By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Missouri state officials say they are deploying a new strategy while conducting mass testing for COVID-19 at Triumph Foods in St. Joseph.
State officials learned of the first two cases at Triumph immediately and began testing last week. Testing will continue through this week, with every employee being tested for the coronavirus.
Gov. Mike Parson confirms the state is worried about Missouri’s meat packing industry with outbreaks in Saline and Moniteau Counties in addition to the worries at Triumph.
“Number one, it’s a huge concern of the state here,” Parson says. “One, because it has to do with the food supply chain of not only our state, but our country. So, we’re very concerned any time we’re seeing those issues.”
Triumph Foods confirms 16 employees at its plant in St. Joseph have tested positive for COVID-19. Workers who tested positive are in self-quarantine, according to Triumph. Triumph employs more than 2,800 workers in St. Joseph, processing more than 1.5 billion pounds of pork annually.
Missouri now has the ability to test hundreds of residents at a time; using that to target potential outbreaks for COVID-19.
State Health Director Randall Williams says as many as 500 Triumph workers can be tested a day.
“It’s important to understand that this is comprehensive surveillance testing. We do not have an outbreak there,” according to Williams, who says the state is being incredibly proactive and testing everybody at Triumph.
Parson says the state now has the ability to conduct hundreds of tests at a time as a precautionary measure in an attempt to head off any localized outbreak.
“We’ve got the ability to go in there and do those tests and that’s something we didn’t have two or three weeks ago, but we have the ability to do that today and we are doing that currently as we speak,” Parson says.
Williams says he has talked with the Triumph plant manager.
“Is there a pattern there that we need to be in tune with? Again, they’ve been incredibly responsive and can’t thank them enough for cooperating, as have the doctors,” according to Parson. “We’ve had some phenomenal doctors up there help us at two of the large health systems up there, Northwest (Health Services) and Mosaic, and so we really appreciate their help.”
Parson says the new strategy hopes to keep on top of hotspots to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.
“One of the things that we’re getting much better at, to have the ability to go out and what I want to call target testing or basically for these hot spots around the state that we can go in and test,” Parson says. “That’s exactly we did. When a couple of the processing plants had a little bit of a problem there, we were able to immediately go up there and frankly test as many people as we needed to test.”
Mass testing of Triumph workers will continue all week with 500 employees tested each day.