44 inmates at Tarrant County Jail have COVID. Two describe the quarantine conditions.
When Eric Antonio Johnson wakes up, there are seven other men sleeping near him. When he looks at the pods around him, he can see and talk to at least 20 other men. It’s not possible to social distance and he’s often within just feet of someone else. Some of those people are sicker than he is.
At the Tarrant County Jail, quarantining isn’t easy.
“This is a constant battle and the target is always moving,” said Tarrant County Sheriff’s Lt. Jennifer Gabbert.
Johnson, 34, found out he was positive for COVID-19 about a week after he was sent to the Greenbay Unit, where sick inmates are quarantined.
“They sent us all back here trapped together,” he said.
As of May 18, there were 44 active cases in the jail among 3,563 inmates. All of the positive inmates are in quarantine and are being treated by John Peter Smith Hospital medical staff, Gabbert said on Monday.
In total, 121 inmates have tested positive at some point. Seventy-seven of them have recovered. No deaths have been reported.
Of the staff, 39 have tested positive. Ten have recovered and returned to work.
Johnson has been jailed since July, awaiting trial in a string of aggravated robberies. His bond is $705,000.
His mother, Yolanda Johnson, says she’s lucky she can talk with her son daily. She makes sure he always has money to call.
“He’s my son and he’s in jail but he has a family who is worried about him,” she said recently. “There are people in there who don’t have money to call their families and tell them they have COVID-19.”
She and Johnson worry that he was infected after he was moved to quarantine. He woke up on April 23 with some body aches, but he said that’s not unusual for him. A nurse took his temperature. Yolanda Johnson said it was 101. Then, it lowered to 99. Because of the symptoms, he was moved into quarantine.
Johnson gets a daily vitamin D pill and Tylenol, but his body aches worsened and he developed a new symptom — he can’t smell or taste anything.
The food, he told the Star-Telegram, is delivered cold on a disposable tray.
Another inmate who wrote about conditions in a letter to the newspaper said tensions between inmates are rising. The unknown has led to stress and a hostile environment.
Eric Johnson said he’s concerned he became infected after he was moved into quarantine. Gabbert said that positive inmates and inmates with tests pending aren’t placed in the same area.
“There are areas where one inmate may have become symptomatic, so all the others that were around him are now in quarantine (together, not showing symptoms) and monitored by medical staff,” she wrote in an email to the Star-Telegram. If a test does come back positive, “the ill inmate is removed from the area. Symptomatic does not mean they tested positive.”
Inmates with symptoms are monitored multiple times a day.
Eric Johnson told the Star-Telegram his temperature was being taken regularly. Gabbert said jail officials consult daily with Tarrant County Public Health and John Peter Smith Hospital about how to maintain the cases that are already within their walls.
“Our staff care for the inmates,” Gabbert said. “They show up every day, many catching the virus themselves, to make sure things are done well.”
But as seen across the country, when one case gets into a jail, it’s almost impossible to keep it from spreading because social distancing is impossible in tight quarters. More than 100 jail inmates in the U.S. have died of COVID-19, according to an analysis by UCLA.
“If somebody at the jail would get that virus, the disease would spread through that building like wildfire because you wouldn’t know how long they had it before you were finally able to catch it,” said Gary Smart, Tarrant County Criminal Defense Lawyers Association president. “It would spread like wildfire before you even knew it existed.”
In a joint letter to Fort Worth and Tarrant County officials in late March, advocates described Tarrant County jails as squalid, without the opportunity for social distancing and inside an environment where health care is deficient.
“This is a recipe for the rapid spread of disease through correction officer contact and other personnel who could facilitate community spread throughout the jail,” said the letter, signed onto by groups such as United Fort Worth, The Tarrant County Coalition for Community Oversight and the immigrant advocacy group RAICES.
This story was originally published May 18, 2020 at 12:20 PM.
