found to be positive. According to the latest official report published Thursday morning, the epidemic has resulted in the death of 22 people in Haiti.
The spread of the virus in the prison, located in the heart of downtown Port-au-Prince, could quickly worsen this toll. With a capacity limited to 778 places, the "penitentiary" as it is commonly designated, today has more than 3,600 prisoners, more than three quarters of whom have been awaiting trial for several months or years.
The deplorable sanitary conditions in Haitian prisons, the most overcrowded in the world, are regularly assimilated to "acts of torture" by human rights defenders. "The cells in Haiti are small rooms capable of receiving 10 to 20 people if we take into account the standard of 4.5 square meters per detainee, but these small rooms receive up to 80 people, so we can imagine in what level of promiscuity these people are called to live, ” alerted in early April Marie Rosy Auguste Ducena, of the National Network for the Defense of Human Rights (RNDDH).