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Review
. 2022 Jan 29;10(2):270.
doi: 10.3390/healthcare10020270.

The Risk of COVID-19 Infection in Prisons and Prevention Strategies: A Systematic Review and a New Strategic Protocol of Prevention

Massimiliano Esposito  1 , Monica Salerno  1 , Nunzio Di Nunno  2 , Federica Ministeri  1 , Aldo Liberto  1 , Francesco Sessa  3
Affiliations
Review

The Risk of COVID-19 Infection in Prisons and Prevention Strategies: A Systematic Review and a New Strategic Protocol of Prevention

Massimiliano Esposito et al. Healthcare (Basel). .

Abstract

Health risks within prisons are well known and have worsened with the 2019 coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), becoming a public health emergency. To date, there are more than 10 million inmates in the world; in most cases, conditions are bad and health care is scarce. A SARS-CoV-2 outbreak inside a prison is extremely rapid. The aim of this systematic review was to analyze all possible prevention techniques to reduce the risk of COVID-19 related infection within prisons. A systematic review of the literature was performed according to the PRISMA guidelines. Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, and Google Scholar were used as search engines from 1 January 2020 to 1 November 2021 to evaluate the prevention of COVID-19 in prisoners. A total of 1757 articles were collected. Of them, 486 duplicates were removed. A total of 1250 articles did not meet the inclusion criteria. In conclusion, 21 articles were included in the present systematic review. From this analysis, it emerged that the most common COVID-19 prevention methods were the screening of the entire population (prisoners and workers) inside the prison through swab analysis and the reduction in overcrowding in prisons. Few studies concerned the prevention of COVID-19 infection through vaccination and the implementation of quarantine. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic review that evaluates the prevention of COVID-19 within jails and the real effectiveness of all possible methods used and published in the literature. Finally, a very useful strategic protocol is provided to reduce the incidence of infection and to control and manage COVID-19 in prisons.

Keywords: COVID-19; management strategies; prevention; prison; risk of infection.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Flow diagram illustrating included and excluded studies in this systematic review.
Figure 2
Figure 2
COVID-19 prevention measures in prisons in general (a) and within the single prison (b).
Figure 3
Figure 3
Prevention measures for COVID-19 for visitor in prisons.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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