Overview
Oh no! An epidemic is running rampant through your prison! Some of your inmates came down with a virus and are puking their guts up all over the floor while infecting everyone else! Don’t worry though, if you caught it early, it’s easy to solve…
PLEASE NOTE
Prison Architect is incredibly vague about how to deal with this event – Just a message “Oh, your inmates are infected! Quarantine them and send a doctor!” and then a little notification in the ToDo list saying how many prisoners are affected, and no other guidance or hints.
I’ve only had the event once, but the following steps worked for me (in October 2015, it may have changed since then). There are no other guides on this, so I’m making this small one real quick, compiling both my own experience/trial and error, and the info found in this forum thread:
[link]
Also I dealt with the event early and I happened to get it while the prisoners were sleeping – It may be more difficult to fix if you’ve left it too long and the infection is running rampant through your prison, but maybe these steps will still work for you.
Dealing with it *sunglasses*
Prevention is better than cure, and all that stuff. As soon as you get the event notification, immediately “Bang Up” prisoners to send them to their cells if they aren’t already. (one of the red buttons in lower right corner of the GUI)
Once the prisoners are in their cells, pause the game and hover your mouse cursor over each of your prisoners one by one. If a prisoner is infected, the tooltip will say “Needs Treating” in red coloured text at the bottom of it – Easy to spot if you’re skimming over them. The prisoner’s head sprite may also be tinted pale green, but I think this happens only after they’ve been infected for a short time.
Once you’ve found your infected prisoners, send a doctor (or paramedic) to treat each one individually. Select a doctor, then right click the infected inmate. The doctor will move to the inmate and heal him. Once treated, the tooltip will say “Treated” in green text.
Click on each infected prisoner to bring up their info page. Under the “Punish” drop down menu, select “Lockdown” for 12 hours.
LOCK THEIR CELL DOORS. (click a door, select “Door mode: Locked shut”) This will quarantine them effectively and prevent other prisoners from entering their cells (while on cleaning or laundry jobs) and catching the infection. Note that these poor sods will get hungry because guards won’t be able to deliver food to them.
(Did you place a jail door over a drain, and the game won’t let you select the door to lock/unlock it? You can press tab to cycle through overlapping objects! It’s true!)
You can now deactivate “Bang Up” and let the rest of your inmates go about their buisiness (or not if you’re the sadistic type. :P)
Keep an eye on your infected inmates and wait for the “Sick +++++” condition in their tooltips to reduce and eventually disappear. (Fog of war may briefly hide them from view – Just wait for a bit or move a guard nearby, they should reappear again)
If they need more time to recover, keep them under lockdown for longer (but hopefully not so long so that they starve to death). Do not unlock their cells until their tooltip no longer says that they are sick.
Once the infected inmates recover, you can unlock their cell doors again so that guards can feed them in their cells as they wait for their lockdown time to expire. E: Kia Holms suggested in the comments that you can also set prisoners to permenant lockdown or solitary, then remove it – This will apparently instantly clear their punishments, rather than having to wait for it to expire. (Although I think you have to unlock this with the Lawyer?)
Once the prisoners are cured, the “Infected Prisoners” listing should disappear off of your “To Do” list.
Congratulations! The virus epidemic should now be over, and you can carry on running your prison! Hope this helped.