WASHINGTON, D.C. — Ohio has received widespread praise for its response to the coronavirus, but a sore point is the pandemic’s impact on the prison population.

“There’s not much I criticize Governor DeWine about in terms of his aggressiveness in dealing with the pandemic, but they’ve got to do better with the state prison population,” Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said in a video conference interview on Thursday.

As of Thursday, 4,563 inmates or staffers in Ohio’s state prisons have tested positive — roughly 15-percent of total cases across Ohio.

Brown said the CARES Act recently passed by Congress awarded $16 million to the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services to go toward employee overtime and buying personal protective equipment, but he criticized the White House for not establishing a national effort to keep prisons safe.

Ohio’s one federal prison, Elkton, has had 136 inmates and staff test positive, as of Thursday. It ranks second in the country for inmate deaths, at nine.

“One of the problems at that prison is that it’s a minimum-security prison, so people live in a dormitory-style arrangement, so they’re living on top of one another,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said in an interview last week. “You’ve got to find out if somebody has the COVID virus and then move them out of that situation into a place where they’re isolated.”

Portman announced last week that the Federal Bureau of Prisons would increase testing at Elkton to 150 inmates and staff per day, up from 100 per week. But he said more is needed for the over 2,300 inmates, including isolation units.

On Tuesday, a federal judge wrote in an order that the Bureau of Prisons has “made limited efforts to reduce the COVID-19 risks for subclass members within the prison.”

Making it safe for the people who work in Ohio’s prisons is also a growing concern since four staffers have died from the virus so far.

It adds another layer to the debate over what another federal relief bill from Congress should include.

“Those are union correction officers that are there working in an already dangerous situation that’s going to become more dangerous,” Representative Tim Ryan (D, 13th Congressional District) said in an interview last week. “So yeah, we need to protect everybody in there, including the workers.”

The Marion, Pickaway, and Belmont correctional institutions have all made news for becoming nationally-recognized hotspots for coronavirus.