Marruecos trata de contener su peor foco de virus localizado entre freseras

Morocco is trying to slow down with a field hospital built for the occasion, plus the isolation of several villages, its worst coronavirus outbreak ever recorded, located mainly in two Spanish fruit companies in a region south of Larache.

To date, the outbreak has officially reported 700 cases of infection, mainly from two red fruit processing plants belonging to the Spanish companies Frigodar (457 cases) and Natberry (103).

Hundreds of people who have been in contact with the infected are being tested, and the number of cases could increase in the coming days.

Last night, Interior Minister Abdeluafi Laftit announced the creation of an ad hoc field hospital in the town of Sidi Yahya del Gharb (about 50 kilometers north of Rabat) to admit the 700 strawberry plants, after they were temporarily admitted to empty student residences, Efe learned.

In Sidi Yahya, Efe was able to check this morning on the preparations to set up the field hospital in an existing military facility; although the movement of ambulances, fire engines and military vehicles was observed, no source wanted to talk or allowed to take pictures of the place.

Laftit also recalled yesterday that the accesses to the villages from which the infected workers come are closed, and added that his government has ordered to stop the activity in all the red fruits treatment plants that are concentrated in the Lukos river basin, which add up to about twenty, half of them of foreign capital.

The news has dealt a heavy blow to this sector, which has become the main provider of employment in the region and which employs mainly women; according to the president of the Network of Development Associations in the region, Abdelali El Karkri, there are some 20,000 people (almost all women) working in the red fruit.

The chain of contagion that has occurred in this agricultural region is not defined, but there are some clues: in the case of Frigodar, its manager Jerónimo Díaz tells Efe that on Friday the 12th they detected a first case in the person of a driver who was transporting the workers, and asked him to cease his services and put himself in quarantine.

But the driver, who is self-employed, not only works with Frigodar, but with four or five other companies in the region, and he spends the day from village to village picking up tens or hundreds of women and taking them to their fruit packing or packaging plants, so the chances of contagion have multiplied.

In fact, this is what happened, and after starting the drip of cases in the different villages, the region's caid ordered on Wednesday 17 collective tests in the different fruit plants, even at the risk that this would lead to large concentrations of all workers, Diaz explained.

Diaz maintains that his company - with 1,313 employees - had already established on its own initiative in its plant several protection measures such as mandatory masks, separation screens and temperature taking, and adds that the Moroccan government forced this year the transporters to reduce by half the number of workers transferred.

It is not clear whether the transporters complied with the rules: Karkri says that every year, at the height of the strawberry campaign, these transporters do not hesitate to remove the seats and put up to forty people, all standing inside the vehicle.

El Karkri points out that the workers also break the rules of distancing, and although they are forced to work behind a screen, they later meet for group lunches where there is not the slightest social distance.

This activist says that the regularization of these workers has advanced at a good pace in recent years, with 80% of them affiliated to social security, but insists that transport is the true "black spot" of the sector.

The positive cases of the coronavirus have been appearing during the week in several points of this strawberry region - at this time of the year more focused on raspberries and blueberries - until they exploded in the hands of the Moroccan government, which had managed to contain the pandemic with very harsh confinement measures.

To date, Morocco has recorded 9,839 cases of coronavirus and 213 deaths, and the 100-day containment will begin to relax from next Thursday.