Justice official: hundreds of prisoners have COVID-19

Chinese authorities confirmed on Wednesday that hundreds of cases of the new strain of virus spreading across Asia have been identified in the country's prisons.

The Ministry of Justice said 555 cases had been confirmed in five prisons in the provinces of Hubei, Zhejiang and Shandong.

Of those, four are serious cases. In addition, there are also 19 suspected cases in the prisons.

According to reports from local media, 323 infected prisoners are in prisons of Hubei, of which 279 are in Wuhan Women's Prison.

Xiong Xuanguo, Vice Minister of Justice, told a news conference the virus was highly likely to have been brought into the women's jail by the guards who shared the same bus station with people visiting a local pulmonary hospital 100 meters from the jail.

In addition, the spread of the virus to other prisons was caused by the prison guards who failed to report their contacts with people from epidemic regions of Hubei province, Xiong said.

"The spread of the virus in these prisons has fully revealed the loopholes in the management of the prison guards, the lack of effective epidemic prevention and control measures, and the serious formalism and bureaucracy in the work of these prisons," he added.

China, by far, still has the most cases and deaths from the illness, though its numbers have slowed recently.

China has recorded 2,715 deaths from COVID-19 and 78,064 confirmed cases of the virus on the mainland since the illness emerged in December.