GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — A week after Brown County confirmed an outbreak at three meat processing facilities, one of them has temporarily stopped production.
JBS on the east side of Green Bay has 255 employees that have tested positive for COVID-19. The plant closed Sunday night.
“We hope obviously that it will decrease that will help limit the spread of the virus in the community,” said Claire Paprocki with Brown County Health and human Services. “Ultimately what it came down to was JBS needed to make a decision that was best for them and that’s what they did.”
In a statement JBS USA said in part:
“We’ve been focused on doing everything we can to keep the virus out of our facility, but we believe a temporary closure is the most aggressive action we can take to help our community collectively slow the spread of COVID-19.”The Department of Health Services says 2,500 more test kits are headed to Brown County and the National Guard will assist with testing process.
“Over the past several days, over the past weekend particularly, we have been in development, in partnership with the county emergency management, county public health, the health systems in the region to develop a plan that will not only continue to test workers at these facilities, but will expand to include household and family members as well as a strategy to test in the community more broadly,” said Department of Health Services Secretary-Designee Andrea Palm. “That work starts today.”
The 255 employees infected at JBS doesn’t include potential spread at home or in the community. Just late last week the County said there was no plans to shut this facility down, so why didn’t they step in sooner?
“Obviously this week we would’ve reevaluated and if we felt that closing them was something that would’ve been appropriate, we would’ve discussed that and put it on the table,” said Paprocki. “I don’t think it was a matter of the county stepping in or not. We’ve always been there every step of the way and JBS came to this conclusion on their own.”
The Green Bay location is the fourth JBS facility to temporarily close due to a coronavirus outbreak. Two of those four have already reopened.
