Meat plant must be held to account for Covid-19 outbreak, says German minister
The owners of Europe’s largest meatprocessing plant must be held to account for a mass coronavirus outbreak that has infected more than 1,500 of its workers, Germany’s labour minister has said.
Hubertus Heil said an entire region had been “taken hostage” by the factory’s failure to protect its employees, most of whom come from Romania and Bulgaria.
Germany’s coronavirus reproduction or R rate leapt to 2.88 over the weekend largely as a result of the outbreak at the plant at Gütersloh in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW). About 7,000 people have been sent into quarantine as a result of the outbreak, and schools and kindergartens in the region that had been gradually reopened have been forced to close until at least after the summer holidays.
Health authorities have accused Tönnies, the family-run business that owns the plant, of breaking regulations around physical distancing that were introduced to dampen the spread of coronavirus. Authorities say Tönnies has also been reluctant to give them access to workers’ contact details, allegedly hampering the tracking and tracing of the workers and their contacts. Tönnies said delays in handing over personnel data had been due to Germany’s strict data protection laws.
Clemens Tönnies, the company’s billionaire CEO, held a press briefing at the weekend at which he apologised for his company’s management of the crisis, and said it would take “full responsibility” for what had to be done to combat it. Within his own family there have also reportedly been attempts to oust him from his role. He has ruled out resigning.
Heil said trust in the company was “precisely zero”, accusing Tönnies of endangering not only its workers but also public health in general. Authorities in the region are considering introducing curfews in the vicinity in an effort to stop the virus from spreading further. The 17.93 million population of NRW, Germany’s most populous state, may have to be placed under a fresh lockdown, Armin Laschet, the state leader, said.
“It cannot be ruled out at the moment,” he said.
“We have closed schools and kindergartens, which is the first stage in a lockdown, and we will examine other measures in the coming days,” Laschet added.
The developments have been described as a massive psychological blow for the state’s citizens who like elsewhere in Germany had been adjusting to an easing of lockdown rules in recent weeks. Heil said he could understand the “level of fury” in the region.
Frantic attempts are being made to contain the outbreak in the hope it can be confined to the workers of the factory, which has been closed until further notice. Teams have been sent to towns and communities in surrounding area to carry out tests. Family members of those who work at the factories are all being tested.
A total of 32 teams were dispatched on Sunday and the number was expected to increase this week, according to a spokesperson for the Gütersloh area, who said tests would be available for everyone in the area around the factory.
The teams consist of employees from the local orderly office, containment scouts from the health authority, members of the German Red Cross, members of the German military and translators. Most of the workers come from Bulgaria and Romania and speak little or no German.
Not all the results of the tests carried out on the factory grounds at the weekend were yet known, so the number of cases was expected to rise. Twenty-one people are being treated in four hospitals. Six – five of whom are Tönnies employees – are in intensive care, two of whom are on ventilators, German media reported.
The federal health minister, Jens Spahn, said the incident, which has followed smaller outbreaks at plants elsewhere, illustrated the importance of interrupting infection chains before they got out of control. He urged authorities to ensure Tönnies employees kept to the quarantine rules “in order to prevent a spread to the whole of Germany”.
Working practices in the meatprocessing industry have come under increasing focus in recent weeks. Employees who typically work and live together in close quarters are often contracted by outside companies, meaning they may not be protected by Germany’s labour standards and wage regulations.
Last month MPs voted in favour of stricter regulations on the industry, including an outlawing of outside contractors, which will come into effect next January. Politicians from the Social Democrats and Green party are demanding a rethink of meat production, including the introduction of a minimum price system.
Norbert Walter-Borjans, the coleader of the Social Democrats, said the outbreak had underlined the importance of the need in Germany for a debate about distributive justice. “Meat is a product which requires a high degree of energy and other raw materials. There’s often a huge discrepancy between its actual value and price,” he said.
Anton Hofreiter, the parliamentary leader of the Greens, said Clemens Tönnies should “pay for the resulting costs for this virus outbreak from his own pocket, if he is really serious about his apology”.
Germany has about 6,100 confirmed active cases of coronavirus. Its death toll is 9,058.
The Robert Koch Institute, the main body advising the government on issues of public health, said the R-rate’s rise to 2.88 was less alarming than it at first appeared because as the number of active cases falls, the more sensitive the R-rate becomes to individual outbreaks, such as that in Gütersloh.