As the coronavirus took hold at Nash Correctional Institution early this month, 45-year-old inmate Donald Burks began to feel worrisome symptoms. He said his lungs burned, his joints ached, he had a headache, said his mother, Carol Taylor. He said it was miserable.
Burks is healthier now. But Taylor worries about what will happen if he s infected a second time. And she questions why the prison didn t lock down every unit and test each inmate after the first cases surfaced. No matter what these inmates have done, they don t deserve to be endangered like that, she said.
Nash Correctional, a mid-sized prison about 45 minutes east of Raleigh, had no COVID-19 cases in mid November. A month later, officials there were wrestling with one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks in the state prison system.