Alabama’s death toll from COVID-19 rose by 40 on Tuesday, the largest single-day increase in reported deaths since the onset of the pandemic, coming weeks after the state began to see a rise in cases that every day reaches new highs.

As of Tuesday, at least 1,136 people in Alabama have died from COVID-19. While deaths had largely plateaued since early May, death from COVID-19 typically occurs weeks after onset of symptoms, and public health experts worry that deaths will eventually rise as cases rose several weeks. It may take even longer for deaths to be reported in statewide data.

At least 129 deaths have been reported in the last week, the most in any seven-day period since the state’s first confirmed death in late March. At least 210 have come in the last two weeks — the most of any 14-day period.

Because deaths most often come weeks after infection — and because death data is even more delayed — the true toll from the state’s current surge in cases may not be seen for several more weeks.

Dr. Don Williamson, president of the Alabama Hospital Association and a former state health officer, told reporters during a press conference hosted by U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, D-Alabama, on Monday that about 13 percent of the state’s intensive care beds were available, or 211 beds.

“We can stretch that. We can take care of patients in other critical care areas, but as a measure of the impact of COVID, as that ICU bed availability goes down, it just tells us that our system is becoming increasingly stressed,” Williamson said.

Williamson said he’s concerned about continued surges in new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations, especially as schools soon begin to reopen and the regular flu season approaches, when hospitals regularly fill with flu patients even during a normal year.

“That’s the scenario where I become extremely concerned about system wide capacity,” Williamson said, noting that hospitals could be doubly strained by both COVID-19 and the flu.

Alabama on Tuesday added 1,673 new COVID-19 cases, and on Tuesday the total number of current hospitalizations of coronavirus patients again reached another all-time high. COVID-19 hospitalizations have increased more than 61 percent since July 1.

The seven-day average statewide positivity rate Tuesday was 16.58 percent, the highest since the start of the pandemic, taking into account incomplete testing data in April that threw off figures.

“Every single life, it does matter. Every single life is important, and is an absolute tragedy. Just to hear these statistics is alarming,” Jones said during the Monday press conference.

“What I’m extremely concerned about is if we find ourselves with 1,500 to 2,000 people hospitalized with COVID by the middle to end of this month, and we’re having 1,500 to 2,000 new cases diagnosed a day, as we approach the gathering of children together in August, in K 12, and in our colleges, I think we set ourselves up for what could be a potential disaster, in terms of new infections and new demand on hospitals,” Williamson said.

Asked by APR if he believes a statewide face mask order would help stem the continued surge in new COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, Williamson said yes, especially if a statewide order is coupled with local mask orders.

“I do think that now a statewide ordinance, and the association thinks that a statewide ordinance, added to the existing local ordinances will give us our best chance,” Williamson said. “Because in communities that may not be under a local ordinance, that doesn’t mean we don’t have virus being transmitted.”

Williamson said a statewide mask ordinance would also give business owners some cover, and the ability to tell customers that the order to wear a mask is statewide.

Alabama Hospital Association President Dr. Don Williamson speaks during a press conference Tuesday, July 14, 2020.

Despite surging COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations across Alabama and in many other states, an extra $600-per-week in unemployment compensation through the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation program is expected to expire July 26.

Asked by APR whether the extra aid could be extended, Jones said it’s possible, but encouraged the public to get back to work safely, because unemployment benefits will eventually end.

“We may see some type of extension, but we’re seeing pushback from Senator McConnell and the administration on extending unemployment benefits,” Jones said. “I’ll have to see how that goes. I do think, in my view, we need to kind of stair step this down a little bit.”

APR also asked both Jones and Williamson to speak on concerns about the reopening of schools while the state continues to see surging new cases and hospitalizations.

“Everyone is concerned about that,” Jones said, adding that a bill is pending that would provide more money for local school systems to prepare and help keep students, teachers and families safe.

“We’ve got to get more resources for schools to open safely too — whether it is masks for kids, whether it is more testing, whether it is reconfiguring school space,” Jones said.

What troubles Jones, he said, is that the reopening of schools is beginning to become a political issue, just as the wearing of masks has become a political issue.

The White House and President Donald Trump have publicly called for all schools to reopen, and Education Secretary Betsy Devos on Monday threatened to withhold federal funding to schools that decided not to reopen.

“One thing that is troubling me so much right now is that it seems that opening schools back up has become a political issue, and not an education or health issue. … We can’t let that happen folks,” Jones said. “This is about our children. It’s about our families. It’s about our teachers who are going to be there every day,  and we’ve got to try to find that balance.”

