1,200 virus tests planned at jail

State agency coordinating with lockup’s care provider

LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas Department of Health is facilitating testing of employees and detainees this week at the Pulaski County jail to learn inmates’ infection status and move them out of a 14-day quarantine period for new arrivals amid covid-19 outbreaks at other county jails.

Officials intend to do over 1,200 tests, Lt. Robert Garrett, a spokesman for the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday.

The latest testing effort began with 54 employees on Wednesday and will continue over the next couple of days, Garrett said.

The move to test more at the jail comes shortly after the Sheriff’s Office abandoned a plan to test people held in the state’s largest county lockup every Tuesday because of long delays receiving results.

Until recently, the Sheriff’s Office was working with a nonprofit health care provider, Jefferson Comprehensive Care System, to do the weekly testing. Jefferson, in turn, was relying on commercial laboratory LabCorp to process the results.

Recent testing at the jail was facilitated by Jefferson Comprehensive Care at no cost to the county, CEO Sandra Brown said. The latest testing is being coordinated by the state Health Department and carried out by the jail’s medical provider, Turn Key Health.

Turn Key will collect the swabs from the jail population and the state’s Public Health Laboratory will run the tests, according to Danyelle McNeill, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health. She said the turnaround time for results is about three days.

Garrett said the jail was holding about 980 inmates on Thursday.

The goal of working with Jefferson, and now the Department of Health, was to get an idea of the health status of new detainees, Garrett explained.

Because of the covid-19 outbreak, people booked into jail are placed in a 14-day quarantine before entering one of the jail’s housing units, according to Garrett.

However, Garrett said, “With arrests not slowing down from other agencies, you know, those units fill up pretty quickly when you’re holding people in place for 14 days.”

By working with Jefferson, officials thought they could ascertain the test results of new detainees, which would help empty the isolation units more rapidly, Garrett said.

But because of the delays associated with receiving the results from Jefferson’s lab partner, the testing regimen “wasn’t serving its purpose” because it was supposed to allow the jail to move inmates into the housing units, he said. The Department of Health’s turnaround time on tests is a lot faster, Garrett said.

New detainees are placed in individual cells “as much as possible” during those 14 days, Garrett said.

However, the specific living arrangement of new detainees depends on the head count of the jail, according to Garrett.

If the head count in one of the units being used as a 14day quarantine zone is low, some cells might have only one person inside — a situation Garrett called “ideal” — but new inmates are also housed in two-person cells.

“That’s not something that we can control,” he said of the jail population.

The facility can hold more than 1,200 detainees. In-person visitation at the jail has been suspended since March.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson has raised concerns recently regarding the slowdown in processing times at commercial laboratories as the number of new covid-19 cases has surged in Arkansas and other states across the nation.

Despite being the largest county jail in the state, the Pulaski County jail has so far not experienced a widespread outbreak, even as other jails and prisons in Arkansas have struggled with hundreds of covid-19 cases.

According to Garrett, three employees of the Sheriff’s Office have tested positive — two who work in enforcement and one at the jail.

In early May, an individual arrested by the Little Rock Police Department was booked into the jail after testing positive for covid-19. The individual was placed in a negative pressure room, the Sheriff’s Office said at the time.

Another person received a positive test result at the VA hospital after leaving the jail on bond late last month, Garrett said, but people who may have been exposed to the individual all tested negative.

At the Benton County jail, 188 inmates and 13 staffers have tested positive, according to the Department of Health’s numbers tracking cases in congregate settings. At the Washington County jail, as of Wednesday, 36 detainees and three employees have tested positive.

Although he said the jail’s virus procedures have served them well during the pandemic thus far, Garrett acknowledged that may not always be the case.

“We’re not naive to the fact that we will eventually probably experience what other facilities have experienced around the state,” he said.

“We’re not naive to the fact that we will eventually probably experience what other facilities have experienced around the state.”

— Lt. Robert Garrett, Pulaski County Sheriff’s Office