Former Wisconsin inmate Jeremy Egger gave CNN a glimpse inside what a Covid-19 prison lockdown looked like in his medium security facility over the past three weeks.

With limited contact to the outside, he heard snippets about the coronavirus pandemic on a prison radio. “The radio station we had, it was from Milwaukee. We only had bits and pieces about a virus out there.”

Egger said that -- without being told anything directly by the guards -- he could tell something was changing within the prison. Egger said guards' posturing was different.

“Whether inmates were coming down with it or guards, I didn’t know, but something wasn’t right and it was in the institution," he said.

Former Wisconsin state prison employee Jeff Wydeven said a change in demeanor with the guards doesn’t surprise him at all. “Of course they’re going to be scared,” he told CNN. “It’s their health too.”

Egger, 33, was taking morning courses in Wisconsin’s Thinking For Change program and studying in the afternoons. He arrived at the Metropolitan Secure Detention Facility (MSDF) on March 12 expecting to serve three months for a parole violation.

Three days later everything changed.

While Egger was taking one of his courses, “they suddenly locked the entire place down," he said.

"Everybody had to go back in their cells and that’s when we’re like, OK, there’s got to be a case here somewhere," Egger said.

'From the normal to being locked'

Prison life went “from the normal to being locked,” he said. Egger said the initial lockdown was 23 1/2 hours a day with only 30 minutes out of a cell he shared with three other inmates. They shared a dry cell that Egger described as a cell without a toilet, running water or television. Those 30 minutes a day gave them time to use the phone, microwave food and use shower facilities.

During a call with his mother on March 25, Egger grew concerned because she was exhibiting symptoms of the virus, but couldn’t get a test. His mother, Cheryl Fountaine-Kempf, said she “could easily detect the pain and fear in his voice.”

The next day, an even more stringent lock down was instituted, according to Egger.

“It just all changed again from one day to the next,” Egger said, adding that inmates were only allowed out for 45 minutes about every three days.

“I’m sitting there wanting to call my mom, thinking she’s deathly sick and I can’t call her for another two days.”

Guards told Egger they were trying to do their part in helping to slow the spread, he said.

MSDF Milwaukee has the largest population of parole revocations re-entering the system for short periods of time “so people are going in and out constantly which creates much more of a risk than other facilities,” according to Wydeven.

Four staff members at MSDF have tested positive, according to the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, which noted on its website this is the highest number of staff cases at any Wisconsin prison.

“Each site has pandemic plans to address COVID-19,” according to the website which states the plan includes “protocols and isolation procedures if someone is exposed and/or becomes infected. In the event of a confirmed positive case in one of our secure facilities, contact investigations are being conducted to determine which individuals may have been exposed to the virus, and subsequent isolation or quarantine may occur to manage these situations.”

CNN has reached out to the Department of Corrections for additional details.

More changes

On March 30, almost three months before his expected release, Egger was told to contact his family and probation officers because there was a possibility he was going to get out. He said after that even more changes began happening.

“The last two weeks there was no laundry was being done internally and it was instead, outsourced,” he said.

Wydeven said while inmates normally do the laundry, with a lockdown they wouldn’t be able to do it.

“We had to wear the same 'yellows,' a jumpsuit, for like two weeks,” Egger said.

“We’re supposed to wash our hands, but we could only shower about once every other day If we were lucky ... and wearing dirty clothes With no running water in their cell hand washing was at a minimum," he said.

Egger, a registered sex offender, was released on April 3. He was originally released from prison in 2016 and obtained his welder’s certificate and a commercial drivers’ license.

He is living with his mother for the next two weeks to make sure he hasn’t contracted the virus, and then will move to rural Wisconsin with his father, he told CNN.

Watch video from inside the prison: