COVID-19 outbreak at Placer County jail in Auburn has infected multiple inmates, one officer

At least 11 current inmates in the Placer County jail and a correctional officer have tested positive for COVID-19 as officials work to contain an outbreak at the Auburn jail.

The Placer County sheriff’s office on May 30 announced that it was isolating two inmates at the jail after finding they had low-grade fevers. They tested positive for COVID-19 and staff put them in special cells meant to curb the spread of the disease, the department said previously.

Staff began monitoring inmates’ temperatures, ordered one round of jail-wide testing and another that tested about 200 inmates last week. Of the positive tests, one inmate who was hospitalized and has returned to custody, and another person has since been released and encouraged to get medical treatment in the community.

The Placer County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday evening acknowledged they had 11 inmates and an employee who tested positive. It was the department’s first public update about the COVID-19 situation in the jails in 12 days.

“The outbreak has been localized to a specific section of the jail,” Angela Musallam, a spokeswoman for the department, said in a video posted on Facebook.

Musallam did not say how many other inmates were housed in that part of the jail, how many tests were pending results and what the plan was for future testing in the facility.

When a reporter on Tuesday asked questions about COVID-19 in the county’s jails, Musallam said the information was “not readily available” and would require a formal Public Records Act request. In contrast, Santa Clara County publishes an online dashboard with information about inmate and staff testing, Fresno County has readily supplied information when asked, and several other county health departments post information about in-custody testing.

The inmate population in jails around California has plummeted during the pandemic, driven by fewer arrests and a $0 bail requirement on many lower-level charges. The Judicial Council of California on Wednesday rescinded the emergency rule, meaning it will no longer be in place as of June 20.

Placer County jail is no different. The number of people in custody is down about 35 percent since February, according to population data collected by the Board of State and Community Corrections. As of last week, there were 449 people in custody — the population number has held relatively steady for about six weeks.

Bookings in Placer County’s jails, however, have begun to increase with twice as many people detained in the last week of May than in the first.

At the same time, Placer County has seen a 33 percent jump in the number of coronavirus cases since May 27, driven in part by clusters and the situation at the Auburn Jail, The Bee reported last week.

The county’s public health officer, Dr. Aimee Sisson, said the increase in reported cases isn’t entirely attributable to more coronavirus testing. Rather, her team is seeing an increase in the percentage of tests that come back positive, she said, a statistic that typically goes down as more tests are done.

Currently, Sisson said, fewer than 5 percent of tests are coming back positive over a rolling 14-day period. This is not high enough to warrant imposing stricter social distancing guidelines, Sisson said.

“In our attestation to the state, we outlined the triggers that would cause us to consider modifying our approach, including the rate of case increases,” she said. “We continue to monitor that and local health care capacity closely so we can respond quickly to avoid our health care system becoming overwhelmed.”

Dramatic drop in California inmate population

Jails elsewhere in Northern California have also recently reported their first positive cases of COVID-19.

In Butte County, deputies and public health employees late last month were working to isolate and test the 26 inmates who were exposed to a man who had the disease and was roomed in a dormitory-style housing arrangement.

Those tests all came back negative, and no inmates are currently symptomatic, Megan McMann, a sheriff’s office spokeswoman, said Tuesday.

A Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman did not immediately provide the updated information but last month announced one inmate, who tested positive, had been released.

California’s array of county jails hold about 21,700 fewer people — a drop of roughly one-third the pre-pandemic population, The Bee reported previously. It’s unclear how many county jail inmates statewide have contracted COVID-19 because the community corrections board does not collect that data.

Experts last month told The Bee that the combination of lagging testing and reporting gaps is masking cases of the disease nationwide, which could quickly spiral inside jail walls and out as inmates are released back into the community and jail employees come and go daily.

“There’s never been a greater need for oversight,” said Michele Deitch, a jails and prisons expert who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law and Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. “We have to find other ways to enhance transparency about what’s going on behind the walls, and one of the best ways to do that is through data.

“That’s good government 101.”