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(From left to right) Logan County Commissioners Marvin Goodman, Kolby Ellis, Monty Piearcy and Logan County Sheriff Damon Devereaux stand in front of the Logan County Jail after its annual inspection. Photo by Mike Monahan
The Logan County Jail’s COVID-19 numbers are dwindling as of late.
As of Dec. 9, 2020, 39 inmates had contracted COVID-19. As of Dec. 23, only four inmates tested positive for COVID-19, and none of them reported any symptoms. Now, there are zero COVID-19 positive inmates.
Undersheriff Troy Dykes talked about the precautions that allowed the jail to avoid having an outbreak up to this point, as well as the plan going forward to rid the jail of its current cases.
“We’ve pretty much just had an isolation, I don’t know even really what you want to call it,” Dykes said. “Some of the inmates of course were calling it lockdowns because it felt like that, but it was really more like an isolation protocol where nobody was going in and out of the pods, as far as new inmates.”
Other jails in the area have had issues with COVID-19 outbreaks long before the Logan County Jail, and Dye said there are a number of reasons why it took this long to reach the jail.
“On certain circumstances, there’s natural barriers in the jail such as the jail cell with the door,” Dye said. “Our doors are not like (the ones) with typical bars. Let’s say you were rooming with like two people in a cell, and we could simply just isolate you in that one room where you didn’t get cross-contaminated with your neighbor because it’s a natural barrier, such as walls and a door within that pod.”
No new inmates were allowed to come into contact with any of the isolated. Inmates who tested positive for COVID-19 were quarantined for 16 days.
“We just threw in two extra days just for good measure before we started moving people around,” Dye said. “The only challenging part of that was we didn’t really ever close, so it just would delay some intake techniques.”
One of the other strategies of note was the replacement of plates with disposable counterparts.
“We did serve our food with disposable Styrofoam to-go boxes, so that when they were done, they could just put it in the trash can and we could just take the trash can liner out to minimize cross-contamination from that inside pod back out to our trustee pod that cooks the food,” Dye said.
Dye was quick to give credit to the Logan County Jail’s staff for making everything work smoothly during a stressful situation. He said he couldn’t be more proud of them, as well as the “trustees” – inmates who are trusted with helping around throughout the jail – for helping the situation stay under control.
“I can tell you our jail staff, along with our vendors that work for us, like our medical team and then our food service venders – all of them did an amazing job,” Dye said. “It’s definitely like that saying where ‘it takes a village,’ because even our trustees that cook, every one of them help. We have some ornery guys who made some mistakes and end up back in jail, but we have a lot of good guys, too. It was the help of everybody that really made this smooth, and we owe them a lot of gratitude.”