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A Hancock County company that processes and packs blueberries has detected five cases of the coronavirus among migrant workers it had hired to rake blueberries.
Hancock Foods evaluated employees as a precautionary measure before starting work and interacting with other employees, said Kim Allen, a company official, who is located in the Washington Junction neighborhood of the city of Hancock, just east of the Ellsworth city line. .
Additional testing is underway and support services are offered to company employees, said Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hancock Foods is owned by Allen’s Blueberry Freezer, based in Ellsworth.
“We were bringing in a team of migrant workers for the blueberry harvest,” Allen said.
The workers are quarantined under the supervision of the Maine Mobile Health Program, a nonprofit health care agency that serves temporary farm workers.
Until those who test positive obtain a clean health statement, the company will have to find other workers, Allen said. Hancock Foods does not plan to bring in more migrant workers, but it intends to fill the remaining raker positions with local residents, he said.
Hancock County has seen a low number of coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic. The county has the third-lowest rate of coronavirus infections in the state, according to data from the Maine CDC. As of Monday night, the county had seen a total of 18 resident cases, one death and two hospitalizations.
However, coronavirus infections among migrant workers have been common throughout the pandemic, as they have gradually moved north to tend different crops.
The outbreak at Hancock Foods was one of three new coronavirus outbreaks reported by the Maine CDC on Tuesday.
One such outbreak was at the Maine Central Medical Center in Lewiston, where 12 cases were reported, 10 among staff and two among patients. The Maine CDC is still investigating that outbreak, but it appears that a patient introduced the coronavirus into the facility before it spread, Shah said.
The other outbreak, of three cases, was reported at the Sappi paper mill in Westbrook.
The state has seen more coronavirus outbreaks in the workplace in recent weeks as Maine’s economy has gradually reopened. Earlier in the pandemic, outbreaks in nursing homes and group homes where people with intellectual disabilities live were more common.
