Danish Crown, Europe’s biggest pork exporter, said it will close down a slaughterhouse for at least a week after a rise in the number of workers infected with Covid-19.
The facility in Ringsted, southwest of Copenhagen, registered another 22 cases on Saturday, brining the total to 142, Danish Crown said in a statement.
Since registering the first case last week, the company has introduced extensive testing of the roughly 850 workers at the site, but the number of infections continued to rise. The outbreak at the plant, which normally processes about 62,000 pigs weekly, has led to a halt in exports to China.
”While the rise in the infection numbers hasn’t been explosive, our intensive testing program hasn’t succeeded in containing the disease, as we had hoped,” Chief Executive Officer Jais Valeur said in the statement.
