The Unasked Question About Abattoirs and Meat Workers

We don't really know why so many abattoirs and other meat production workplaces have been affected by COVID-19 and have become the focus of outbreaks, sometimes very large ones. This phenomenon is now seen in Victoria, Australia, and has been seen in multiple other countries, including the US, Canada, Germany, France, Israel and many others. The usual "explanation" for this is that work conditions, lack of social distancing and cold are to blame. But this has never been proven to be the case. The obvious question is, could there be another reason why only meat workers stand out as a uniquely vulnerable group? A hypothesis which then begs to be tested is: Could this be related to occupational exposure to livestock, to slaughtered animals' body fluids? Could the animals carry Coronavirus and pass it on to humans who are exposed to them in such an intensive manner? Abattoirs sometimes process thousands of animals a day, and workers are exposed to their breath, blood, respiratory secretions etc. How do we know the virus does not originate from the animals?

I will list the circumstantial evidence in favour of this hypothesis first.

1. The COVID-19 epidemic started at a meat market in China. It has always been assumed to have passed to humans from animal meat, and speculations about the identity of that animal have never been proven. The possibility that the virus was present in farm animals at the Wuhan market has not, to my knowledge, been systematically checked.

2. MERS COVID, another Coronavirus epidemic only a few years ago, spread to camel abattoirs who were at high risk of that infection. We know MERS passed from infected bats to farm animals (camels in that case) then from camels to humans, and especially to camel abattoir workers. COVID-19 may have a similar transmission pattern, being a related virus. Otherwise, the assumption that abattoir workers are now having outbreaks of COVID-19 for a completely different reason (work conditions) would be an amazing coincidence.

3. Animals have been documented to spread COVID-19 to humans, see the case of the mink farm in the Netherlands recently.

The possibility that livestock can pass the virus to humans through abattoir exposure can easily be tested. The material needed is bodily fluid from animals which are being killed for meat anyway, and there is no need to use laboratory/experimental animals for this purpose. Collecting samples from abattoir and subjecting them to RT-PCR is simple and easy. However, this has not yet been done. I have personally approached several government officials and research institutes in Australia and the idea has been repeatedly rejected, mainly on the grounds that it was considered unlikely, and that there would be no known way for farm animals from country Victoria to get infected with the virus in the first place.

We have to remember that we do not know everything about this virus and its biology. We are learning on the run. Ruling out any plausible explanations before simply testing them now is going to be hard to justify if we find out later that this hypothesis is correct.