The Iowa Department of Public Health confirmed Thursday that there had been a COVID-19 outbreak among workers at the Tyson Foods plant in Storm Lake, touching off another round of questions about the state’s reporting of business outbreaks.

IDPH Deputy Director Sarah Reisetter said 555 of the plant’s 2,017 employees ꟷ more than 27%  ꟷ have tested positive so far.

The state’s policies about reporting outbreaks at businesses such as meatpacking plants raised numerous questions earlier this week. State data showed hundreds of positive cases in Sioux, Wright and Buena Vista counties with no new report of a business outbreak.

“Businesses are not currently required to report outbreaks to the Iowa Department of Public Health,” Reisetter said Thursday during Gov. Kim Reynolds’ daily news conference.  The state becomes aware of outbreaks if a company voluntarily reports one or if state surveillance testing uncovers it, she said.

Reisetter also said the state is not necessarily in a position to confirm on its own that a business may have an outbreak involving at least 10% of its employees. Workers can be tested through various outlets and county public health officials might handle contact tracing. The state also doesn’t keep records on the numbers of employees working at various facilities.

“We haven’t had or the access to all of the information necessary to confirm outbreaks at a point in time when 10% of the employees working in these high-risk environments” might test positive. Reisetter said.

She announced confirmation of the Storm Lake outbreak one day after she and Gov. Kim Reynolds indicated there were no plans to routinely report outbreaks at vulnerable businesses unless asked about them by reporters.

On May 5, Reisetter said the state epidemiologist, Dr. Caitlin Pedati “has determined it is necessary to protect the public health to release the name of an employer when there has been an outbreak, which is defined as 10% absenteeism or 10% of the workforce as a confirmed case or is identified as a close contact.”

She went on to specify that this reporting was related to “a single location of an employment setting which constitutes a high-risk environment for the potential of COVID transmission” such as a meatpacking plants, food and beverage processing plants, factories with production lines and warehouses.

She did not indicate that employers had no obligation to report any outbreak or that the state may not have the resources needed to confirm outbreaks on its own.

Reisetter was asked by a reporter at that May 5 news conference why the state set a 10% threshold for “requiring employers” to report an outbreak if that many of their workers were out sick or had reported positive tests. She responded that the threshold is “a consistent standard that we apply when we’re looking at flu activity throughout the state and so we ask schools, for example, to report to the department when they have more than 10% of their students out ill.”

As of noon Thursday, 503 Iowans with COVID-19 have died.  Five of those deaths were reported Wednesday.  There were 18,542 positive cases in Iowa to date, with 212 testing positive on Wednesday and another 75 as of noon Thursday.

Editor Kathie Obradovich has been covering Iowa government and politics for more than 30 years, most recently as political columnist and opinion editor for the Des Moines Register.