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Breathing from the same mask or sharing a disposable cup, a group of Los Angeles County inmates deliberately sought to become infected with Covid-19 to try to force their release, a senior police official reported Monday.

"There was an erroneous belief among the inmate population that if they tested positive, they would somehow force us to free more inmates from our prison environment, and that will not happen," Sheriff Alex Villanueva said at a press conference. .

The official quoted several videos from security cameras taken in mid-April at two modules of the North County Correctional Facility, in Castaic, 67 km north of downtown Los Angeles.

A first video showed an inmate distributing sips of hot water among a group of colleagues who were lined up to see the nurse.

They were "trying to falsely raise their temperature readings to pretend to have one of the symptoms," Villanueva said.

In a second video, the prisoners are observed sharing a single disposable cup and taking turns breathing inside the same mask, which is not known if it belonged to someone infected.

John Satterfield, a deputy sheriff's department, said the images were "just a sample of other videos being reviewed and part of the ongoing investigation."

None of the inmates admitted any intention to become infected. It is not clear how the outbreak started, if one of those inmates was ill or had symptoms, but according to Villanueva, only in those two modules did 21 inmates test positive for these vines a week.

"It 's sad to think that someone deliberately try to be exposed to Covid-19 , " said Villanueva, who said that 4,590 prisoners -40% of the prison population in the county - quarantined, and a total of 357 were positive, the which 117 have already recovered.

According to the officer, 5,000 inmates were released as part of the plan to contain the virus in the prison system, leaving the prison population at 11,700 inmates out of 17,000, the largest in the country.

"If this pandemic had spread while we had 17,000 inmates, the results would have been catastrophic," he stressed.

But critics like the NGO JusticeLA consider that these measures are not enough. "The sheriff must release more people incarcerated," her spokeswoman Patrisse Cullors said in a note. "He has no idea how far the disease is spreading in prisons."

"What I have heard from prisoners is that there is not enough soap, hot water, that their officers make fun of the people inside, coughing, telling them they are going to die of Covid," he added.

The Sheriff's Department was sued in court for lack of diagnostic tests and inadequate conditions of social distancing.

Villanueva said that since May 3 all new inmates have been undergoing tests, with 16 positive results in 632 exams.

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