How do I respond to a virus outbreak in Prison Architect?

Question

Prison Architect 1.0 includes random events, one of which is a virus outbreak. The doctor reports that you should quarantine the sick prisoners to prevent it from spreading, and the tasks list shows a counter for the number of infected prisoners–3 in my case.

I'm unclear on how to respond to the event and treat the prisoners. I put the prison into Bangup mode for two consecutive days and healed the one or two injured prisoners I had. At some point the count of infected prisoners dropped from 3 to 2, but it wasn't clear what caused this.

How does the virus event work, and what's the course of treatment? Does it require medical staff (doctors or paramedics) to cure the virus–or is it a case of "keep them penned up until they're healthy, or burn the place down?"

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Update: Has update-1 fixed / improved the virus event?

Answer 1

From what I can tell from various sources (here and here for starters) the virus event is currently very buggy and/or broken. If it is a non-fatal virus, the doctors should heal it within 12 hours. If you don't have a doctor that figure rises to 2 days. One way of dealing with this is attempting to put infected prisoners in solitary. Be careful though, as if they are let out the virus seems to spread very rapidly. If it is a fatal virus then you can do nothing about it in-game but sit and hope, since fatal viruses are bugged and doctors will not heal patients infected with the fatal virus. One solution is to save your game and then edit the file to remove infected prisoners; be sure to back up your save files before editing them though. I sourced the following Python script from here.

#!/usr/bin/python

#Open the save file and the copy file (any file with the Newprison.prison name will be erased)
f = open('autosave.prison')
f1 = open('NewAutosave.prison', 'w')
#read the file and store its line by line as a list
lines = f.readlines()
#as long as the list still contain 3 lines
while lines :
  if ('virusdeadly' in lines[0]):
    lines.pop(0)
  else:
    f1.write(lines.pop(0))

#close both files
f1.close()
f.close()

Answer 2

Have all of your prisoners go to eat and put your paramedics in the canteen while they’re eating to heal them all