All staff at Four Leaves’ Ion outlet quarantined after positive case
All staff at the Four Leaves outlet at Ion Orchard have been quarantined, and the bakery has been closed temporarily, after a retail assistant working there was announced as a Covid-19 case on Tuesday.
The AMK Hub outlet where she was at for training last month has also been closed for a day for cleaning, and its staff will be swabbed as a precaution.
A professional disinfection company was engaged to conduct deep cleaning and disinfection at the Ion Orchard outlet on Monday, the bakery chain's senior manager, Mr Koji Tanabe, said in a statement yesterday.
He added that the outlet has been closed since Tuesday till further notice as a precautionary measure.
Mr Tanabe said the employee had also been to the Four Leaves outlet at AMK Hub for training on May 23, after which she worked at the Ion Orchard outlet.
He said the Ministry of Health (MOH) had told the company that there was no need to quarantine the AMK Hub outlet staff as more than 14 days had passed prior to the woman's positive test.
The staff will be placed under phone surveillance instead and may be swabbed if necessary.
Four Leaves decided to stop operations at its AMK Hub outlet yesterday and have it deep cleaned and disinfected, Mr Tanabe added.
"As an additional precautionary measure, we will also arrange for all AMK Hub staff to go for swab tests," he said.
MOH had said on Tuesday that the infected staff member is a 35-year-old Malaysian woman.
She developed a fever, cough, sore throat and runny nose last Saturday but did not seek medical treatment until Monday, when she visited a general practitioner.
She was immediately isolated when her antigen rapid test result came back positive for Covid-19.
Her polymerase chain reaction test result also came back positive that day.
From the MOH statement, it appears that the woman had been working at the Ion Orchard outlet from last Thursday to Sunday, as the location and dates appear under the ministry's list of public places that community cases have been to while infectious.
Dr Rayner Tan, postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore's Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, said that customers should not be worried about transmission through food, as there is no evidence currently to suggest that the virus can be transmitted via food and food packaging.
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