Almost 300 staff test positive after outbreak at sandwich factory

Almost 300 staff have tested positive for coronavirus following an outbreak at a sandwich factory in Northampton.

Northampton’s director of public health confirmed that Greencore factory is affected by the outbreak and some staff are self-isolating.

Lucy Wightman director of public health at Northamptonshire County Council said that 213 positive test result came back from Greencore’s private testing, whilst 79 workers result were positive from NHS tests.

Wightman added, “We are working with colleagues at Greencore in Northampton after the discovery of an outbreak of COVID-19 in the workplace.

“Public Health England Midlands have been providing support to colleagues at Greencore in managing the outbreak.

“This has been supplemented by support from the local infection prevention and control team and Northampton Borough Council’s environmental health colleagues.”

She added, “It is evident that Greencore has highly effective measures in place and they continue to work extremely hard to exceed the requirements needed to be COVID-19 secure within the workplace.

“Northampton borough has been experiencing a high number of cases over the last four weeks and residents and employees have been asked to ‘act now’ to follow additional measures, to avoid a local lockdown or further government intervention.”

In a statement the Greencore factory said, “As a result of the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the Northampton area, we took the decision to start proactively testing all of the colleagues at our Northampton site.

“We can confirm that a number of colleagues have tested positive for the virus and are now self-isolating.

“We are liaising closely with PHE East Midlands, Northamptonshire County Council and Northampton Borough Council, who are fully supportive of the controls that we have on site.”

The statement added, “In each case we have immediately conducted contact tracing and instructed potentially affected colleagues to self-isolate.

“All of Greencore’s sites have wide-ranging social distancing measures, stringent hygiene procedures and regular temperature checking in place, and we are doing everything that we can to keep our people safe.

“As ever, the health and wellbeing of our colleagues is our number one priority.”