Food Protection Trends - November/December 2022 - 428

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
This study was conducted to survey documents published
by U.S. government institutions regarding COVID-19
mitigation in the U.S. food manufacturing and processing
industry. A total of 35 publicly available documents were
identified through a rapid review of the CDC, OSHA, and
FDA Web pages, including two documents identified through
snowballing: one from a relevant government agency (the
Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA]) and one
from a professional agency (the American Society of Heating,
Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers [ASHRAE]).
As a primary regulatory agency for the agriculture industry,
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) would be a
major source of information for the food processing industry,
and their documents were considered for review. However,
after preliminary research, the identified USDA documents
were excluded from the study based on the inclusion criteria.
Specifically, industry-specific COVID-19 information
published by the USDA is in the form of FAQs (57, 59), which
was one of the exclusion criterion. The document " USDA
COVID-19 Workplace Safety Plan " (58) is addressed to USDA
employees (rather than to industry workers), which was
another exclusion criterion. This document provides guidance
for employees of USDA agencies, including inspectors for the
Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) (56). Because FSIS
inspectors interact with food industry workers, the USDA
document provides indirect protection to the health of the
employees in FSIS-regulated commercial establishments by
protecting the health of FSIS inspectors.
A timeline was created listing when the 35 documents were
published (Fig. 1). A cluster of documents was published
in April 2020 following the World Health Organization's
declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic (35) and
coinciding with the outbreak at Smithfield Foods (37, 51). In
December 2020, a second cluster of documents was published
when a large spike in COVID-19 cases occurred in the United
States during the winter (53). Among the 35 documents,
five themes and 19 categories of mitigation strategies were
identified and extracted through content analysis (Table 1).
The five broad themes are employee biosafety, surveillance,
vaccination, social distancing (also described a physical
distancing) (6), and worker education. The first document
addressing the employee biosafety theme was published in
October 2018 (Fig. 1), i.e., before the pandemic has started,
but it was included in this review because of its relevance
to COVID-19 control. In April 2020, surveillance, social
distancing, and worker education mitigation themes were first
mentioned in the reviewed documents, and the vaccination
theme was first mentioned in a document published in
October 2020 (Fig. 1).
Overall, information provided by each agency was
consistent. Regarding employee biosafety, guidelines for the
food industry generally recommended that employers inspect
and maintain facility heating, ventilation, and air conditioning
systems (31, 47, 50), improve air filtration by installing MERV13
filters (47, 50), increase natural ventilation (47), ensure
the demand-controlled ventilation is off (31, 50), promote
hand washing and install hand sanitizer dispensers (3, 7, 9, 34,
Figure 1. Timeline of the documents published by the U.S. government and one professional association about mitigation of coronavirus
disease 2019 (COVID-19) relevant to U.S. food manufacturing and processing industry workers. Above the timeline axis are individual
documents by their publishing entities (and reference number); below the axis are the themes of mitigation strategies extracted from all
documents published in a given month (ordered by row from the most to least frequently appearing theme).
428 Food Protection Trends November/December

Food Protection Trends - November/December 2022

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