Lincoln County is racing Tuesday to begin tracking down everyone that 124 seafood workers with COVID-19 have been in touch with the past two weeks.
The workers are all from Pacific Seafood’s five plants on the Newport bayfront, which have been closed since Friday because of the outbreak. It is by far the largest public workplace coronavirus outbreak in Oregon since the start of the pandemic.
“Until this point the pandemic has been distant,” Lincoln County Commission Chair Kaety Jacobson told reporters Monday. “That is no longer the case.”
The outbreak has rocked county officials and the public.
“This is a massive amount of cases for us,” Nicole Fields, deputy director of the county health department, told commissioners Monday afternoon.
The county had relatively few COVID-19 cases until a week ago, when that bumped up to 31 following the Memorial Day weekend. And there were no local hospitalizations.
Now the number of cases has reached 157, the county said Tuesday, adding the case of a child connected to the Pacific Seafood outbreak.
There was a second hospital admission Monday, but is a case not associated with the outbreak.
A handful of prominent coastal restaurants, which had just reopened, announced temporary closures Monday to protect employees and customers. The Lincoln County School District delayed its summer meal program for two days and the Waldport Moose Lodge suspended its popular program that had delivered more than 8,000 meals since March. And county commissioners held a brief debate about requiring all people to wear masks in public — but decided against it.
Health department director Rebecca Austen also pushed back on a Sunday statement from the Oregon Health Authority that the Newport outbreak represented a low risk to the public. The people who tested positive for COVID-19 live and work in the county, she said.
“There is going to be some risk in Lincoln County … there will be risk,” Austen said.
The first local hospitalization occurred Sunday. A person went to the emergency room at Samaritan North Lincoln Hospital in Lincoln City and Monday morning was rushed to Good Samaritan Medical Center in Corvallis, hospital chief executive officer Dr. Lesley Ogden told county commissioners Monday afternoon.
But the biggest task will be tracking down family, friends, causal acquaintances and anyone else who has had contact with the newly diagnosed cases
Pacific Seafood, which paid for a private laboratory to test its 376 workers, gave the county a list of the infected workers Monday afternoon. The company said had already told workers with positive tests to stay home and that they won’t be allowed to return to work until they get a negative test.
Austen told reporters Monday that the 34 percent positive rate “is extremely high.”
“It’s going to take us quite awhile … a few days … to get through all these 124 people,” Austen said. “They have housing here; they have families here. We don’t know who the close contacts are yet.”
Anyone who has been within six feet of a COVID-19 positive person for 15 minutes or longer will be asked to quarantine for 14 days, the county said. They won’t be tested for the coronavirus unless they develop symptoms or get a referral from a doctor.
The county has trained additional staff to help with tracing and is getting help from the state and other counties.
Company tests everyone Friday
The company said that 53 positive tests were among its employees and 71 were from workers hired through local contracting companies. County officials said Monday they believe that all of the positive cases were Lincoln County residents and not laborers from elsewhere who had come to Newport to work.
State agriculture officials said they will be at the plant Tuesday to to inspect and advise the company on safety and operating protocols.
The company had already announced last week it was making changes throughout the plants to protect workers, including extensive cleanings, requiring face masks or face shields, daily temperature checks, installing work station barriers, and staggering work shifts.
The Oregon Department of Agriculture visit will help see if the plant can safely reopen after the company’s changes, said Rustin Rock, a agency food safety specialist who had also visited the plant June 2.
“We don’t want any more outbreaks but we do want them to at least have a partial operation,” said Rock, adding that the plant’s closure could jeopardize some of the area’s seafood harvest.
“You have to protect public health. That’s No. 1,” Rock said. “But you have an essential food processor that needs help too.”
Lincoln County Public Health officials weeks ago had expressed concern about the outbreak among hundreds of workers in the close confines of Newport’s food processing plants.
County officials said they had asked Pacific Seafood managers if they had protocols in place should there be an outbreak.
Austen and Jacobson said the county also requested if it could do “active surveillance and testing” to establish a baseline for the presence of coronavirus among workers.
“The plant wasn’t quite ready to go there yet,” Austen said Monday.
Dr. Paul Ciselack of the Oregon Health Authority told reporters that the state was also not willing at that point to test large numbers of people who were not showing symptoms of the coronavirus.
Now that testing is more widespread across the state, Ciselack said it is more important to judge the severity of the coronavirus in Oregon by looking at the rate of hospitalizations, which until recently were averaging “a steady” 30-34 a week. But testing increases, more positive cases and a rise in hospitalizations the past week is changing that.
Seafood processors on the Oregon coast are in full swing this time of year. Like many agricultural processors in the Northwest and across the country they are very susceptible to COVID-19 outbreaks – but are considered essential businesses by state and federal regulators and not required to shut down.
Pacific Seafood and Bornstein Seafood plants in Clatsop County were shut down in May because of outbreaks there. The bulk of that county’s 46 COVID-19 cases can be traced to the plants, the county’s health director said last week, as he called on state agencies to more closely inspect plants and conduct regular testing.
The 124 cases at Pacific Seafood dwarfs Oregon’s last major outbreak at a food processor – 48 cases confirmed at Townsend Farms, a berry processor with plants in Fairview and Cornelius. There was an earlier outbreak involving 34 cases at a food plant in Albany.
Not testing people who do not show symptoms of the virus is exactly how asymptomatic transmission of this virus spreads. The only reason so many of those cases were identified is because Pacific Seafood tested everyone. Were it up to the OHA and their backwards standards for testing, many of those positive cases would have been missed. Check out what http://www.covidactnow.org has to say about this for Lincoln County.
It isn’t good news. It certainly isn’t business as usual and it’s doubtful it will ever be.