September 4, 2020 10.49 am This story is over 42 months old

Four Lincolnshire COVID-19 infections from Norfolk poultry factory outbreak

22 people from Lincolnshire work there
Banham Poultry. Photo: Google Streetview

Four Lincolnshire residents have been confirmed COVID-19 positive in a Norfolk poultry factory outbreak.

Banham Poultry, in Attleborough, has been testing all of its staff and carrying out a deep clean following the outbreak revealed earlier this week.

Almost 500 of the business’ 800 staff had been tested, and more than 100 have been confirmed positive, according to the Eastern Daily Press.

Tony McGinty, Lincolnshire County Council’s director of public health, confirmed that there were about 22 people working at the poultry factory who lived in Lincolnshire, of which four had tested positive so far.

“We’ve seen to it that they’ve had all the usual advice about self-isolating and taking care of themselves,” he confirmed.

Although Lincolnshire has not seen any major outbreaks within the county, this is the second time in recent weeks it has found itself tackling the virus coming from elsewhere.

“We’re almost a bit of an island of relative calm when areas around Lincolnshire are having problems,” said Tony.

“We have our usual low level of finding individual cases from routine care home testing and the like, but they’re all ones and twos, and no outbreaks of any size in any of those settings, which is which is obviously really good news.”

The council said around 7,000 COVID-19 tests had been carried out a week recently, with between 30-40 cases coming back positive.

Although numbers have slowly creeped up recently in line with national figures, so far officials remain unconcerned.

The current cumulative breakdown of the 3,705 cases across Greater Lincolnshire as of 5pm on Thursday was:

  • 2,693 in Lincolnshire (up from 2,688)
  • 769 in North Lincolnshire (up from 767)
  • 243 in North East Lincolnshire (no change)