Two Edendale Fonterra staff test positive for Covid19

INVERCARGILL: Dairy giant Fonterra Cooperative Group has temporarily closed its Edendale distribution centre in Southland for 48 hours to allow for deep cleaning after two workers tested positive for Covid19.

Fonterra was declared an essential service when New Zealand moved to the Alert Level 4 lockdown two weeks ago. At the time, it said employees in the food supply chain, such as farmers, tanker drivers, manufacturing and distribution centre employees, were to keep working but follow very strict government guidance to protect themselves and the community from the virus.

Gordon Carlyle, director of global supply chain, said the deep cleaning started on Tuesday evening and ‘‘the remainder of our Edendale site will continue to operate during this time and milk collection and processing is not impacted’’.

The two workers appear to be members of a local outbreak known as the Bluff cluster. The cluster, which is the secondlargest in New Zealand, is directly linked to a wedding that took place on March 21. There are 81 cases that form part of the Bluff cluster, including eight new cases in the past 24 hours, data from the Ministry of Health shows.

New Zealand currently has a total of 1210 confirmed and probable cases.

‘‘Our employees are also members of the community and, as you’ll know, there is a significant outbreak locally, referred to as the Bluff cluster. With this in mind, our priority is to take conservative actions and precautions on site to keep our people protected from catching or spreading the virus,’’ Mr Carlyle said.

However, ‘‘the scale of our business — with more than 20,000 employees in more than 20 countries around the world, combined with the global nature of Covid19 — means it’s inevitable that some of our people will test positive’’. — BusinessDesk