Jan 5th, 2022
4 mins
Government announced on the 4th of January around 100,000 key workers to take daily Covid tests as record number of cases (219,000) recorded and hospital admissions rising.
The Government will provide key industries, which they have defined to us as Distribution operations both retail and wholesale, plus meat processing operations.
BFFF attends the weekly food resilience industry forum and on 5th January the following key points were made:
• In terms of employee absences, the forum outlined at present these were manageable but were increasing rapidly. On average absences due to Covid were now thought to be circa 5% but increasing up to 10%. Regional differences were highlighted, transmission initially seemed to be more prevalent in the South of England, however there is evidence that other parts of the country are seeing increasing rates. Absences also varied in different parts of the food industry such as 5 – 10% in distribution and retail and reports of up to 20% in manufacturing.
• The message to businesses was the reiteration for businesses to install all previous control measures within the workplace including social distancing.
• Vaccinations are still the best route to limit the impact of Covid to our industry and businesses should continue to encourage employees to get vaccinated including boosters.
• With the government announcement yesterday, daily lateral flow test kits are to be distributed to essential businesses and companies will be contacted with an aim of protecting workers which includes food distribution and animal processing. These are not the same as the original daily contact testing completed in the workplace and is less stringent in terms of the testing process.
Although the full list of businesses that the Government will contact is not available, Defra should be contacting companies they have identified as essential within the next few days.
The process for the daily lateral flow test kits supplied by Defra to businesses was said to be less onerous than the previous workplace daily contact testing as these were not approved by the MHRA for home testing.
If any BFFF member has not been contacted but experiences a significant increase in absences due to Covid they should contact Carla at the BFFF, and we will provide contact details to Defra for support. Defra defines critical absence levels of 20 to 25%.
