El Paso County Sheriff’s office creates command center to track COVID-19 effects
EL PASO COUNTY, Colo. (KRDO) -- When the COVID-19 outbreak started taking effect nationwide, law enforcement agencies started putting together plans for how they'd manage the virus among their employees.
The El Paso County Sheriff's Office created an Incident Command Team that would track the effect of the coronavirus it has on their department.
Jeff Kramer, commander of the team says, "We could roll out a series of processes that we could use internally for the sheriff's office to be able to track and inform on a daily basis the impacts COVID-19 has had on the sheriff's office."
Every morning, the team starts their day with reports from division leaders across the agency.
The reports break down the following:
- Staffing in every division, who's sick out and if their symptoms are COVID-19 related
- Extra expenditures on personal protective equipment
- Time tracking of employees, who and when did someone work and if they could have passed the virus to someone else
- Operational changes, what measures are put in place because of pandemic
"It's extremely valuable and in fact, I suppose when we started we didn't recognize how valuable it would end up being," Kramer explained.
The process proved it's a success when Dep. Jeff Hopkins after contracting COVID-19, and the team had to identify who he worked with and when he was last at the El Paso County jail.
"[We can] go back pretty quickly and identify things like 'what was the status about certain employees out of the division he worked in? Regarding who was out sick, did they have COVID symptoms? Was he on those lists?'" Kramer said.
The team consists of longtime employees who were called from their positions to work on the incident command teams, others are brand new employees who couldn't complete the training for their hired position due to COVID-19, but had skills that would make them appropriate for this line of work.
