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Thursday’s announcement of a coalition of businesses and healthcare entities coming together in order to improve COVID-19 testing is another step in the right direction in keeping our community safe.

Hormel Foods, Quality Pork Processors, Albert Lea Select Foods, Mower County Public Health and Mayo Clinic Health Systems-Albert Lea and Austin all came together in order to attempt to stem the rising COVID-19 cases in Austin.

After a good amount of time of slowly rising numbers, Mower started seeing an uptick that continued to gain momentum throughout the community, highlighted by increasingly sharp rises in numbers.

Unfortunately, Austin also reported its first two — and hopefully last — deaths related to COVID-19.

As cases in Mower continued to take a steep climb, so did the cases in both Hormel and QPP plants. Both places met those numbers with increased procedures, that had a much earlier origin.

“I was part of a group at Hormel Foods since the end of January that was looking at the coronavirus,” said Richard Carlson, vice president of Quality Control for Hormel during Thursday’s virtual news conference announcing the Community Health First plan.

To their credit, these early moves by both plants have been able to keep the doors of their facilities open when other plants, including the JBS Pork Plant in Worthington and the Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, both had to shutter their plants because of COVID-19 cases swiftly expanding within each site.

And now the knowledge and experience of Mayo, who stepped up in April with increased testing of their own, has been added to the mix.

Taken together, this is a powerful coalition of groups who want to keep our community as safe as possible.

However, we urge those employees working at these plants who have not been tested to strongly consider getting a test if they work at either of the plants. Both places have been offering testing in order to try and stay on top of the crisis and this plan will continue that and streamline it.

Currently, half of the total employees within both Hormel and QPP have been tested, but it is only on a volunteer basis as the company’s urge people who think they may have been exposed or worried about the possibility to get tested.

Despite measures being taken within the plan to limit contact and to keep the plants sanitized, the very nature of the work being done has hundreds of people passing each other each day.

Early on in the pandemic, cases were largely spread through travel. People traveling to one place, getting infected and then coming back again. Now, spread of the coronavirus is largely through known and unknown contact or community spread.

An example of this is groups of people living in one dwelling where one person comes down with the virus and then transmits it to the others, such as the case with many who work at Hormel and QPP, highlighting a need for increased testing among the employees.

Overall, these businesses and organizations have taken the proper steps to keep the number of COVID-19 cases down, but we need to be involved in this as well. We want to see these plants remain open and continue to do the good work they do and that success comes at the hands of their healthy employees.