Harris County Jail to increase inmate testing
Partnership will provide lift to sheriff’s office in bid to prevent outbreak, protect jail staff
Scores of quarantined Harris County Jail inmates will be tested for the novel coronavirus, officials said Tuesday, to prevent an outbreak like the hot spot that has swept through the nation’s third-largest lockup in Chicago.
A grant to the Houston Health Foundation will send 2,000 nasal swabs to the jail to have inmates and Harris County Sheriff ’s Office employees tested for COVID-19, while eight United Memorial Medical Center employees will embed in the jail’s medical facility to help administer those tests, officials said.
The cache of tests are not enough to check the entire jail population of 7,416 people — the number of inmates housed there as of noon Tuesday — but it will help the sheriff’s office figure out who is healthy and who is not.
“It’s a giant Petri dish in there,” said Dr. Joseph Varon, chief medical officer of the hospital whose employees will temporarily work in the jail.
As of Tuesday, nearly 100 inmates have been diagnosed with the virus. Forty-five are symptomatic and quarantined. On Monday, authorities said more than 2,100 others did not have symptoms but were in “observational quarantine” because they may have been exposed to the virus.
“Every day there’s new people coming in,” Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said, describing that number as 100 or more daily. “It’s impossible to simply quarantine, lock the doors and go away.”
Gonzalez also has about 2,000 employees to worry about, he said.
“This is their workplace,” the sheriff continued. “I need to
make sure that we’re making a safe work environment for them.”
The sheriff’s office has also found that 151 of their employees have contracted the coronavirus, with officials saying Monday that at least 108 of them were jail workers. Authorities did not provide the latest number of jail staff with the virus or how many inmates were in observational quarantine in an update Tuesday.
The nature of a jail — which the sheriff likened to being its own city — brings thousands of people together in cramped quarters, which makes it prone to major outbreaks of disease. Dr. David Persse, Houston’s health authority, said the jail has done well in the past to keep outbreaks from wreaking havoc on inmates. Last year’s mumps outbreak was an exception, he said.
Medical officials said the jail is comparable in size to the Cook County Jail in Chicago where about 400 inmates have tested positive for COVID-19. According to Gonzalez, testing will help to prevent a similarly devastating outbreak from incubating in his jail system.
Dr. Laxman Sunder, the jail’s medical director, pointed to testing as the sole solution to keeping the virus in check there. Two percent of the jail’s population has been tested for the novel coronavirus, but Sunder would like to bring that up to 20 percent.
“That should put us in a commanding position,” he said.
Sunder plans to have quarantined inmates tested and have the positive cases separated from those who are negative. Already, quarantined inmates are being housed in pockets of 25 to 40 to keep the infection rate down. Once the quarantined inmates are taken care of, he hopes to expand testing to the booking process to prevent asymptomatic carriers from being added to the negative general population.
“That’s the only game plan,” Sunder said. “I need help. We’re not prepared for the massive pandemic.”
Sunder said that the problem with jail testing is not the number of swabs. They have enough, he said. However, he lacks the staff to administer them.
He currently has only two staffers to allocate to testing up to 200 inmates a day, he said.
“They’re real soldiers, and they work so hard in completing my tests, but I can’t just have two staff members,” Sunder added.
Extra help will come from the team of UMMC medical professionals, who will join Sunder’s team in administering tests and shipping them off to their lab — just as they do at four drive-thru facilities. With this boost, more inmates can be tested, Sunder said.
The grant will not cover the cost of UMMC’s employees, said Duni Hebron, spokeswoman for the for-profit hospital in Acres Homes.
Improved jail testing comes from a portion of a $100,000 grant from the automaker Hyundai to the Houston Health Foundation that included a total of 10,000 tests. Twenty percent of those tests are going to the jail.
Robin Mansur, the foundation’s president, was unable to say how much of the donation will also go toward help testing inmates.
Also Tuesday, the sheriff ’s office received a donation of 3,000 bars of soap for inmates and 600 masks.