A study of grocery store employees in Boston found an alarmingly high rate of asymptomatic infection among workers, suggesting that grocery workers should be regularly tested and scrutinized more closely for the public health implications of their role.
In a study of 104 workers from one unnamed store, all of whom were required to be tested after one co-worker was infected, 20 percent of the staff tested positive. Of those, three-quarters had no symptoms, according to the study, which was published last week in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine.
The study was conducted in May, at a time when around 1 percent of the surrounding community was infected. Massachusetts did not have a mask mandate at the time.
The earliest wave of studies of essential workers focused heavily on health care workers, in part because medical centers regularly test for employee health and provide the information to researchers. The authors of the new study say their work makes it clear that other essential workers should also be a focus.
The large number of workers who were infected but asymptomatic was troubling, said one of the report’s co-authors, Justin Yang, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Medicine and a researcher at Harvard’s T.C. Chan School of Public Health.
“That shows us that when someone is positive in that kind of environment, it spreads like wildfire,” Dr. Yang said. “If we had not tested them, they would have spread it to all the other employees and customers.”
The virus also appeared to spread far more widely among employees who had regular contact with customers. Customer-facing employees were five times more likely to be infected than colleagues who did not interact with customers.
Since the study’s publication last week, the authors have received appreciative emails from grocery store workers, “who thanked us because they have felt their voice was not being heard by the corporates through this pandemic,” Dr. Yang said.
The large corporations that own grocery chains would “not want this kind of data to be released,” he said.
— Ellen Barry The New York Times