Williamson said he is concerned about the possibility of spiking cases once schools reopen, and that comparison some have made recently of the safe reopening of schools in some European countries isn’t applicable to the U.S., where cases continue to surge.

“My concern is if we find ourselves in a situation where we still have significant ongoing viral transmission, and we aren’t able to maintain six feet of social distance in the classroom, are we going to have those same sorts of results,” Williamson said of the reopenings in Europe. “And I don’t know the answer to that. I worry about it.”

Jones discussed legislation he and a bipartisan group of other Senators filed, called the Reopen Schools Safely Act, which would cover the costs of protecting students and educators from COVID-19. He hopes it will be included in the next packages of COVID-19 legislation.

“Anything we could do to get schools open safely and that local school systems feel appropriate,” Jones said.

Williamson encouraged the public to wear masks in public, and to practice social distancing to help ease the surge in cases, and try and stave off what he fears could become dangerously stressed hospital systems. “I think we have a very, very short window to get this under control,” he said.

Two more inmates in Alabama prisons have died after testing positive for COVID-19, according to the Alabama Department of Corrections, bringing the total number of inmate deaths after positive test results to 12.

ADOC also announced Monday that 32 more inmates and eight prison workers have tested positive for coronavirus, making Monday’s update the largest single-day tally of new cases and deaths.

Lavaris Evans, 31, of Birmingham who was serving at Easterling Correctional Facility died Sunday after testing positive for COVID-19, according to ADOC. He had no other underlying medical conditions, according to the department.

Barry Stewart Foy, 57, who was serving at Staton Correctional Facility, where he was housed in the infirmary because of multiple health problems, also died after testing positive for COVID-19, according to ADOC.

Foy was tested for coronavirus on June 11 after being exposed to another inmate in the infirmary who tested positive. He was taken to a local hospital on June 20, where he later died.

Sharon Evans, Lavaris Evans’s wife, speaking to APR by phone on June 26, which was 16 days before his death, described what she was able to learn about her husband’s condition and of the last time she spoke to him.

“One of his friends, another inmate, said that he was so unresponsive he couldn’t even walk. He fell out. They allowed him to just lay in bed for four or five days, and no aid rendered,” Evans said.

Correctional officers placed her husband in a single cell, Evans said, a practice the department has used in the past to isolate a person who is suspected of having coronavirus to quarantine them away from others.

When his friend went to check on him in that single cell, her husband was unable to stand and walk to get his food, Evans said the inmate told her. It was that other inmate that informed Evans of her husband’s conditions after days of her trying unsuccessfully to get some word from prison administrators, she said.

APR’s attempts to contact the inmate who knew Lavaris were unsuccessful.

“They gave me the runaround. They hung up on me. They left me on hold for long periods of time. They gave me a name of a person to contact within the facility, and I found out later that person no longer works there,” Evans said.

Evans said the last time she spoke to her husband was on June 16, and it was clear something was wrong.

“He said that he woke up in a sweat. He was very weak, like his body was so heavy, and he was short of breath. He couldn’t even make a complete sentence,” Evans said. “He kept trying to say ‘I love you. Just know that I love you.’ And I’m like, ‘No. Stop saying that,’ as if it was going to be his last time speaking with me.”

Evans said he started coughing and sounded as if he was throwing up “and then he dropped the phone and that was the last I heard from him. I’m nervous now because I don’t know anything,” Evans told a reporter more than two weeks before his death.

An APR reporter reached out to an ADOC spokeswoman on June 26 and asked that a prison administrator call Evans to update her on her husband’s whereabouts and condition, and the spokeswoman said that she would make that effort.

Evans said that she never heard from anyone at ADOC, but that another family member of her husband was able to learn from prison staff that he was taken to a local hospital some time after she spoke to him on June 16, but the family member got no other information on his condition.

Evans told APR in a message July 9 that an inmate told her that her husband’s condition was worsening, that he had tested positive for COVID-19, was having heart problems and had pneumonia.

Lavaris Evans was tested for COVID-19 at Easterling prison on June 23, according to ADOC’S press release Monday. That would have been seven days after his last conversation with his wife. The department said he was tested after he began exhibiting symptoms of coronavirus.

“Evans did not suffer from any known preexisting health conditions. He was transferred to a local hospital for additional care on June 25 after his condition began to decline and returned a second positive test result for COVID-19 while at the hospital. Evans remained under the care of the hospital until his passing,” ADOC said in the release.

