Staff at the Melbourne meat processing plant now linked to 71 cases of Covid-19 were not told they could stay away from work for several days after the company had been told two workers were infected.
Thirteen more cases connected with the Melbourne meat processing plant were confirmed on Thursday and another eight on Friday, taking the total of those who had tested positive to 57 workers and 13 close contacts. These contacts include an aged care worker and a nurse at Sunshine hospital.
Cedar Meats was informed by the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services on Monday 27 April that a worker had tested positive the previous day. It has also now acknowledged it was told of another positive test on 24 April by a labour-hire company that directly employed the worker.
But on the Monday staff were told the meat works would close only if more cases were discovered. It was not until Wednesday 29 April, when this occurred, that workers were given the option to stay home.
A spokeswoman said this was because on the Monday the factory believed it was dealing with one isolated case. However, it has now been revealed the company had been made aware of two Covid-19 positive workers by then.
One Cedar Meats worker, who did not want their name published, told Guardian Australia staff were afraid of going to work that week.
“They said [on the Monday] someone has it, and if someone else gets it we will shut down the factory … I was very scared but I can’t stay home,” the worker said.
“I look around and I’m thinking people have Covid-19, they look very tired … at that time no one wanted to go to work.”
The worker said even after staff were told they could take days off, some feared there would be consequences from the company if they did so.
“The factory is very hard. If they aren’t happy they can tell you ‘no more work’… we work full time but they could fire us,” the worker said.
“I don’t speak English well … I just stay silent and work.”
A spokeswoman for Cedar Meats said this was not the company’s business approach.
“The threat of firing is never hanging over people’s heads,” she said. “Any staff could have come forward at any time and spoken to a supervisor.”
Cedar Meats has maintained it did not know of any positive tests until 27 April, but on Thursday it acknowledged to Guardian Australia that the labour-hire company Labour Solutions had made contact about another case on Friday 24 April, after Labour Solutions received the information from the health department.
A spokeswoman for Cedar Meats told Guardian Australia it was not considered an “official warning” by the person who took the call.
“He was left with the clear impression that it was not official. Before [Labour Solutions] had been calling and saying ‘such and such thinks they got coronavirus’ and that kind of thing. So the person who got the call didn’t take it as official information.”
“It was a call on a Friday night, the plant was closed,” she said.
The spokeswoman would not confirm whether the Cedar Meats worker who took the call reported it to anyone else in the company.
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Guardian Australia has contacted the labour-hire company for comment.
Among contacts of Cedar Meats workers who have now tested positive is a staff member at a Footscray aged care home.
The chief executive of Doutta Galla aged care facility wrote to families on Wednesday confirming the result.
The Victorian health minister, Jenny Mikakos, told reporters: “This person I understand is a close contact of a worker at Cedar Meats.”
The aged care worker is not showing symptoms and is in isolation.
A Sunshine hospital nurse has also been affected. On 23 April a Cedar Meats worker was rushed to the hospital after he severed his thumb at the factory. He was asymptomatic at the time and later tested positive to Covid-19 – his case was the one reported to Cedar Meats on 27 April.
The two dozen health workers who treated him have been quarantined, one testing positive to Covid-19. The Australian has reported this worker is a female nurse in her 60s.
The Victorian government has come under fire for not acting after the health department confirmed a Cedar Meats worker tested positive for Covid-19 as early as 2 April.
The department said the worker had not been at the plant for four weeks before the positive test, but the Victorian opposition leader, Michael O’Brien, has labelled the cluster “Daniel Andrews’s own Ruby Princess”.
Andrews defended the government handling of the outbreak at a press conference on Thursday.
“I am very proud of the public health team in the response that they have provided to every positive case, and this outbreak was singled out by Brendan Murphy, the chief medical officer of the commonwealth at National Cabinet as a model example of how to deal with an outbreak,” he said.
Much of the controversy around the Cedar Meat cluster has stemmed from claims by Melbourne radio host Neil Mitchell.
While speaking with Victoria’s chief health officer, Brett Sutton, Mitchell said he had been in contact with an anonymous staff member at Cedar who claimed the worker diagnosed on 2 April had been at the facility more recently.
Sutton could not say whether the health department had confirmed that with Cedar Meats.
On Thursday Andrews defended the contact tracing.
“You don’t spend the time of contact tracing experts making phone calls and searching at places where people have not been. You focus on where they have been,” he said.
“Regardless of where you work, if you say, ‘I have not been to work for four weeks’, then we take you on face value. The assumption is that people are giving us an accurate story. If we assume that everyone wasn’t, I don’t know if we could ever have enough contact tracers. We wouldn’t need 1,000, we would need 100,000 perhaps. It would become impossible.”
On Wednesday the health minister, Jenny Mikakos, also rejected concerns that Cedar Meats had been ruled out as a potential exposure site too quickly after the 2 April case.
“There has been no breakdown at all … I’m absolutely confident that they have done everything possible to contain this outbreak.”