KELSO, Wash. — Four cases of COVID-19 have been detected at the Foster Farms processing plant, and health officials are testing other employees to see if the virus has spread further. None of the four employees with the disease required hospitalization.
Six hundred people work at the plant. Health officials they are focusing their testing, to start, on 90 employees that work in the same part of the facility where the four infected employees worked.
“For now we’re going to start there. We’re trying to find more cases, and if we find a case in another part of the facility we would likely ramp up, but that’s where we’re starting right now,” said Cowlitz County Deputy Health Officer Dr. Steven Krager.
Krager said they will be watching closely and working with Foster Farms to improve social distancing and other health safety features to mitigate the risk.
“I am concerned because of what’s happened at other facilities across the country,” said Krager, referring to other meat processing plants with large outbreaks. “Four is not as big as 50 or 100 or 200 that I’ve seen in other places but it’s a start, and so we’re going to keep a very close eye on things.”
Foster Farms put out a statement describing safety features it is adding, including barriers in work and break areas, hand washing and sanitizing stations, and providing masks for employees. It is also checking employees’ temperatures at work.
The statement added, “Foster Farms is committed to ensuring the continued health and well-being of our employees, consumers, suppliers and communities as we work to ensure the availability of food on our nation’s shelves.”
Health officials will be contact tracing the current cases and looking at new coronavirus test results closely.
Dr. Krager is hopeful they’ve caught this mini-outbreak quickly enough, but acknowledges it’s too soon to tell.
“There is a decent amount of people with asymptomatic infections which can just be so hard to track down," he said.a"A lot of people don’t even notice a change at all, so that makes this virus particularly hard to find.”
Information COVID-19 in Cowlitz County can be found at the Health and Human Services website.