Officials confirm 2nd COVID-19 outbreak at Seminole County jail

Seminole officials on Wednesday confirmed a second COVID-19 outbreak at the county jail since the start of the pandemic, with 22 inmates recently testing positive and one staff member, according to Seminole County Sheriff ’s Office spokesman Bob Kealing.

Kealing said the jail is “taking steps to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 after the positive tests, and said all the cases have been asymptomatic. He said the infections were discovered during “routine testing protocols.”

The jail reported its first COVID-19 outbreak in August, with more than 40 inmates testing positive after a staff member reported feeling ill. Days later, a 76-year-old man incarcerated at the Seminole jail died of COVID19. He was facing charges for drug possession and a probation violation, but had not been convicted, and spent the last nine months awaiting an outcome in the case, court records showed.

Kealing said the most recent outbreak was confined to one housing area in the jail, but staff are conducting further tests for both inmates and staff. He said some inmates have qualified for a COVID-19 vaccine, with 18 having received the inoculation.

He noted that with the age limit now lowered to 50, he expects “the numbers will be increasing substantially.”

There are about 780 people incarcerated in the jail.

“The facility continues to collaborate with the Florida Department of Health in Seminole County for increased testing and health protocols along with offering COVID-19 vaccines to inmates who qualify according to state guidelines,” Kealing said in a statement Wednesday.

Providing vaccinations to inmates, whether in local jails like Seminole, or state prisons, has become a contentious issue in Florida, as Gov. Ron DeSantis

has not prioritized the population, though public health officials have repeatedly called such facilities at high-risk.

State Rep. Omari Hardy, D-Palm Beach, tweeted on Wednesday that he learned state officials had issued an “unwritten directive” to local leaders, who run local jails, not to vaccinate inmates. But that does not seem to be an issue in Seminole County, or in MiamiDade where the county-run jail has also vaccinated about 60 inmates as of Wednesday.

The Seminole County Sheriff’s Office runs the county jail.