The Tulsa County jail isn’t near where it was during the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, when more than 170 inmates tested positive, but cases are on the climb as the delta variant makes its way through the unvaccinated community at large.
Only 15% of people held at the jail are vaccinated, Public Information Officer Casey Roebuck said Thursday, noting that 77 cases were active among the 1,200 to 1,300 people incarcerated there.
Each inmate is offered the opportunity to receive a single-dose Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccination upon booking, Roebuck said, but most decline.
Tulsa County Sheriff Vic Regalado said employees and inmates are encouraged to get vaccinated but that many are concerned about possible unknown long-term effects. Those interested in learning more about the vaccine may visit the Tulsa Health Department’s website at bit.ly/THDcovidvax.
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Sheriff’s Office officials are not surprised that the facility’s cases are climbing, considering the rates seen in the community outside the jail, and staff are continuing virus protocols largely with normalcy.
“When you start to see it in society, you’re going to start to see it in the jail, too,” Roebuck said. “For a brief, glorious while we didn’t have any.”
In two months, Tulsa County’s seven-day average of confirmed new cases jumped from 23 to 363, according to Oklahoma State Department of Health data. State-level increases are more than 17-fold in the same time period in a rise health officials are attributing to the spread of variants among the unvaccinated population.
Most of the jail’s virus precautions remain in place from earlier in the pandemic, save for a changed intake testing procedure and the fact that the jail is open, Regalado said. The courts also are open, so inmates are being transferred to and from the courthouses, and attorneys may request in-person visits.
At the height of the pandemic, every new inmate was tested for COVID-19 upon booking, Regalado said. Now, every person admitted to the jail who is not experiencing symptoms spends seven days in an intake pod before being admitted to the general population. If they develop symptoms, they are tested, and those with positive results quarantine in their cells unless they require medical attention, Roebuck said.
Of the more than 13,000 inmates tested since the beginning of the pandemic, 542 have tested positive, and only a “handful” have been hospitalized, Roebuck and Regalado said. No inmates have died of COVID-19, they said.
Inmates in the general population are tested upon development of symptoms and isolate in their cells unless they also require medical attention.
“We’re most susceptible to it when someone is booked in, but we have had people in general population test positive,” Regalado said.
Jail pods with more than five active cases are placed on restricted movement, he said, which means others in that pod who haven’t tested positive must wear a mask when outside the pod. If a negative inmate in such a pod is summoned to court, the jail notifies the respective judge of the inmate’s pod’s status, and it is left to the judge’s discretion whether to invite that inmate into his or her courtroom. The protocol is the same for attorney appointments, Regalado said.
COVID-19 positive inmates are quarantined.
Four of the jail’s 26 housing units are currently on restricted movement due to COVID-19, Roebuck said.
Regalado said the jail is closely monitoring the developments despite its numbers being far below their former peak.
Problems may arise, he said, “if we start having to segregate pods into restricted movement pods, which takes additional personnel.
“I think everybody knows that right now we are in a personnel crisis.”
In late June, the sheriff reported that his agency’s staffing level was “critical” with a shortage of about 70 detention officers from what he would consider an “acceptable” number of 285 and even farther from his ideal of 300. More than 120 detention staff members have retired or resigned this year.
The Sheriff’s Office is hosting its first-ever “Ladies of Law Enforcement” recruiting event on Saturday. Those interested may register at bit.ly/TCSOLadies, and information on jobs available at TCSO can be found at tcso.org/resources/employment.
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