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Some 15 meat factories are under “active investigation” in relation to outbreaks of COVID-19 in their facilities.
Director of public health in the midwest Dr Mai Mannix revealed the figure at a HSE briefing in DCU on Friday 5 June.
She said in total, there were now 1,054 cases in meat plants since 1 June and 20 clusters out of 56 large-scale factories. Testing of all staff had been carried out in eight plants.
The figures mark a slight rise on all fronts since the previous week.
Dr Mannix said that 2.7% of all cases had had to be admitted to hospital.
“Thankfully we have no deaths in this grouping,” she said, adding that 58% of cases are aged between 25 and 44. Some 77.6% of affected workers are male and seven have been treated in intensive care units.
Contact tracing
With regard to concerns raised around contact tracing by Independent TD Denis Naughten, she was emphatic on the point that “contact tracing of workplace contacts is 100%”.
However, she admitted that it was lower in community settings.
“In relation to community contacts, this is often done via the contact-tracing centres. The information I have from speaking with my colleagues around the country is that this is about 90% complete, but there was one instance where the estimation was 60% to 70%.”
Non-English speakers
Dr Mannix also addressed the issue of informing management of meat plants of results before individual workers which caused controversy last month.
“…suppose again 20 to 40 of those are non-English speaking. Each of those 20 phone calls could take at least half an hour or an hour, because you have to use a translation service,” Dr Mannix said.
“So you're potentially looking at five people in my department to take four hours to go through to contact each of these twenty people.”
She explained it was a matter of trying to “save lives” and getting people as home as quickly as possible when a high number of cases were discovered.
Department of Health figures show that 88% of infected workers have now gone past the 14-day infectious period.
Dr Mannix said that factories were complying well with HSE protocols.
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