Food Protection Trends - November/December 2022 - 427

factories into temporary closure due to illness or measures
to control the infection (e.g., quarantine) among workers,
which has impacted countless employees and their families
and threatened the normal functioning of the food supply
chain (38). The shortages of labor and closures of processing
facilities have also negatively affected the livestock sector.
The reduced capacity of the food processing sector resulted
in a number of animal production, health, and welfare issues,
such as overstocking of farms and the related stress and risk
of animal diseases, and efforts to reduce production included
drastic measures such as culling of animals and induced
abortions (41, 44). The pandemic has placed significant stress
on the national food supply chain, and the food processing
industry is recognized as a critical infrastructure area for
preserving normal societal function.
To help combat the negative effects of the COVID-19
pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) rapidly responded with a series of documents to help
guide mitigation efforts in the community, including in the
food processing industry. On 3 April 2020, the CDC (5)
published " Cleaning and Disinfecting Your Facility " to provide
general guidance regarding cleaning and disinfection at the
workplace to prevent the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that
causes COVID-19. On 22 April 2020, a memorandum was
published based on the CDC investigation of the Smithfield
Foods COVID-19 outbreak to provide recommendations for
improving health and safety controls at this production plant
(39). On 26 April 2020, the CDC (8, 9) and the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) jointly published
the guidance documents " Meat and Poultry Processing
Workers and Employers " and " Protecting Seafood Processing
Workers from COVID-19 " to help employers and workers
identify risks associated with COVID-19 exposure and prevent
virus spread at the workplace. A number of other documents
were also issued over a relatively short period of time. We
constructed a collated list and reviewed those documents
issued early in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic (i)
to help researchers and public health workers interpret the
potential timing for implementation of mitigation strategies
and the attributed changes in the epidemiology of the disease
in the food processing industry work environment and (ii)
to help employers in the food processing industry control
COVID-19 exposure risks and maintain facility operations.
Thus, the objective of this study was to identify, review, and
collate U.S. government documents that contain resources or
guidelines about COVID-19 mitigation relevant to the U.S.
food manufacturing and processing industry.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Document collection and search criteria
Rapid Web-based reviews (40) were conducted between
1 June and 30 September 2021 to collect documents that
contained resources or guidelines about COVID-19 mitigation
from government institutions, including the CDC, OSHA, and
the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Each of these
three institutions has a dedicated COVID-19 Web page (28,
46, 61), which we reviewed, including all tabs for each page.
A complementary snowballing approach was used to identify
additional relevant documents from other U.S. government
agencies or professional associations where applicable.
Collected documents were screened based on the following
inclusion criteria: (i) relevance to food manufacturing and
processing industry workers (i.e., foodservice and the food
retail industry were not within the scope of this review) and
(ii) accessible or published between the beginning of the
pandemic and the end of the search period (30 September
2021). According to our exclusion criterion, the frequently
asked questions (FAQs) pages were excluded from this
review. The first author identified the documents, retrieved
the publishing date for each document, and read and analyzed
each document for content.
Launch date data collection
The original publishing date of each document was retrieved
through one of the following two methods. The first method
involved going directly to the document web page and retrieving
the website source code (52). In the source code, key words " first
published " or " published_time " represent the date when the
website first went public and became accessible on the Internet.
In rare cases when the source code did not contain information
regarding publishing date, the second method was used because
it provides the publishing date of any website. This method
involved use of Carbon Dating the web, a web application that
estimates the web page launch date by inputting the URL link
of the target web page (49). Therefore, both methods together
resulted in complete information about the date when each of
the identified documents was first published.
Content analysis
After the initial collection and screening of documents,
content analysis was conducted on all identified documents,
and a codebook was developed in Excel (Microsoft, Redmond,
WA) to record the mitigation strategies mentioned in each
document. Specifically, the entire content of each document
was extracted and coded based on the category of mitigation
strategy. For that purpose, we adapted a list of categories of
mitigation strategies from a recent needs assessment survey of
COVID-19 perceptions in the food processing industry (43)
and added to the original list any new category that we came
across in the documents. The list of considered categories
and their detailed explanations are given in the Supplemental
Material (Table S1). After generating a list of categories
of mitigations, the frequency of each category was also
determined in terms of the number of reviewed documents
mentioning a given category. Excel spreadsheets used to
organize and analyze the reviewed documents can be accessed
at https://github.com/IvanekLab/Control-of-COVID-19-inthe-US-food-industry.
November/December
Food Protection Trends 427
https://www.github.com/IvanekLab/Control-of-COVID-19-in-the-US-food-industry https://www.github.com/IvanekLab/Control-of-COVID-19-in-the-US-food-industry
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