Early, decisive prevention at an area cosmetics factory might have saved hundreds of workers from catching COVID-19.

Process Technologies and its affiliate company, Seokoh, started taking employees’ temperatures March 23, five days after the first case appeared in Lackawanna County and four days before the most stringent restrictions on movement locally came down from Harrisburg.

The contract makeup manufacturer has nearly 300 workers across multiple sites in Lackawanna County and roots in South Korea, a country revered for how it’s handling the pandemic without shutting down its economy.

Company controller

Shawnna Giumento said they received guidance from their Korean counterparts on how to stave off the disease early. Those steps helped them get an employee away from others long before anyone knew that worker had the disease.

Warehousing and many types of manufacturing are allowed to stay open under Gov. Tom Wolf’s sweeping ban on non-life-sustaining businesses.

In Luzerne County, tens of thousands of employees who flock to giant warehouses around Hazleton, Hanover Twp. and Pittston Twp. magnify the odds of spreading it faster and farther.

Luzerne County has three times as many confirmed cases as Lackawanna County, with the heaviest concentration in and around Hazleton where the largest business parks are.

It’s different in Lackawanna County, where the nascent warehouse build-out hasn’t reached Luzerne County’s level.

“Our warehousing/distribution is much different than in Hazleton,” said Andy Skrip, a vice president at the Greater Scranton Chamber of Commerce.

The chamber’s development arm, SLIBCO, which Skrip leads, had a hand in developing most of the county’s 23 business and industrial parks.

“We have more parks. The employment is spread out,” he said.

Two large scale, pending projects in the Valley View Business Park — a Chewy.com distribution center and another spec building under construction by developer Trammell Crow Co. — are on the order of Luzerne County’s largest sites, but they’re not operational yet, and construction has stalled due to COVID-19.

Operating warehouses might still be allowed. Building new ones is not.

Lackawanna County’s workforce profile is different, too.

Luzerne County has twice as many working-age, Latino residents, according to U.S. Census data. Immigrants who come from impoverished or war-torn countries sometimes distrust government, so they might ignore official edicts to shelter in place, said Teri Ooms. She’s the director at the Institute, a public policy think tank funded by area colleges.

Language barriers could impede important public safety messages. Public information announcements would be more effective if they appeared in other languages so the region’s immigrants from Gujarat, Bhutan, and the Congo can understand, as well as in English and Spanish, she said.

‘It’s good news’

On the morning of March 31, a temperature check stopped one employee at the door at Process Technologies. That person was sent home with a fever, Giumento said.

Thirteen days later, just this week, test results for COVID-19 came back positive. It’s the only confirmed case the company has had so far, she said.

“It’s good news for us that we were able to catch it before it got through the company,” she said.

The company has reduced two shifts to one to allow cleaning crews to disinfect, she said. Employees fill out weekly questionnaires to screen out anyone who might have been exposed to infection. Breaks are staggered so not everyone is taking them at once.

Lackawanna County manufacturers and distributors did a fair job preparing, said Craig Pawlick, the secretary-treasurer for the Teamsters Local 229 in Scranton. The union local represents 1,100 workers, most of them in essential industries and service jobs, across Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Topps, the company that makes Ring Pop candy in Scranton, started preventive measures in late February/early March, he said.

Under Wolf’s order, confection manufacturers may keep the production line moving, but Pawlick questioned whether the company should have just closed down.

“Topps makes Ring Pops and candy, is that truly essential?” he asked. “However, the company, in their defense, is complying with all the CDC recommendations.”

Ooms echoed his challenge on broadly defined essential businesses.

Distributors that ship food, cleaning products or medical supplies are obvious ones to keep open.

“Are handbags and shoes essential?” she asked. “There is a broader section of the workforce nationally that could be home if there were further breakdowns within the broader industry classifications.”

Pawlick said one of the largest companies where Local 229 represents workers, Americold Logistics in the Covington Industrial Park, which has about 240 workers, had only a handful of confirmed cases.

The transportation company has workers hauling “around the clock” to large cities in New York and New Jersey, he said.

“I think they’ve only had three employees through this test positive for COVID-19,” he said. “They’ve been kind of ahead of it. They immediately had those people removed from the building. They’re doing what they can.”

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