Twenty-six of the 34 new confirmed coronavirus cases among inmates Monday are at St. Clair Correctional Facility, where on Monday a total of 29 inmates and 10 workers had tested positive for the virus since the pandemic began.

Four more inmates at Easterling prison and four at Bullock Correctional Facility have also tested positive for COVID-19.

Five more workers at Kilby Correctional Facility have confirmed cases of the virus, bringing the total among staff there to 25. Two workers at Easterling prison also self-reported positive test results, as did a worker at Bibb Correctional Facility.

Two workers at the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Woman previously died after testing positive for COVID-19. As of Monday, there have been 100 confirmed COVID-29 cases among inmates in Alabama, and 203 prison workers self-reported positive test results.

As the death toll and surging COVID-19 cases among inmates and staff continue, the department recently announced plans to ramp up testing, but for early proponents of expanded testing in state prisons, the move comes too late, and a lack of a detailed plan is troubling, they say.

ADOC on July 9 announced plans to start more broadly testing inmates and staff.

“The ADOC’s ultimate goal is to, over time, test every inmate across the correctional system for COVID-19,” according to a department press release.

Inmates are currently tested for coronavirus upon intake, when exhibiting symptoms of the virus and before medical appointments and procedures at local hospitals. Prison workers are asked to self-report positive COVID-19 test results.

ADOC said in the release last week that the next phase of expanded COVID-19 testing, “which will begin in the near future,” includes testing those inmates who are “most medically vulnerable,” and the department plans to test all inmates prior to release.

The department is also “working to develop a comprehensive plan and timeline” to provide staff with free testing “on a yet-to-be determined schedule.”

“The ADOC’s Office of Health Services (OHS) is working with community partners to develop both fixed and mobile testing sites and provide necessary logistical support,” the department’s press release states.

Asked Friday why plans for expanded testing of inmates and staff aren’t already finalized and ready to implement, ADOC spokeswoman Samantha Rose in a message said that the department’s Pandemic Continuity of Operations Plan is a “living” plan and is “regularly updated with new protocols, learnings, and actionable information based on the latest available data.”

Rose also said that COVID-19 testing capabilities “were extremely limited from March – May. This issue was not specific to Alabama, nor specific to correctional systems.”

Testing resources have expanded since the start of the pandemic, and so to have ADOC’s testing capabilities, Rose said.

“Given the fluid nature of COVID-19 and the now greater availability of testing resources, the expansion of our testing protocols — as indicated in our release — requires strategic implementation in order to achieve success as it relates to further containing the spread of the disease, which is the primary purpose. We fully intend to steward the taxpayer dollars funding this initiative thoughtfully to ensure we deliver appropriate available medical resources to our inmates and staff members,” Rose continued.

APR asked how long it might take for ADOC to begin the next phase of expanded testing, and Rose responded that the department will provide more information on the expanded testing strategy “and associated timelines related to its incremental implementation, in the near future.”

As of Monday, 535 of the state’s approximately 21,000 inmates had been tested for COVID-19, according to ADOC.

Dillon Nettles, a policy analyst at ACLU of Alabama, said in a message to APR on Monday that ADOC’s announcement of expanded testing is only as good as the plan and protocols in place to implement it.

“None have been disclosed or provided in detail. While several other states have forged ahead with mass testing of people in custody and staffers, ADOC seemingly has no plan for how they will execute testing at scale and adequately distance individuals who have been tested from those who have not,” Nettles said.

“The first COVID-19 patient in ADOC custody passed away nearly three months ago and in recent weeks two prison staffers have also died,” Nettles continued. “Mitigating this crisis as it has spread to our prisons is a responsibility that falls squarely upon Commissioner Dunn and ADOC leadership. They have yet to address it with the urgent and life-preserving response it demands.”

Immigrants in Alabama are responsible for more than $900 million in federal taxes and more than $350 million in state and local taxes, according to a study published Monday that assessed the economic impacts of immigrants in each state.

Of Alabama’s 4.9 million residents, 162,567 of them, or 3 percent, were foreign-born as of 2018, according to statistics compiled by the American Immigration Council, which advocates for immigration reform.

Alabama residents in immigrant-led households had $3.7 billion in spendable income, the study states.

Of the state’s immigrant population, 34 percent was undocumented in 2016. That is equal to 1 percent of the state’s total population. Undocumented immigrants represented 2 percent of the state’s workforce that year. They paid an estimated $54.1 million in federal taxes and $37.6 million in state and local taxes in 2018.

Roughly 67,000 of the state’s immigrants, or 41 percent, were naturalized citizens as of 2018. Three-quarters reported speaking English “well” or “very well,” according to the study.

