By Carbon County Sheriff Jeff Wood
I often get asked questions about the COVID pandemic and how it has impacted the operations of the sheriff’s office. I wanted to take a few minutes and update the community on the COVID precautions taken at the sheriff’s office since the pandemic started.
As you know, this has been a challenge to our office in order to maintain a healthy work environment for our employees as well as the inmates in the jail. Upon intake, we provide each inmate with a medical grade mask. New inmate bookings are screened for COVID symptoms during the medical screening at the time they are booked into jail. If an inmate displays any symptoms, they are required to be given a COVID test and they have to have a negative test result prior to being placed into an inmate housing section.
We have suspended all in-person inmate programming and classes to reduce the risk of the virus being brought into the jail. Each inmate housing section has been quarantined to limit inmate interaction between other sections. All in-person inmate visits have been suspended and visitation is available through the kiosk system located inside the jail.
Medical requests are also handled through the kiosk system. Each inmate has access and the ability to put in medical requests on a kiosk that is located in each section. The jail’s medical staff comes in every day to review inmate medical requests, provide inmate medical care, review inmate medical intakes and to do inmate screenings. All inmate sections are provided with cleaning and sanitizing products every day and they have sanitizing spray in the section 24 hours per day.
All jail staff are required to do a self-screening before the start of their shift. If they have any symptoms, they need a negative COVID test before coming into work.
We also use an electrostatic spray gun with a Brutab disinfectant solution. This is used throughout the jail several times per day along with frequent cleaning of all areas of the jail as well as the administrative sections of the sheriff’s office and our patrol cars. We want to assure that we are taking a responsible approach to this situation to avoid the spread of COVID.
As of Wednesday, there was one positive COVID case in our jail with a total of 58 inmates incarcerated. We have approached this issue with a common sense approach and have managed to avoid any major outbreaks of COVID in our jail. We have had members of our staff contract COVID, but again we have been fortunate not to have any major outbreaks with our staff and have been able to operate business as usual.
As always, we have relied on our proven model of leadership and approached the issue with our administrative staff as a team using a common sense approach. We are proud of our results given this type of issue. We take great pride in serving our community and I am proud to serve as your sheriff.