Sedgwick County expects COVID-19 testing numbers for inmates to ‘change dramatically’

About 46% of inmates tested for COVID-19 at the Sedgwick County Jail have had test results come back positive, with the total number of positive and negative cases expected to “change dramatically” as the sheriff’s office works to test all its roughly 1,510 inmates and staff by the end of the week.

“We expect to start hearing either today or tomorrow the results of the 350 or so tests that we completed on Monday,” sheriff’s Col. Brian White told the Sedgwick County Commission on Wednesday. “We will start finding those results today and tomorrow and then these numbers will change dramatically as the week rolls on and into next week.”

The Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office has been taking the tests to Topeka in order to get the results within 2-3 days.

The jail tested roughly 350 inmates on Tuesday and plans to continue that testing rate daily until all the inmates are tested. They also will continue to test people who come back negative, White said.

People who come through booking and will go on to housing will be tested first and isolated together until the results come back.

So far, White said, 123 inmates have tested positive and 144 came back negative. Staff has had 11 positives and 36 negatives, he said.

White said they have been working with municipal and district court to release inmates with non-violent offenses. They have been releasing about 30 to 40 inmates every day but take about that many in each day through booking, he said.

The jail started releasing inmates early in the pandemic and then slowed the process before inmates started to test positive a few weeks ago.

“But it’s been a very brief amount of time and we really haven’t seen the impact of some of those strategies,” he said, “but we expect that that will start happening soon.”

With the current outbreak, the Kansas Department of Corrections hasn’t been taking inmates from Sedgwick County, but that will start to change after the jail started to implement “some of their rules,” White said.

The outbreak also led the Sedgwick County District Court to issue an administrative order Tuesday suspending in-person court appearances for jail inmates for 30 days or until the outbreak is over. Judges plan to hold virtual hearings for those defendants and anyone who was in the jail over the past two weeks to prevent the infection from spreading into the courthouse.