CK Public Health and the Municipality of Chatham-Kent continue to ensure residents best practices are being utilized in dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak at Greenhill Produce.
In a media briefing on Thursday, CAO Don Shropshire acknowledged that inspections are being done daily.
“We’ve had Public Health team members out every day doing inspections,” says Shropshire. “They’ve been accompanied by translators, to make sure that some of the migrant workers whose first language is not English have access to the information in their primary language.”
Online accusations from an anonymous source previously suggested positive and negative case workers were still living in bunkhouses together.
CK Public Health has since denied those allegations.
“We have done everything to mitigate that,” says C-K’s Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Colby. “We have shuffled people between bunkhouses to make sure those that have symptoms and those that have tested positive are housed separately from those that are asymptomatic and have tested negative.”
Shropshire adds that the owners of Greenhill Produce are doing what they can to help their affected workers.
“The owners have been stepping up. They’re still paying the workers that remian in isolation. They’ve also been providing for their food and medication and so on that they require.”
There are a total of 48 positive cases at Greenhill.
Earlier this week, Dr. Colby shared that he believes the outbreak started with a local employee and not a migrant worker.
Colby says one local employee showed symptoms of the coronavirus in late March but wasn’t tested until recently. While the test showed up as negative, it very well may have been a positive case prior, according to the doctor.
One other local employee began showing symptoms on April 8th and later tested positive.
“My hypothesis is that the source of this outbreak at Greenhill was a Chatham-Kent resident,” says Dr. Colby. “And I’m not putting ANY fault on that resident. They didn’t know they had it. From there, the bunkhouse environment fomented that spread of this through the population.”
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