Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones Emerges From COVID-19 Quarantine

UPDATE: Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones announced Wednesday that he has cleared the COVID-19 quarantine period and has returned to work.

Jones took to Facebook to make the announcement:

"My symptoms were fortunately mild--like a cold with a low fever--and started clearing up in a couple days. Fortunately, I did not transmit the virus to anyone and everyone in my family or with whom I had come into contact tested negative."

The sheriff's office says Jones started developing COVID-19 symptoms at the end of November after being exposed to another employee who also later tested positive for the virus..

Jones is now one of the dozens of sheriff's office employees to have contracted coronavirus. An exact number has not been released.

Jones has played foil to California's COVID-19 emergency orders. Ahead of Gov. Gavin Newsom's mid-November announcement of a month-long curfew for the state, Jones released a statement that made it explicitly clear his deputies would not enforce compliance with the order.

Further, at the outset of the pandemic when Newsom handed down a mask mandate, Jones also released a statement that outlined how his deputies would comply but would not be "criminally" enforcing the order.

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The sheriff was also among the voices who called for the state to start reopening its economy in May.

"It is time to let people out of their houses and responsibly open the economy, to let businesses thrive and employees and former employees get back to work," Jones wrote in May 6 Facebook post.

Other law enforcement agencies across the state also released statements echoing Jones' stance.