JSo Coesfeld. In a third meat company in Germany, a special accumulation of corona cases occurred within a very short time. According to the Coesfeld district, 129 infected people were recorded at the Westfleisch factory, one of the largest meat factories in the region in the Münsterland region. That’s a good 10 percent of the employees at the location. The high number of infections led to the district exceeding the upper limit set by the federal and state governments. In the district of Steinburg in Schleswig-Holstein, where employees from another slaughterhouse live, the maximum number of 50 newly infected people per 100,000 inhabitants was exceeded within a week. The state of Schleswig-Holstein reacted to the positive tests in the slaughterhouses on Friday evening: the local health ministry announced that it would have the staff of all slaughterhouses tested for the virus.
The affected slaughterhouse in Coesfeld is therefore temporarily closed, as the North Rhine-Westphalian Minister of Health Karl-Josef Laumann (CDU) announced on Friday in Düsseldorf. In addition, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia has all employees in slaughterhouses tested for the corona virus. The state government has ordered the workers to be “immediately” tested, a government spokesman said. The accommodations of the factories’ employees, who often come from Eastern Europe, are also to be checked. The meat industry is largely dependent on foreign employees who are often hired through subcontractors.
“Whole branch under general suspicion”
The Tönnies Group, which is by far the largest meat supplier in Germany with sales of more than 7 billion euros last year, believes that “an entire industry is now under general suspicion”. “Eight weeks ago, we were asked in the food industry to continue working during the lockdown, such as hospitals, nursing homes and energy supply. We have fulfilled this mandate, knowing that it increases the risk of infection, ”said a company spokesman. “It is very questionable that the state should regulate all accommodations.” A family with three children now has to set up a disinfection dispenser in every room and wash all laundry at 60 degrees. Tönnies has never had a large number of corona cases.
Westfleisch had already cut production earlier due to the large loss of employees. The company left requests for dealing with the virus unanswered on Friday. The member of the Bundestag, Friedrich Ostendorff von der Grünen, in whose constituency Westfleisch’s business is located, demands more transparency from the company, where many employees are accommodated. “Disease protection is only possible with individual accommodation,” he said.
Perhaps Coesfeld could learn from Birkenfeld. In April, in the town west of Pforzheim, there was a sensational accumulation of corona cases at Müller-Fleisch, one of the largest cattle slaughterhouses in Germany. There, an employee of Covid-19 fell ill, and the health department then began large-scale tests, right on the company’s premises – to get security, as Brigitte Joggerst, head of the health department, said. Already in the first round of the tests it was found that 90 out of 250 people tested were infected with the coronavirus, most of whom showed no symptoms. The district office in Enzkreis then quarantined all operations. Slaughtering and processing of the meat continued, but the employees were only allowed to be at work and at home, nowhere else.
Every third employee is infected
It quickly became apparent that the problem was much bigger. Every third employee of Müller-Fleisch’s 1100 employees was infected. The vast majority were subcontractors from Eastern Europe. Their living conditions are so cramped that one can hardly avoid one another, was the analysis of the health department, while meat entrepreneur Stefan Müller pointed out that those affected come from a cultural area in which people like to celebrate. The hope of the district office, through the quarantine for the company and its employees as well as the close control to prevent the spread of viruses, was shattered, however, because the “closed system” created in this way was reopened by the company itself: for the upcoming barbecue season and the foreseeable future 50 additional employees had already been hired to meet higher demand.
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