Food Safety in the Age of COVID-19

By: Dr. Kara Morgan

Within the coronavirus pandemic, we are living through extraordinary times. Even as a decision analyst who is accustomed to bringing tools and experience to the challenge of making decisions under uncertainty, I am finding it challenging to absorb and react to all of the emerging information that we are continuously receiving. It is overwhelming.

In the food safety community, the first questions were about the ability for coronavirus to be transmitted through food. Current research indicates that the likelihood of transmission through food is very low. However, we need to be aware how quickly science has been changing during this pandemic and be prepared to respond accordingly. We cannot let down our guard.

Other concerns focus on the impacts of food safety, not from the coronavirus, but from traditional foodborne pathogens. The food safety system has some automated and technical components but, at its core, it is a human system and vulnerable to the same types of impacts that every human system can be impacted by. Stressed employees, new and less trained employees, and employees working in unusual environments (increase in curbside deliveries, wearing masks while waiting tables), restaurants selling bulk produce and raw protein, all of these unusual situations can impact the risk management hurdles that are put in place to prevent and reduce foodborne illness. Also, things like shifts in types of food being eaten (more eating at home, more take-out) and shortages in grocery stores can lead to changes in consumption patterns which can lead to changes in exposure to foodborne illness  as well.

The final assault on the food safety system from coronavirus is the problem of government resources. The public health resources that are assigned at CDC and in local and state health agencies to collect and analyze data on foodborne illness have been redirected to support work on containing and managing the COVID19 outbreak. This is understandable but poses an increasingly likelihood over the next weeks and months that a large foodborne outbreak will not be identified by the systems that would usually detect it. Also, doctors are not ordering the lab tests that feed data into the surveillance system that identifies matches and helps link single illnesses to other illnesses that lead to the recognition of an outbreak. Finally, the resources at FDA that are dedicated to oversight of the food system through domestic and foreign inspections of food manufacturing facilities have been put on hold in order to protect FDA inspectors from possible exposure to coronavirus. In addition, the food manufacturing inspections that are conducted by state inspectors under contract to FDA were also paused. The USDA inspections have not been stopped (if they had, meat and poultry production would have to stop, by law), but many USDA inspectors have become ill from coronavirus and at least four have died, so there are clearly stresses in that environment as well.

Some have hypothesized that the cleaning and sanitizing practices that have been put in place to reduce the spread of coronavirus could have positive impacts on food safety. It is true that policies like proper handwashing and employees staying away from work when they are sick are key risk management tools for reducing foodborne illnesses caused by microbial pathogens. Also, the sanitation practices put into place to reduce the spread of COVID19 will similarly kill foodborne pathogens on food contact surfaces that may have otherwise caused cross-contamination and lead to foodborne illness. But the truth is, we will never know. We will never know whether these practices reduced foodborne illnesses because the data we have during the pandemic will be of lower quality than previous time frames, that is, it will have more missing data due to lack of reporting from state labs of patient samples and the lack of resources to monitor and trace foodborne outbreaks. Most likely, the estimates of foodborne illness during this time frame will be lower, but we will not know if that was due to the change in practices or due to the lack of resources to identify and investigate illnesses. It is a fragile system we have built to monitor foodborne illness, and unfortunately, like so many other things, the COVID19 pandemic has shattered it. Perhaps the analysts who estimate foodborne burden can develop a method of accounting for these changes, but those will simply introduce more uncertainty. There is one hope - if we can keep these more intense cleaning and illness protocols in place after the COVID-19 threat passes and the public health system is able to turn its attention back to food safety, only then will we will be able to assess the true impact on the system. And if, as many say, we are moving into an era with a constant threat of global pandemics, maybe that is not as unlikely as it now seems.

Dr. Kara Morgan

Research Scientist