Food Protection Trends - January/February 2023 - 54

regarding the perceived needs and implemented mitigations
for control of COVID-19 transmission in the workforce.
Implemented mitigation strategies
The study participants self-reported adoption of most
physical distancing mitigation strategies included in the
survey except those measures that negatively impacted production
capacity, namely cohorting employees and downsizing
operations. The widespread adoption of most physical
distancing strategies across the assessed food industry sectors
is not surprising because of the well-established key role such
strategies play in reducing the occurrence of COVID-19 cases
in various work settings (44) and countries (67). The continuous
promotion of such measures since the beginning of the
COVID-19 pandemic and the availability of updated guidance
on how to implement these measures likely facilitated
their adoption by food facilities and operations (16, 71). For
example, a COVID-19 outbreak that occurred in a Colorado
mushroom farm on 6 May 2020 was rapidly controlled, and
further virus dissemination was prevented based on available
public health guidance (5). We hypothesize that the common
adoption of physical distancing mitigation strategies is
partly due to the availability of funding programs launched
by the U.S. federal government to financially assist businesses
during the pandemic. These programs include the Coronavirus
Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, the COVID-19
Economic Injury Disaster Loan, and the Coronavirus Food
Assistance Program, which provided food facilities and
operations with financial resources to implement physical
distancing (69, 70, 74, 75). Despite these programs, survey
participants expressed concerns about financial challenges
that limited their ability to install physical barriers, suggesting
that additional sources of funding are necessary to further incentivize
the adoption of such measures and that companies
need to budget in advance for emergency preparedness and
responses. Overall, findings from this study suggest that the
common adoption of physical distancing strategies and the
current availability of detailed guidance for their implementation
will contribute to the rapid implementation of physical
distancing controls in response to new SARS-CoV-2 variants
in the current pandemic, future COVID-19 pandemics, and
similar disasters.
Our survey also revealed that physical distancing
measures based on cohorting employees and in particular
downsizing operations were rarely implemented, possibly
because businesses avoid strategies that would reduce
production capacity or present organizational disruption
(79). Downsizing was used by some businesses during the
COVID-19 pandemic to contain the outbreak in a facility or
operation even in late 2020 (33), albeit at the cost of reduced
production capacity. For instance, capacity reduction in the
Canadian beef and pork industry led to financial setbacks
for businesses and increased the cost to maintain animals
for an extended period before slaughter (33). Downsizing
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Food Protection Trends January/February
and the increase in sickness-related absences caused an
increase in work-related physical demands and job insecurity,
which had negative impacts on employees' mental health
(43). One survey participant in this study described food
industry employees' struggles with mental health issues
after downsizing. Thus, when facilities or operations plan
on adopting or are forced to adopt downsizing as a strategy
to reduce COVID-19 transmission, measures should be
taken to prevent downstream food supply disturbances and
production losses and to protect employees' mental wellbeing.
Further studies are needed to determine the specific
economic and other effects of downsizing on the U.S. food
industry facilities and operations and their workers before
and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The survey participants indicated that cheap and easy
biosafety mitigation strategies were widely adopted by
produce farm operations and food processing facilities, but
more information is needed about the cost-effectiveness
of air cleaning and filtering and ventilation in general. The
use of personal protective equipment (PPE) self-reported
in our study agrees with an earlier report from Waltenburg
et al. (76), who reported that 86 (77%) of 111 meat and
poultry processing facilities required workers to wear masks.
However, survey participants in our study mentioned that
the lack of access to preventive measures, including PPE,
was an important concern in efforts to control COVID-19
in their industry sector. Previous reports indicated that the
lack of supplies due to disruptions in the supply chain (20,
23) early in the COVID-19 pandemic was a severe challenge
for businesses, even for front-line essential workers in health
care institutions in the U.S. (1) and abroad (1, 42). Thus,
establishing a reliable and efficient system to ensure PPE
availability and distribution to food facilities and operations
is essential for the success of disaster preparedness plans
for future pandemics. Our findings suggest that sectors of
the food industry represented in this survey are prepared to
implement biosafety strategies in the event of a new SARSCoV-2
variant, future COVID-19 pandemics, or similar
disasters caused by airborne pathogens, but successful
adoption will critically depend on the establishment of
measures to strengthen the local and global supply chain of
PPE and other relevant resources.
In contrast to other biosafety strategies evaluated in our
survey, air filtering and ventilation were rarely implemented
among facilities and operations. For some participants'
facilities, there was a concern that ventilation would disrupt
the controlled environmental conditions required for production.
Some participants mentioned that air filtering was
considered an unnecessary investment when other mitigation
strategies were already in place. However, a somewhat
unexpected finding was that another reason ventilation and
air filtering were not implemented was insufficient guidance
and information about cost-effectiveness, although these
strategies had been recommended in late 2020 by the CDC
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