Ohio prisons work to prevent outbreaks
5 staff, 111 inmates have died of coronavirus
Annette Chambers-smith knew something was wrong at the end of a workday back in late July.
“I was exhausted,” she said. “And I don’t mean, like, oh, I’m tired, I did a hard workout or I didn’t get enough sleep. I mean like walking through molasses — the most exhausted I’ve ever been in my life, I don’t even know how to describe it.”
She had a headache the next morning, and a subsequent test confirmed what the telltale symptoms were indicating: The head of Ohio’s prison system had joined the 95,000some other Ohioans at the time with confirmed or probable COVID-19 cases.
Four months later, the state’s overall count has topped 360,000, and Chambers-smith is still feeling the effects, both personally and professionally.
She’s concerned about the upswing in infections statewide in recent weeks. Though prison cases have been more under control since outbreaks among Ohio’s inmates and staff members earlier this year, an uptick likely is coming.
“Whatever goes on in the community is eventually going to happen inside the prisons,” she said.
“And we usually trail whatever happens in the community. So right now, we’re in a decent place, but that is rapidly changing.”
And then there are the holidays.
Chambers-smith, whose nearly three-decade career at the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction includes time as chief of the bureau of medical services, said in a normal year, regular flu infections would start to increase right after Thanksgiving.
If people choose to gather together this year, “We’re going to have a real problem inside the prisons,” she said.
“I just keep trying to tell everyone, I’m not having a normal Thanksgiving, I’d like to have a normal Thanksgiving, but I
can’t. I know what the exact outcome will be if people drop their guards at this critical moment.”
Through Monday, 532 staff members and 407 current inmates had positive COVID-19 tests, and 3,085 inmates were quarantined in dozens of units across the state prison system after being exposed to someone with the disease, according to statistics compiled by the prisons agency.
Five staff members and 111 inmates have died as a result of coronavirus, the latter including 109 confirmed and two probable infections.
To date, 7,261 out of 41,609 inmate tests have been positive for COVID-19, an overall rate of about 17.5%. That number is pushed by a nearly 68% rate in April, when 4,045 of 5,951 tests were positive for coronavirus.
Since June, the positivity rate has hovered between 5% and 11%; during the month of October, 569 of 6,994 inmate tests were positive, or about 8%.
Nearly 1,700 prison staffers and 5,700-plus current inmates in state-run facilities have recovered from COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic earlier this year. And Chambers-smith said the department is regularly updating procedures and policies to reduce the potential spread of the disease among the more than 12,000 prison system employees and 44,700 inmates.
“It’s a massive operation behind the scenes to try to make sure that one person who’s sick doesn’t make other people sick, regardless of whether they live there or work there,” she said. “We’re constantly adding to the things we do.”
The list includes testing wastewater samples for signs of the virus before infections are otherwise evident. Positive results help to shape visitation and other policies at different prisons.
“We decided in DRC that we weren’t going to have one restriction for the whole state,” she said. “That’s the easier thing to do, but it’s not the humane thing to do. COVID is not a five-minute thing, it’s going to be a years thing, and we need to make sure that people can live in our prison system long term with the restrictions that make them safer so that when there is a time period when people are all healthy and we can loosen restrictions, we do.”
As of early October, prisons implemented required COVID testing for staff members to help prevent outbreaks.
“I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like if we had 500 additional asymptomatic staff in the prison right now,” Chambers-smith said. “I think having that in place is protecting the people that work in the prison. Our staff are very good about getting those tests and very good about quarantining.”
She added, “There’s people in jails and prisons that are working in very difficult circumstances where they have double shifts and lack of staff. They’re there every day taking excellent care of the people around them. If it wasn’t for them staying home when they’re sick and taking these tests and doing their best, we would be up a creek.”
Prison officials also have worked to improve air quality in prisons, via special filters and circulating more outside air, and to reconfigure open-bay inmate housing to provide more social distance and dividers between beds.
Chambers-smith isn’t sure how she contracted COVID-19. She and her husband wore masks and gloves and took other precautions to avoid infection.
“It’s in the air and it’s so pervasive at this point, you just need to do everything you can all the time to not pass it on and to stay separated,” she said.
She still hasn’t completely regained her senses of smell and taste, not to mention overcoming the anxiety and stress caused by the disease. Thankfully, her husband and 88-year-old mother, who lives with the couple, did not contract the disease, thanks to masks, regular hand washing and sanitizing and social distancing within the home.
Those things work, Chambers-smith said.
“I’m a very big believer in the science and the things that they recommend we do,” she said. “Because in the microcosm of my own house, I’ve seen it work. And in the macrocosm of the prison system, I see how it can work.” mkovac@dispatch.com @Ohiocapitalblog