On Jan. 13, Lehigh County Board of Commissioners extended the state of emergency declaration until April 16. It has been in effect since March 16, 2020.

Commissioners made it clear the COVID-19 emergency declaration allows Executive Phillips Armstrong to allocate resources in connection with the fighting of the pandemic.

The action does not modify any measures put in place by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf.

In other news, Lehigh County Jail Director of Corrections Janine Donate recounted the current state of COVID-19 affairs at the jail.

Donate said, as of Jan. 13, there were 714 inmates at the jail. She did note 109 of these are being held at the request of other counties or agencies.

“We instituted a mask policy back in April for inmates and all staff members,” Donate said. “This is a very fluid situation. We are making daily, sometimes hourly, adjustments in our procedures to react to the ever-changing world of the virus.”

According to Donate, there has been a spike in positive cases since Thanksgiving.

“We certainly saw an uptick in our staff members that were testing positive,” she reported.

Donate said the rise in positive rates at the jail was not sudden.

“It was a slow and steady rise through the summer months and into the fall,” she said. “As we did our contact tracing in our facility, we identified a trend where those officers who were working on their housing posts, the inmate population became symptomatic or tested positive.

“We received the Abbott rapid antigen test Dec. 4, 2020. If we had not started testing Dec. 7, 2020, those cases would not have been identified,” she said.

The Abbott rapid antigen test is used for detecting active COVID-19 infections on a large scale. Results are provided in 15 minutes.

After testing, Donate said, positive inmates were moved to separate housing units within the jail; however, moving inmates can take time.

“This led to the misconception we were housing positive-tested inmates with negative-tested inmates,” Donate said. “A positive inmate is never held in the same cell as a negative inmate.”

Donate said the Abbott test is given to all new inmates when they are checked in. All those inmates who tested negative are, after 14 days, tested again. Then after 14 more days, they are tested once more.

Donate previously reported a 54-year-old inmate died of COVID-19 Dec. 31, 2020, while in a hospital. This was the first COVID-19 death reported among prisoners in the Lehigh Valley.

Donate reported they are still adequately stocked with personal protective equipment. She said the Pennsylvania Correctional Industries provides cloth masks, and each inmate is issued two of them.

An inmate who didn’t want to be identified, but who was in the jail at the beginning of the pandemic, shared some experiences of his stay. He was released in March 2020.

He said the visitor ban at the beginning of the pandemic was “really hard on the inmates” for whom visitors are one of the few links with normalcy. He questioned whether the ban was effective toward controlling the virus since they were separated from the inmates by a glass barrier.

According to the former inmate, COVID-19 abatement procedures required inmates to wash their hands, but the same bar of anti-bacterial soap was used by more than one inmate.

Regardless, the former inmate reported, based on his personal experience, “Lehigh County Jail is definitely one of the better jails in Pennsylvania.”

“I want to thank my staff,” Donate said. “These have been trying times. The last 30 to 45 days have been especially difficult. They have been resilient. The strength they have shown for the past month and a half has been commendable.”