Grocers grapple with rising COVID-19 cases as second wave sweeps country
Big-box grocery chains across Canada are reporting hundreds of COVID-19 infections among their employees this month, but the retailers say the high number of cases is just part of a larger trend as the general population grapples with a second wave of the pandemic.
Reported infections at four of the largest grocery chains in Canada have soared past 1,370 in January. The companies, however, said the infection rate among their employees, which total in the hundreds of thousands, is lower than the national average and that most employees aren’t contracting the virus at work.
Toronto Public Health has also noticed an increase in the number of cases among people who work “in a retail setting,” which includes grocery stores. According to survey data, 17.3 per cent of people who tested positive for COVID-19 between Dec. 27 and Jan 9 reported working in retail, up from 10.7 per cent between Sept. 28 and Dec. 12.
The survey’s results don’t mean more people are getting the virus in retail settings, only that more people who work in retail are getting the virus. The rise in cases could be partly due to the current lockdown in Ontario forcing more businesses to be closed than earlier in the fall, said Dr. Vinita Dubey, Toronto’s associate medical officer of health.
“Where are we seeing outbreaks now? It’s those sectors that are open,” she said. “Restaurants are not getting outbreaks because they’re not open. As we have more and more things closed, the things that are open are the places where you’re proportionally going to see more cases or outbreaks related to them.”
With higher transmission rates in the broader population, Dubey said it would be expected to see a corresponding rise among employees working in any given sector. But even if employees are contracting the virus outside of work, stores face the challenge of stopping any infected employee from spreading COVID-19 to their colleagues.
“You have to expect that people will come to work contagious, especially because you can be contagious before you have symptoms,” she said. “How many of those cases that have come into the workplace end up spreading in the workplace?”
Of the five major grocery chains operating in Canada, only Loblaw Cos. Ltd., Empire Co. Ltd. and Metro Inc. provide publicly available data on COVID-19 infections in their workforce.
Walmart Canada Corp., with more than 400 stores and 100,000 employees, doesn’t publicly post its data, but told the Financial Post on Monday that 697 of its employees have tested positive for COVID-19 in January.
Walmart spokesperson Adam Grachnik said cases among staff have started to drop recently. In the last week, case totals are down 24 per cent compared to the previous week, and are down 38 per cent compared to the first week of January.
“While the number of reported positive cases has been trending down the past weeks, we remain vigilant,” he said in an email, adding that safety protocols continue to be followed and the retailer is providing two weeks of paid leave to any employee who has close contact with a confirmed case.
Walmart did not provide case totals during previous months.
Costco Wholesale Canada declined to comment on this story.
Metro, with 90,000 staff across 950 grocery stores in Ontario and Quebec, has been the most forthcoming, posting publicly available reports on employee cases dating back to March 2020, when there were 10 positive COVID-19 tests.
Total monthly cases in the first wave peaked at 69 in April, then dropped each month until they bottomed out at 14 cases in August. Monthly case totals then gradually rose through the fall, hitting 250 in December. As of Jan. 25, Metro reported a total of roughly 259 for the month.
Metro spokesperson Marie-Claude Bacon said its case counts are different from some of its competitors in that they also include employees at distribution warehouses.
“Our employees are not as infected as the general population,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of cases in the workplace. Typically, it’s community spread … It’s very rarely a work-related transmission.”
Metro would not divulge the exact rate of infection among its employees, or the percentage of employees who contracted the virus at work, rather than in the community.
“At the end of the day, we see the numbers. We’re, of course, preoccupied by that,” Bacon said. “We’ve been managing this very proactively and even aggressively.”
The two biggest grocers, Loblaw and Empire, only post the number of cases reported over the past 15 days.
Loblaw — the country’s largest grocer with roughly 200,000 employees and 2,500 stores, including 1,300 Shoppers Drug Marts — has reported at least 174 cases in the past 15 days, according to a count of the case reports conducted by the Financial Post.
The count is not exact, however, since Loblaw only reports “multiple” cases in the event that five or more staff at a store test positive. For its tally, the Post counted two reported instances of “multiple” cases as five cases each.
Loblaw would not provide case counts from earlier in January, or for previous months, but company spokesperson Catherine Thomas said employee infections have increased “with the second wave throughout the fall and have seen a dramatic decrease over the last three weeks” after provinces brought in heightened restrictions.
“We see that cases in our stores tend to reflect the local community, the vast majority of colleague infections do not start in our stores, and our infection rates remain below the national average,” she said in an email. “We feel confident that the hundreds of millions of dollars we have spent on pandemic safety continues to work.”
Empire, the Nova Scotia-based chain that owns Sobeys, FreschCo, Safeway and Farm Boy, has reported 200 cases among employees in the past two weeks, according to the Post’s tally of the case reports listed online.
“We have been tracking our case counts since the onset of the pandemic in Canada and our rate of COVID cases is less than half of the rate of COVID cases in the general population, within each province and nationally,” Empire spokesperson Jacquelin Weatherbee said in an email on Tuesday. “We have not let down on our strict COVID protocols in our stores since the pandemic began. Even when the case counts dropped over the summer months, we kept our protocols in place.”
Two unions that represent grocery workers said they haven’t seen a concerning spike in COVID-19 cases.
Unifor, which represents workers at Loblaw, Empire and Metro, said it does not have any evidence of an increase in cases among members so far this year.
Christopher Monette, a Teamsters spokesperson, said the general sense was that cases among grocery staff have stayed “stable” since the onset of the pandemic last spring. Still, he said grocery chains should bring back the pandemic pay increases, which were paid out over the spring until they were removed in June as cases waned.
Empire has reintroduced a pay bonus during the second wave for employees in locked-down regions. Walmart Canada paid $250 bonuses to its full-time staff in December, and $150 to part-time staff. Metro is providing store gift cards to its employees as a bonus, ranging from $75 to $300 depending on hours worked. The first gift cards were handed out last month, with a second round coming in February.
“Working in a grocery store means coming into contact with members of the public every day, including carriers of the virus,” Monette said. “Unfortunately, compensation has not risen with the added risks and workload.”