A third had a college degree or higher. By comparison, 25 percent of native-born residents of Alabama have that level of education. Twenty-seven percent of immigrants had less than a high school diploma compared to 13 percent of native-born Alabamians.

Mexico is the most common country of origin at 27 percent of immigrants. China and India each account for 6 percent, followed by Guatemala and Germany with 5 percent each.

The industries employing the largest shares of the immigrant population are construction, services other than public administration, accommodation and food services, agriculture and manufacturing. 

There were 4,000 active recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA, as of 2019. Of those eligible for DACA, 58 percent had applied. These groups combined were responsible for $11.4 million in state and local taxes, or 3.2 percent of the total amount paid by foreign-born residents.

Immigrants represented 6 percent of the state’s business owners and generated $319.8 million in business income in 2018, the study said.

The Alabama Cannabis Industry Association on Monday released a statement critical of the decision by an Alabama court to imprison an Arizona man for five years after his probation for a 2016 marijuana arrest was revoked in April.

Sean Worsley was an Iraq War vet who legally uses marijuana for post-traumatic stress disorder, and for back and shoulder pain stemming from being wounded in an IED attack in Iraq.

He and his wife were arrested in Gordo, in Pickens County, in August 2016 after a police officer found the marijuana while questioning the Worsleys about the volume of their music when they stopped to get gas.

That Worsley had a valid medical cannabis card in Arizona — one of 33 states where that is legal — was no defense for the authorities in Pickens County. Worsley missed a court date in Pickens County after the VA rejected his application for a substance abuse program, so Pickens County issued a fugitive arrest warrant.

When Arizona arrested Worsley for letting his medical cannabis card expire, he was extradited back to Alabama. He is currently detained in Pickens County awaiting a spot to become available in an Alabama Department of Corrections facility.

Worsley could spend the next 60 months as a guest of Alabama taxpayers.

Black disabled veteran sentenced to 60 months in prison for medical marijuana

A 2016 arrest for marijuana that has turned into a 60-month sentence in an Alabama penitentiary for a disabled veteran from Arizona is drawing national attention.

“The Alabama Cannabis Industry Association (AlCIA) has seen the need to bring clarity to the laws related to the medical marijuana issue facing our citizens,” said Michael Fritz, the general counsel for the Alabama Cannabis Industry Association.

Fritz said that legislators created the new Class D category of offenses so that habitual offenders don’t serve long prison systems, but they left police and district attorneys with broad discretion to determine whether a person possessing cannabis is using that solely for “personal use.”

That discretion is the difference between having misdemeanor charge and becoming a  felon, Fritz said.

“States all across this country have acknowledged the medical benefits that cannabis brings to those suffering” from conditions like PTSD, Fritz said. “The ALCIA is fighting to allow those already suffering to have access to proper medication without the fear of becoming a felon.”

“Sean Worsley is a prime example of why we are fighting,” Fritz told APR. “Medical Marijuana can help our veterans that suffer from PTSD, anxiety as well as pain from physically disabilities. It’s time to permit medical cannabis in our state, as our sister states have done and avoid needlessly jamming our already over crowed prisons with marijuana arrest.”

A counselor who treats veterans with PTSD told APR that it is common for veterans with PTSD to use medical marijuana to self-medicate with cannabis and that veterans like Worsley should not be mistreated by our criminal justice system.

Chey Garrigan, the executive director of the ACIA, said that Alabama Appleseed and the Southern Poverty Law Center partnered with Western Carolina University economists Angela K. Dills and Audrey Redford to calculate that enforcing Alabama’s possession of marijuana laws costs the state an estimated $22 million a year.

Fritz told APR that if you are caught with 2.2 pounds of marijuana, the Alabama Courts charge you with trafficking, but that there are no guidelines under Alabama law in how to determine whether an amount smaller than that is for personal use — a minor offense — or not for personal use, which is a Class C felony in the state of Alabama.

Worsley was charged with the Class C offense.

Worsley’s mother has hired an attorney to appeal the conviction. Meanwhile, the Worsleys are hoping that he can receive clemency from the Alabama court system. Sean has already served approximately six months in jail in Arizona and Pickens County for this.

A bill to legalize medical marijuana has passed the Alabama Senate in each of the last two years, but the bills have failed to come to a vote in the Alabama House of Representatives.

“It’s time to permit medical cannabis in our state, as our sister states have done and avoid needlessly jamming our already over crowed prisons with marijuana arrests,” Garrigan said.

Sean’s plight was first made public by original reporting by Alabama Appleseed’s Leah Nelson.