Corrections Chief Chris Sweet, left, and Health Services Administrator Tanner Burns talk about working under new conditions during the pandemic in August at the Lewis County Jail.
After the Lewis County Jail had managed to not have a single COVID-19 case for the initial six months of the coronavirus pandemic, 11 inmates and two corrections officers tested positive for the virus last week.
According to Correction Chief Chris Sweet, the jail was notified of its first positive case on Monday, Aug. 10, and subsequently started testing the rest of the facility, which yielded an additional 10 positive tests from inmates and two from corrections officers. The additional tests came back positive on Aug. 14.
“We’ve gone up 73 percent of inmate population since May, the odds were against us,” said Sweet. “But we were doing everything we could to work with the courts and the prosecutor to see how many we could get released so the population is more manageable.”
Only seven of the 11 inmates who tested positive are still in custody of the Lewis County Jail and are currently in a 10-day isolation period being monitored for symptoms in a 24-man cell where social distancing can be assured, said Sweet.
According to Sweet, the 10-day isolation period timer starts when a positive test is administered, not to be confused with the date the jail received the positive test result. So it is retroactive.
The seven inmates currently in isolation are scheduled to be done with their isolation period on Saturday, pending medical approval to be removed, said Tanner Burns, health services administrator for the jail.
The two corrections officers who tested positive have remained out of the jail facility since their test results came back positive and one of them is scheduled to return to work this weekend, also pending medical approval from the jail’s staff.
Sweet added that it is not the jail that decides how long individuals remain in isolation, rather it’s Lewis County Public Health and Social Services that determines the length of time.
LCPHSS Director J.P. Anderson said the 10-day isolation period for the inmates and the corrections officers is the same as it would be for anyone in the county who tests positive for COVID-19 and the retroactive nature of the isolation time highlights the importance of quick results in testing.
Anderson also said the outbreak at the jail was a matter of “when,” not “if” and that it shouldn’t be viewed as a failure of the protocols the jail put in place, rather a byproduct of the increasing amounts of cases being detected in the county.
“As much as you don’t want to find problems … if you’re willing to lean in and really investigate what’s going on, then you can get it at the root and that’s what the jail has done,” said Anderson.
He added: “It doesn’t mean you’re never going to get another positive test, but the other option is to kind of look away and ignore it and that is not what happened here, so that’s the best you can expect from a public health perspective.”
Two weeks ago, when the Lewis County Jail still didn’t have a COVID-19 case to report, the jail’s Health Services Administrator Tanner Burns also cautioned that while the situation was fine then, things could flip quickly.
“All it takes is for one asymptomatic person to come in,” Burns said at the beginning of August..
According to Sweet, the jail found out they had an outbreak on their hands last week when an inmate who had been released to the American Behavioral Health Systems (ABHS) facility in Chehalis tested positive for the virus.
Through contact tracing, Sweet said, the jail was notified of the positive case and then began testing all of the inmates and workers in the facility. In total, 233 tests were administered to inmates and staff of the jail.
Since the initial 233 tests, additional testing has been done with no positive results, said Sweet.
For those not in isolation, Sweet said his staff are encouraging and educating inmates to wear masks and remain socially distanced, noting that they cannot enforce mask-wearing all the time, only when they move an inmate out of his or her cell to another area of the facility.
Lewis County Jail Captain Chris Tawes added that though they cannot enforce a mask policy, they have seen a relatively good amount of compliance from inmates wearing face coverings.
As of Friday, the Lewis County Jail’s total system population stood at 161 inmates, with 146 in the general population and 15 in the work ethic and restitution center, down just a dozen inmates from last week when the jail’s population was at 173.
“We hope to get that (number) lower,” said Sweet.
Shannon Miller, whose husband is currently in the Lewis County Jail for a DUI, said last week — when the only information she had regarding the outbreak was from observations from her spouse inside the jail — was particularly tough.
For her, she simply wanted her husband to be informed and safe.
“I have no big concerns or issues,” with the jail, Miller said. “Only keeping inmates in the know as much as they can.”
From Sweet’s perspective, much of last week was spent investigating the scope of the outbreak and waiting to determine how many positive cases were inside the jail.
“Could it be worse? We don’t have that answer,” Sweet said. “But I think if we didn’t have the protocol that we had already set in place, I think we would be looking at a far worse situation than what we have right now.”
