Meat supply at risk of delta disruptions as Covid shutdowns loom

Meat workers’ priority access to Covid-19 vaccines has “gone out the window”, as processors face the uncertainty of shutdowns.

Fletcher International Exports managing director Roger Fletcher says meat processors are “treading on eggshells” when it comes to the impact of the delta Covid-19 variant.

Australia’s meat supply chains are once again at risk of major disruptions.

Insiders say state health departments and chief health officers are delivering conflicting, ever-changing advice on shutting down work sites where just a single worker has contracted the Covid-19 delta variant.

The NSW Department of Health has already just shut down Nestle’s petfood processing plant at Blayney, after a single case of Covid-19 linked to an infected truck driver who visited the site southwest of Bathurst.

Fletcher International managing director Roger Fletcher said his Dubbo plant was “clean, but we’re treading on egg shells. I’m not sure where it’s all heading.”

Just how long it will take to re-open the Nestle plant is unknown, but the company has told all workers and their families to minimise their movements, while NSW Health locks down the region until July 28.

Further complicating the issue is that vaccination rates among meat workers vary enormously from site to site and state to state.

Australian Meat Industry Council chief Patrick Hutchinson said “our guys in some states are all vaccinated, while others have less than 10 per cent” have received the jab.

Mr Fletcher said he and his daughter had to “kick up a huge stink” to get access to vaccine for workers, after initially struggling to get it.

But in Victoria HW Greenham & Sons managing director Peter Greenham said most of his workers were vaccinated.

Meat processing workers were originally classified as high risk workers and a priority population under Phase 1B of the national Covid vaccine rollout.

However Mr Hutchinson said that prioritisation seemed to have now “gone out the window”.

Meanwhile NSW Health has already declared thousands of people, who visited one of 154 tier one exposure sites across Sydney and parts of regional NSW, must self-isolate for 14 days, given they could have come in contact with a Covid-19-infected person.

Victoria has a similar number of tier one exposure sites, which demand anyone who visited them must “immediately get tested and quarantine for 14 days, from the (time of) exposure”, given they could have come in contact with a delta-infected person.

The strategy does bode well for not only meat processors, but hundreds of others in food processing plants across Australia, even though most have adopted Covid-19 protocols to minimise the spread of the virus.

Mr Hutchinson said many had adopted the protocols developed by AMIC, such as temperature testing workers, twice daily deep cleans and strict rules on site visitors.

Ultimately he hopes these protocols and the lessons of last year’s Cedar Meats Covid-19 outbreaks and shutdowns are enough to convince each state’s chief health officers not to shut down more plants this time around.

But he said “it makes it very difficult for us when we have eight chief health officers and departments across Australia, all with different and changing views”.

Just how much those views have changed is evident in the advice of Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton, who advised early last year that Coles stores could remain open after customers tested positive for Covid-19, given they would the virus would only spread in the situation where people were in face-to-face contact for at least 15 minutes or for more than two hours in an enclosed room.

The introduction and spread of the far more contagious delta variant in 2021 has drastically changed that advice and health authorities’ advice.