Managing and Mitigating COVID-19 in a Large County Jail

About the Program

Category: County Administration and Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

Cook County Jail is one of the largest single-site correctional facilities in the nation. Cook County Health (CCH) provides comprehensive correctional health care to detainees at the Cook County Jail (CCJ). On March 18, 2020 the first suspected case of COVID-19 was identified in a CCJ detainee. Over the course of the next several weeks, hundreds of detainees along with Cook County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) correctional officers and CCH staff tested positive for COVID-19. The congregate nature typical of correctional facilities, combined with the unique challenges of housing and keeping safe individuals in the custody of law enforcement, required immediate coordination and cooperation between CCH, CCSO and their partners. The challenge was to manage and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Collective and aggressive efforts by CCH, CCSO, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Chicago Department of Public Health resulted in significant containment and mitigation of the spread of COVID-19 at the Jail. Implementation of widespread testing, added or reconfigured housing for detainees, relentless social distancing and universal masking of staff and detainees together with extensive quarantining of COVID-19 cases and all new detainees resulted in a dramatic drop in the positivity rate and a major drop in the number of cases.