At least 92 cases of COVID-19 and two COVID-19-related deaths have been connected to the Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Joslin, Illinois, as of April 29.
According to a notice on the Rock Island County Health Department (RICHD) website, those cases were found in residents of the county who work at the plant. However, the health department noted that there could be other cases, since there are residents of other Illinois counties and also in neighboring Iowa. It is the responsibility of the employees’ home counties to follow up on cases involving those residents, RICHD stated.
“The meatpacking industry is inherently prone to COVID-19 cases because employees work in close proximity to each other, RICHD Administrator Nita Ludwig said. “Our team has been working with Tyson managers for several weeks to work on mitigation efforts to reduce the number of cases, and the Tyson team has been taking our advice to heart.”
Ludwig credited Tyson installing barriers between workers and staggering shifts and breaks to reduce the number of employees congregating, in addition to implementing other health and safety measures.
Rock Island County has had a total of 426 COVID-19 cases to date.
RICHD’s infectious disease team has been working with each patient and family to help minimize the number on infections outside of the plant through a process called contact tracing, which is the basis of public health infection control. Public health staff ask patients a series of questions to help them recall everyone with whom they have had close contact during the timeframe while they may have been infectious. For COVID-19, the contagion period is 2-14 days after exposure.
Tyson Fresh Meats is the beef and pork subsidiary of Tyson Foods.
The diversified protein company has made the decision to idle multiple plants in recent weeks as it deals with the pandemic and its impact on workers. Among those plants to have operations temporarily halted include a poultry plant in Robards, Kentucky; beef plants in Pasco, Washington; and Dakota City, Nebraska; and pork plants in Logansport, Indiana; Waterloo, Iowa; and Columbus Junction, Iowa.
View our continuing coverage of the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic.
