National Jump-start Plan, Protecting Essential Food Industry Workers

Well, Easter has quietly passed with little resemblance to past holidays and family celebrations. Strangely, several of our ‘hot zones’ may have peaked without much fanfare over this holiday weekend as well. While this is good news that we may be flattening the curve, the lagging death stat is a grim reminder we cannot become complacent in this battle with the COVID-19 global pandemic, especially while taking its toll on frontline workers such as healthcare, food processors, transportation, police and grocery staff.

Yet, we have many anxious folks across the country now turning their focus on when can we reopen the nation and get back to normal. Worries that the US Food Industry supply chain cannot be sustained in this protracted self-imposed lockdown is becoming a reality. As we see processing plant closures due to ill employees, farmers dumping unsold milk, scarce produce driving steep pricing, grocery stores with rolling empty shelves, we need to re-think next steps, as our essential frontline food workers are just as vulnerable as critical healthcare staff. We need to consider now what are best steps forward for our Food Industry as a whole, curtailing risks before we have widespread stoppages causing national panic.

Heated discussions of rolling back lockdowns and reopening without a well thought out national plan is premature. A plan off the cuff or in one’s head is reckless and will foolishly put more American lives at additional risk. However, we cannot sustain lockdowns or national emergency measures indefinitely, we need a holistic plan.

National Scale Up Plan Required 

An excellent summary issued by Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health[1] details a comprehensive strategy for our government to accomplish a successful plan to jump start the country. The plan requires intense testing, contact tracing and most importantly funding by congress to bring the country back online smartly. This COVID-19 testing plan should be our number one priority if we want to safeguard our people. 

Outlined in the plan is a vision to expand local, state, community and territorial government. Needed staffing to perform extensive testing and contact tracing is necessary. Currently, with millions of people out of work, re-deploying from this pool would be an ideal place to begin. Medical ranks are in short supply across the nation, and with this pandemic it is further depleted on our frontlines. Programs to infuse staff for needed healthcare roles is critical. Creative ways to use technology via phones or software tracking to perform trace-back is key. Tele-workers can do the data tracking, ensuring safe follow up. Also, required will be ways to isolate or quarantine large cluster numbers if impacted. Continued surveillance by public health would be crucial as well.

Of course, all of these measures are predicated on our testing and diagnostic capabilities. Currently, we lack the capacity to ramp up our testing for where it should be at this juncture.

Regions continue to have bottlenecks across the country with varied laboratory testing platforms. Kits, swabs, reagents and capacity shortages still exist despite the Pandemic Task Force taking on the mission to remedy this logistical platform nightmare weeks ago. Lag in turning around test results, let alone expanding efforts to test beyond those critically ill is still problematic. At this stage, we should be testing all frontline healthcare, EMT’s and emergency response workers.

If we intend to successfully pull together any semblance of a stratified re-opening, we need immediate turn-around testing. Limited random and antibody testing has begun in some states. But rapid testing which is required to release folks back to work with a quick clearance is still largely unavailable. Mixed feedback on its’ efficacy is also questionable, so we need reliable tests. Getting essential food workers back to work cannot happen without required rapid testing, isolating those that are positive and expanded continued surveillance.

We have an opportunity to mitigate further risk for our essential workers and not squander the momentum we have gained on flattening the curve. Let’s apply a national plan to break out of this malaise as recommended within the Johns Hopkins University strategy, fostering caution while keeping all safe.     

Quality Assurance Strategies, LLC

Author, Gina Reo, [email protected]

[1] A National Plan to Enable Comprehensive COVID-19 Case Finding and Contact Tracing in the US https://www.jhsph.edu/covid-19/