Murdock wants prison cases out of county COVID count
By Terry Murry on Monday, January 4th, 2021 in Columbia Basin News More Top Stories
PENDLETON – The last day of 2020 saw Umatilla County Public Health report a record 144 new COVID-19 cases. More than half of them were inmates at the county’s two prisons, by far the most at Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla. Commissioner George Murdock said the inmates shouldn’t be part of the county’s count.
“It’s not that we don’t care about the health of the inmates, but they are not moving freely about the community and therefore really aren’t a part of what might be happening in terms of cases in the community,” he said.
Murdock, who is the board of commissioners liaison with the health department, said that in some circumstances, the state will delete the inmates while at other times it won’t, which can be confusing. He’s also not saying they shouldn’t be reported at all.
“There’s no valid reason why those numbers should not be reported in general through the Department of Corrections,” he said.
Actually, that information is already being provided by ODOC at https://www.oregon.gov/doc/covid19/Pages/covid19-tracking.aspx. The state has not addressed why the cases are also counted in the individual counties.
