How the Henrico Sheriff's Office is protecting against a potential COVID-19 outbreak in Henrico's jails

The first month of the COVID-19 pandemic has provided ample evidence nationally – and locally – that nursing homes and senior communities in general are among the most vulnerable spots for the virus to take hold and spread rapidly.

But there’s another population that health officials are concerned about: inmates.

“I’m surprised that we haven’t seen more severe spread in prisons and jails,” Henrico Health Director Danny Avula told the Citizen last week. “Part of my concern is not that those cases don’t exist in jails – it’s that we’re not actively testing people who aren’t showing symptoms.”

Henrico houses about 1,100 inmates, split almost evenly between the county’s Jail West (at the government center on Parham Road) and Jail East (in New Kent County), according to Maj. R. A. Garrison of the office.

To date, there have been no known cases among the inmate population – something that Garrison attributed to the office’s early – and thorough – preparation. Deputies and others already are accustomed to taking extra precautions to prevent outbreaks of the flu and other respiratory illnesses, Garrison said, and this year they began enhanced cleaning efforts in early March.

“We were ahead, I think, of a lot of places,” he told the Citizen. “We started wiping down touch surfaces a little more frequently, handing out additional hygiene items to inmates. We started [no-touch] temperature-checking early – all employees and anyone else who entered the facilities.”

Officials also asked visitors whether they had traveled outside the country recently or been around others who had or who had been sick. They provided masks to those who wanted them. They stationed inmate workers full-time in several different parts of the facilities to clean constantly. They marked areas around the booking desk to ensure adherence to social distancing. They implemented many of the same procedures in the county’s courthouse, which the Sheriff’s Office also staffs.

And, they implemented a new intake plan – using two rooms for men and two for women – to prevent a new inmate from potentially infecting the jail population. Initially, those new arrivals were directed one at a time to the gender-appropriate room, where they remained until it reached its functional capacity of several dozen. Then, the entire group remained together for six more days, while the next batch of new arrivals was similarly quarantined in one of the other two available rooms, Garrison said.

After one cycle, officials lengthened the time of quarantine to 14 days, to follow medical guidelines.

Importantly, Garrison said, staffers who work in the jails began wearing face coverings early in the process; those who work with new inmates wore gloves and N95 masks – left over from the supply the Sheriff’s Office had acquired during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak 11 years ago, Garrison said.

“We’re a bigger threat to them than they are to us, because the majority of them have been housed here for awhile,” he said. “That’s why we’re wearing face masks – to protect them from us.”

Garrison declined to say whether any of the office’s 350 staff members had been tested or had tested positive for COVID-19, referring the question to the Henrico Health Department, but did say “We have been very fortunate.”

Each jail cell houses two or three inmates, and jail staffers are required to enter each cell twice an hour, Garrison said, meaning that each day there are hundreds of opportunities for a virus to spread if it has entered the facility. Even during those cell visits, staff members adhere to social distancing as best they can, he said.

If one or several inmates do eventually test positive for the virus, jail officials would transport the afflicted persons to negative pressure rooms at Jail East, Garrison said, where they’d remain until they recovered. In a worst-case scenario – dozens or more inmates infected – there would be only one realistic option, he said.

“I don’t think that we differ from any other facility in the commonwealth in that if we had a large number of inmates that tested positive that we would probably have to isolate in place,” Garrison said.