SALEM, Ore. — It is coming up on one year since Nellie Love last saw her fiance who is incarcerated at Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla.
"I feel lonely," said Love. "I'm used to driving three hours to go see him. Can't do that during a pandemic because there are no visits."
Chances are that will not be changing any time soon. The Oregon Department of Corrections announced Thursday that in the last two days three adults-in-custody died after testing positive for COVID-19. Two of them were at Two Rivers. Love cannot help but worry about her fiance.
"It's like, is he going to be OK," she said. "Is he sick? Is he worried? I'm worried. It's scary."
Since the start of the pandemic, nearly 4,000 inmates and staff members across Oregon's prison system have tested positive for COVID.
KGW has learned of an outbreak at Santiam Correctional Institution in Salem. More than 120 adults-in-custody have tested positive for COVID, 51 of them on Thursday alone. The facility is now going into a 14-day quarantine that includes testing of symptomatic patients and daily symptom interviews with all inmates, among other things.
"It's scary for those of us who have loved ones behind bars," said Love.
Love says she has already lost a loved one to COVID. She does not want to lose her fiance on top of that. She is pleading for early release.
"They don't deserve this," she said. "They don't deserve being positive for COVID. They need to be released."
A spokesperson for the Oregon DOC declined an interview. She directed us to the safety measures in place at prisons across the state. Among those measures, face coverings at all DOC properties and no visitors.
The Oregon DOC did receive and administer 400 vaccine doses in December. Most of those went to staff and inmates who clean COVID units. The DOC is hoping to distribute more vaccine doses in the coming weeks and months.