Plant with 138 coronavirus cases is main link to Kings County infections, supervisor says
Rural Kings County, which didn’t see its first confirmed coronavirus infection until three weeks after the first cases were reported in the central San Joaquin Valley, has rapidly seen its case counts multiply over the past 14 days.
On April 22, the county had 32 cases. By Tuesday, that number had ballooned to more than 200. And nearly two-thirds of those are connected to one place – the Central Valley Meat Co. packing plant in Hanford, said Kings County Supervisor Doug Verboon.
Verboon told The Bee on Wednesday that of the 211 cases reported by the county’s Department of Public Health, 138 are connected to the meat plant, and nearly all of those confirmed infections surfaced within a very short time.
The Bee reported on April 26 that the plant revealed “several” employees tested positive for COVID-19 after being identified through the company’s daily pre-screening process. Mike Casey, the company’s vice president, said at that time that he did not have a total number of workers who tested positive for the virus.
Verboon said Wednesday, however, the first indication that the county had of problems at the meat plant came as a result of contact tracing – the county’s investigation of all the people that one patient had contact with – that led back to the meat plant.
Late last week, the county’s health department acknowledged that the significant increase in the number of coronavirus cases in Kings County was attributable in large part to the meat plant.“
In a May 1 statement, health officials said they are coordinating with neighboring Fresno and Tulare counties, as well as with the state Department of Public Health, to provide special testing and monitoring for employees at the meat plant to prevent the further spread of coronavirus in the Valley.
“This coordination is necessary as large organizations within Kings County employ residents from all of our neighboring counties, and this expanded testing will increase their number of COVID-19 cases as well,” the county’s statement read. “As this situation continues to evolve, the County does expect to find additional confirmed cases of COVID-19, but through monitoring and continuing to work with the business, the County expects to see those numbers improve in the near future.”
Verboon said he is confident that the outbreak at the meat plant is largely contained. “It’s isolated. We can control it if we have the cooperation of the packing plant,” he said. “We had a lot of cases in a small area real quick.”
Nearly all of the workers, he added, had no symptoms of the respiratory disease caused by the virus, but Verboon acknowledged that those workers could have come in contact with many more people and potentially spread the virus before they were tested.
“Most of our cases in Kings County are (person-to-person) contact related,” he said.
Kings County’s health officials report that of the 211 cases, three are believed to have contracted the disease through travel to other areas, 140 are through known person-to-person contact, and 10 are through community spread in which the exact source of transmission cannot be determined. Another 58 cases remained under investigation as of Wednesday morning.
Across Fresno, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced and Tulare counties, the number of people confirmed to have tested positive for the coronavirus has reached more than 2,000 as of Tuesday evening. That figure includes 55 deaths and more than 540 considered recovered from the virus.
This story was originally published May 6, 2020 at 11:15 AM.
