Prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 Contamination on Food Plant Surfaces as Determined by Environmental Monitoring

What is it about?

During the early phase of the pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus, there were large scale Covid-19 outbreaks in food production plants. In March 2020, we helped to implement environmental surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 virus in 116 food production plants. One of the goals of surface monitoring was to determine whether such surveillance could show the presence of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic individuals in the production facilities, since measures were already in place to quarantine symptomatic and exposed personnel. Our data showed that 1.23% of food plants showed surface contamination. We also found correlation between virus positive environmental samples and virus positive human specimens. Our results indicate that environmental monitoring of high touch surfaces can indeed work as a sentinel system for identifying the presence of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic carriers in addition to determining the efficacy of decontamination protocols in food plants.

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