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Cold store of the meat manufacturer Tönnies (archive photo)
Photo: Bernd Thissen / picture alliance / dpa
The federal government has still not got an overview of how many people were infected with the corona virus in slaughterhouses, nurseries or on farms this year.
That emerges from a response to a small question from the left-wing parliamentary group in the Bundestag, which SPIEGEL has received.
"The Federal Government has no information on the questions (...)," said the reply from the Ministry of Health.
The left faction wanted to know in detail how many people in which federal states were infected in which farms in agriculture, horticulture and food processing.
In addition, it was asked how many people got sick and how the diseases progressed.
The left faction also wanted to know how many harvest workers from abroad were affected.
None of this could be answered by the government.
Slaughterhouses were already so-called hotspots in spring, in which hundreds of people were infected.
The coronavirus spread again and again in the factories in which people often work close to one another in cold air and have to shout loudly to communicate.
In addition, workers who are not permanently employed often live with several people in rooms.
For example, an outbreak in Rheda-Wiedenbrück in North Rhine-Westphalia with far more than a thousand infected people ensured that drastic measures were imposed in the Gütersloh district.
There was also a major corona outbreak in a company in Coesfeld.
Infections are still regularly reported in slaughterhouses, currently from Ulm, for example.
Fewer large outbreaks have been reported from agriculture and horticulture.
But in Mamming, Bavaria, a company was quarantined around the summer when harvest workers there became infected.
Seasonal workers, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, usually do not live alone in their accommodation, often under hygienically difficult conditions - this promotes the spread of the virus.
In the spring, the government issued special rules for harvest workers to allow them to enter the country.
At that time, freedom of movement in the EU was restricted.
Without seasonal workers for planting and harvesting, many farms would not have been able to make ends meet.
When it came to reviewing the hygiene rules, however, the government always referred to the federal states or the responsible authorities in the municipalities.
The federal government is now doing this in response to the request from the left, in which it lists the responsible authorities.
The information from these authorities was apparently not queried and compiled in order to get a picture of the situation about the infection process in corresponding companies in Germany.
"The fact that the federal government admits that it has no overview of the specific infection process in agricultural and processing companies, for example in the meat industry, is a revealing lack of interest," says Kirsten Tackmann, agricultural policy spokeswoman for the left-wing group.
"The shifting of responsibility between the federal and state levels and within the federal government must finally stop."
However, the fact that, according to its own statements, there is no knowledge of the infections, does not prevent the Ministry of Health from claiming that occupational safety is "making a comprehensive contribution to reducing the number of infections in Germany".
This also applies to the concept paper, which contains recommendations for hygiene rules for companies with seasonal workers.
It "made an important contribution to the containment of the infection process".
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