Bexar County Jail Employee Tests Positive for Coronavirus
Video Visitation Employee Infected with COVID-19
The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office has confirmed that an employee who works at the Video Visitation building, has tested positive for the current coronavirus. The employee is presumed to have gotten sick on a cruise. He (we don’t know the gender of the person but will use ‘he’ for convenience) returned from his cruise on March 15 and reported for work on March 16. The employee didn’t start showing symptoms until Wednesday, March 18. He was placed on administrative leave on Thursday, March 19. That means this person was in contact with other staff members and the public for three days.
According to the KSAT 12 article, 11 other employees who work the Video Visitation section and two people in Sheriff’s Administration, have been placed on administrative leave due to contact with the infected employee.
Incompetence During a Pandemic
We have mentioned the incompetence of Sheriff Javier Salazar many times but under the current circumstances, it’s outright deadly. Salazar had his first coronavirus scare on February 9. At that time an inmate said he may have come into contact with an infected person. Salazar used that to get in front of the cameras but he didn’t really do anything proactive at that time. It wasn’t until March 15 that he released an emergency plan of the precautions they would be taking. It took him more than month to put something out regarding something as serious as COVID-19.
And yet that plan didn’t include a simple thing like instructing the employees to report if they had been on a cruise or to any of the areas that were having high rates of infection in the last two weeks. Probably in the last month would be better. They could even ask visiting members of the public those questions to be on the safe side. The Sheriff’s Office did next to nothing to determine if someone might already be infected. There are no instructions saying that employees should not travel but if they do, they are required to report the travel they took, or are going to take, to Sheriff’s Administration.
The Salazar administration completely lacked any kind of two-dimensional thinking. Their only thought was the disease being introduced by an infected arrestee. They put out some simple, sanitize your hands instructions and are using a remote thermometer for the public and employees. But noting someone has a fever is when they are already symptomatic. It doesn’t do a thing for someone who is not showing symptoms yet, but is still shedding the virus everywhere. And they continue to do a poor job. Even now, they say they have put people on administrative leave but don’t say a thing about sanitizing the area the person worked in, the bathrooms he may have used or any other place in the building he may have been. Their actions are for show, so Salazar said he did something. They aren’t serious actions that will protect inmates, the public or employees.
Health Officials Say Public was at Low Risk
But as incompetent as the Salazar administration has shown itself to be, I was shocked at the comments by the unnamed health officials. According to them, yes, people from the general public did come into contact with the infected employee but those people are at low risk of catching the disease.
When monitoring a spreading disease, scientist and medical researchers track back. This means they try to see where an infection spread started. In South Korea, officials were able to track 1,000 cases of COVID-19 back to one woman who was infected but continued her normal functions. To say that the people who went to the Bexar County Jail’s Video Visitation on March 16 – 18 are at low risk is gambling with people’s lives. They don’t know that. And nothing is said in the article about anyone trying to reach out to those people to let them know they may have come into contact with someone who is infected. I sincerely hope it just wasn’t mentioned but is being done. Those people deserve to know so they can take appropriate steps to protect their families.
Needing Transparency, Getting Secrecy
We already wrote about how poor a job San Antonio and Bexar County are doing in addressing this situation but it’s not just San Antonio. All of Texas is making a mess of this. Up to March 27, at which time Texas had 1,937 positive cases of COVID-19, we were ranked as 47th in the state for case per 100,000. That sounds pretty good. We don’t have that many infections as a percentage of our population. Here’s the problem. We are 45th in testing. Texas only tests 82 people out of 100,000. That means there could be, probably are, a WHOLE BUNCH of infected people that we don’t know about. Sticking our heads in the sand will only allow things to get worse. We need to do a much better job of finding, reporting and treating every single case of COVID-19 or we will not get a handle on it.
Reminder: Stay inside. If you have to leave your house make sure to social distance. You need to stay at least 6 feet away from other people. Wash your hands properly for at least 20 seconds. It’s going to take everyone working together to beat this disease.