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  • Pandemic: More than 650 infected by a coronavirus outbreak in a slaughterhouse in Germany

The massive outbreak of coronavirus unleashed at the Tönnies slaughterhouse in the Rhenish town of Rheda-Wiedenbrück has once again put the meat industry, which employs cheaply Eastern European labor and security measures, in the spotlight. and hygiene are lax.

"This cannot go on like this," said the head of the CDU parliamentary group, Ralph Brinkhaus , which has its constituency in Gütersloh, the area where the slaughterhouse is located. Of the 1,050 tests carried out on the staff with the help of the Red Cross, 675 have so far been positive and 328 negative.

This is the outbreak in a major slaughterhouse of those that have occurred to date in Germany and has forced the closure of 140 schools and kindergartens in all the surroundings until the next day 26 and the confinement for safety of up to 7,000 people.

On-site protest

Citizens, especially parents with school-age children, are furious and have concentrated by the hundreds in front of the slaughterhouse facilities , which have not been closed although the company has stopped importing pigs and is working underperforming. A Tönnies spokesperson has however announced that preparations for the plant's closure have been launched , if possible this weekend.

"We have all made an effort to respect the rules and now this," says Heike Neef , the principal of one of the schools that will be closing. Along the same lines, Marina Pielsticker , director of a nursery in Borgholzhausen , has spoken in statements to Renan WDR television . "We no longer know how to explain all this to children, because they no longer understand anything. That just more insecurity," he said.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, former CDU president, has tried to restore calm to citizens with a positive statement. "I am very pleased to see that the Gütersloh authorities have acted quickly and taken measures to prevent the spread of this outbreak, such as the closing of schools," said the chancellor.

No mask or distance

The Covid-19 outbreak at the Tönnies facilities was an announced chronicle, according to the video images that are circulating online in the framework of an action called "labor injustice". In one of them, recorded last April by one of the cameras of the complex, workers in the canteen are seen, sitting at long tables in overalls and work caps , without masks and without a safety distance.

The high number of infections detected in the Tönnies abattoir has increased the rate of infections established by the health authorities, situated at 50 new infections per 100,000 inhabitants in seven days. This would mean total isolation of the area, which has not yet happened, although tests have been carried out in the towns belonging to the Gütersloh district.

Tönnies employs 16,500 workers worldwide and has a turnover of around 6,650 million annually.

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  • Germany
  • Angela Merkel
  • Coronavirus
  • Covid 19

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