Cargill and the Alberta government are faulted for the scale of an outbreak of Covid-19 influenza at the beef-packing plant at Brooks.
Not only were workers infected, hospitalized and two died, but also the infected workers spread the highly-infectious disease into the community, said a report on the situation.
Cargill is faulted for offering $500 incentives and $2 extra per hour to workers to report to work; only more than two weeks after the initial case was identified did the company temporarily suspend operations.
Although the report is about the Cargill plant, the situation was similar at the JBS Foods Canada plant also at Brooks. JBS had the second-largest Covid-19 outbreak.
The report was prepared by the Parkland Institute at the University of Alberta, published a report on Monday examining how Alberta handled the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak at the Cargill beef-packing plant in High River, south of Calgary.
The centre says it is the first public, independent review of what became North America’s largest single-site outbreak during the pandemic.
More than 950 workers at Cargill, which was nearly half of the work force, were infected with the virus in the spring of 2020. Eighteen workers had to be hospitalized and two died.
Secondary spread in the community led to hundreds more infections and four additional deaths.
The Cargill cases were later linked to at least 22 other outbreaks wrote Jason Foster, director of the Parkland Institute, and Sean Tucker, a professor of occupational health and safety at the University of Regina,
Meat-processing plants were deemed an essential service during the pandemic, They were exempted from public-health restrictions, such as physical distancing and the sizes of gatherings.
These facilities were ripe for outbreaks because of crowding, low temperatures that helped the virus survive longer, insufficient ventilation and socioeconomic vulnerabilities in the work force.
Many workers lacked alternative sources of income and supported families in Canada or in their home countries.
The authors of the report said the Cargill outbreak is a story of “systemic regulatory failure” by the Alberta government and AHS, the single provincial health authority at the time.
They said Alberta was unprepared, overconfident and deliberately side-stepped available enforcement measures.
“The evidence shows that there was nothing inevitable about the scale of the outbreak.
The tragedy occurred in a political environment that openly and enthusiastically prioritized economic growth over the health and safety of a largely invisible and vulnerable group of workers,” the report said.
Internal government e-mails referenced in the report show Alberta Health Services managers expressed concern about rising case counts, worker complaints and symptomatic employees still at work.
The report said there were compounding issues at play, including an insufficient supply of masks and inconsistent masking guidance; a poor surveillance system by AHS to track the outbreak; disregard of workers’ rights; and no compliance orders by AHS or Alberta Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) to Cargill.
The authors say AHS abdicated its responsibilities to keep workers safe and that OHS and the government did not have the required expertise to properly handle the outbreak.
They stressed that AHS made incorrect assumptions on virus spread without epidemiological evidence.
“Workers were led to believe that the workplace was safe, that public health had based their assessment on evidence, and clearly that wasn’t the case,” said Prof. Tucker.
A public apology to Cargill workers is one of the main recommendations. Additionally, the authors urge Alberta to amend its legislation to make clear that OHS leads the workplace response during a public-health emergency, undertake a review of existing OHS policies and create a standing list of “essential services.”
