Bristol Seafood temporarily closes to confront outbreak; Cianbro site cases up to 19

File photo / Tim Greenway Five workers at Bristol Seafood have tested postive for COVID-19 and the company has temporarily closed to perform cleaning and to test all employees.

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By Maureen Milliken

Bristol Seafood in Portland temporarily shut down its operations for testing and cleaning Monday after five workers were found to have COVID-19, while the number of cases connected to a Cianbro construction site in Augusta rose to 19.

The outbreaks at the Maine Veterans Home site and the seafood production plant on the Portland Fish Pier are the second and third reported at Maine workplaces other than congregant care facilities.

Bristol Seafood has voluntarily closed while it thoroughly cleans the building and tests all employees, the company said in a news release. It will open later this week with workers who have verified negative results.

Nirav Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said the agency began working with the seafood processing plant over the weekend. The company "very promptly" notified CDC of the cases there, Shah said.

Shah, at his Monday briefing, said that Bristol took steps beginning in early March "to get on top of the COVID-19 situation."

In a news release earlier in the day, Peter Handy, president and CEO of Bristol Seafood, said that besides cleaning and testing, the company is "proactively communicating with the Maine CDC and meeting or exceeding their recommendations."

"We take our duty to provide wholesome seafood to American families seriously, but we will always put the safety and health of our team members first."

Bristol officials said that the plant has taken a variety of actions, including installing an outdoor hand-washing station, performing temperature checks, closing the building to outside visitors, sanitizing the plant throughout the day and at the end of each shift, and adjusting production lines to allow adequate spacing.

"Our company is built on trust and transparency, and we are sharing this information accordingly," Handy said. "Please join me in including our affected team members in your thoughts. We will stand behind and support our teammates throughout this process."

Cianbro site involves multiple states

Shah said investigating the cases related to the Maine Veterans Home construction site in Augusta, where Cianbro is the construction manager, involves people from "across many states," as far away as Wisconsin. He said the number of other states hasn't been determined yet as health investigators talk to contractors and subcontractors.

So far, there are 19 COVID-19 cases related to the site. The central focus of the investigation is "what direction the transmission went," Shah said. "Did people from other states bring it to Maine? Or did they acquire COVID-19 while they were in Maine?"

He said the investigators try to determine the order of transmission, both who the person tested positive might have spread it to, but also where they may have contracted it.

He said information gleaned from the investigation, besides determining where to look for other cases, may also help inform how to keep construction sites safer, including how people work together and even things like whether everyone has been fit-tested for their mask.

"As we think about making police recommendations, where we have to start is with the facts," Shah said. "And then we look at those and see, as compared to other construction sites, where can we do better. It's not that we do these investigations with a policy avenue in mind at the end, we gather all the facts and see what that tells us relative to other investigations."

The state's first non-congregant care outbreak at a business was at the Tyson Foods plant in Augusta earlier this month, where 51 cases were reported.