A puzzling spike in COVID-19 cases has a source: a transfer site for federal prisoners nationwide, which is located in Oklahoma City. Mayor David Holt attributed the local spike to cases among federal prisoners who are housed at the facility, near Will Rogers World Airport, as they are being shuffled between court hearings and federal prisons. More than 50 inmates and staff have tested positive at the transfer center. One inmate has died. Taking the transfer facility’s cases out of the rest of Oklahoma County’s, and the local picture looks better, with a curve that is flat or trending downward. Epidemiologist Eddie Withers said experts consider isolated outbreaks such as the federal prison outbreak separately. And, he said, the feds are fighting the outbreak at their prison transfer station – a location, he said, where containing an outbreak is especially difficult."As an epidemiologist, that is a concern, because a lot of what we want to do in these types of situations is contain the spread of a particular virus. And a lot of that includes limiting the people coming and going in a certain community,” he said. Otherwise, the outlook in the metro is improving. "We're definitely trending in the right direction -- we're trending down. And that is good for us as we begin to reopen things and people begin to go back to work -- and you try to get back to your life as normal as possible,” he said. The Bureau of Prisons did not comment on the specific outbreak but did say the agency is ramping up sanitation, testing and other measures.