BEAUMONT, Texas — Five Southeast Texas Food Bank employees have received positive test results for COVID-19 as of Wednesday.
The food bank is asking its staff members to be screened for the coronavirus after one tested positive this week according to a new release. That resulted in four additional positive results on Wednesday.
Those staff will be quarantined and any others that haven't yet received a negative result won't be able to come to work until they do.
Volunteers who have been at the food bank in the past two weeks are "receiving direction communication of this news separately from this statement, along with helpful guidance from MD Anderson’s website to help them assess if they think they should be tested for COVID-19 in an abundance of caution," according to the release.
From a Southeast Texas Food Bank news release:
For several months now, COVID-19 has affected communities across the nation, including ours. Because of the risk the coronavirus could present to staff and volunteers at the Southeast Texas Food Bank during our need to ramp up services to address the economic impacts of COVID-19 and now Hurricane Laura, we have stayed attuned to CDC guidance and have been in frequent communication with Beaumont Health Department to follow its guidance about the necessary steps to take to strike a balance of maintaining a safe workplace while needing to have staff and volunteers consistently in the workplace aggressively addressing these twin community crises.
We have implemented prudent and acceptable strategies for workplace and public safety since the community’s first exposure to COVID-19 and have adapted them as circumstances have evolved and more knowledge about COVID-19 and its transmission and risk mitigation has been obtained.
Until this week, we had not had any known cases of COVID-19 among staff members or volunteers, but this week, we had our first staff member test positive for the coronavirus. As a measure to try to assess staff and public safety in light of that, all staff have now been mandated to be screened for COVID-19 and that has resulted in identification of four other positive cases today. All those staff will be quarantined and any other staff that does not yet have a negative test result will not be permitted to enter the workplace until they can demonstrate that status.
All volunteers who have worked at the Food Bank within the past two weeks are receiving direct communication of this news separately from this statement, along with helpful guidance from MD Anderson’s website to help them assess if they think they should be tested for COVID-19 in an abundance of caution.
Though we have frequently cleaned and sanitized common spaces throughout the COVID-19 crisis, we thoroughly sanitized our entire facility after the first staff case came to light and will continue to do so frequently as an additional precaution at the present time.
Our cleaning methods are food safe, and since COVID-19 is not a food borne virus, this presence of the virus among staff does not compromise the food commodities shared with the public.
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