![](https://healthnewsatyourfingertips.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/npressfetimg-1514.png)
Global poultry production giant Moy Park has confirmed that a “very small number of employees” have tested positive for Coronavirus at a plant in Northern Ireland.
The company said the workers at its Ballymena factory are self-isolating on full pay.
Moy Park’s operation in the Country Antrim town employs 1,400 workers including agency staff. Northern Ireland’s health minister Robin Swann said that the region’s Public Health Agency is co-operating with Moy Park over the outbreak.
Swann stressed that an outbreak of Covid-19 is defined as two or more people being infected.
“We have always said we will expect outbreaks and clusters as we start to ease restrictions, but what we really need is for people to interact with test track and tracing so we can manage them,” Swann added.
Sturgeon accuses Johnson of exploiting Covid crisis as ‘political weapon’ by ‘crowing’ about union
Updated
at 9.44am EDT
Campaigners threaten PM with judicial review if he does not set up Covid-19 inquiry now
A large group of families whose relatives have died due to Covid-19 have sent Boris Johnson an ultimatum to hold an immediate public inquiry into the government’s handling of the pandemic, promising to take legal action to force him to do so if he refuses. The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, which now represents 1,400 people, is crowdfunding to support an expected application for judicial review, after the prime minister and the health secretary, Matt Hancock, declined a request to hold an inquiry or to meet families.
The detailed letter, sent by the group’s solicitors, Broudie Jackson Canter, argues that the government has a legal duty to hold a public inquiry under article two of the European convention on human rights, which requires a state to protect life. That duty, which applies in UK law, includes an obligation to carry out an effective investigation into people’s deaths where the state itself may have failed to protect them.
Detailing the deaths of 24 people whose relatives are members of the group, including nurses, care and other key workers and several elderly residents of care homes, the legal letter sets out 22 issues for a public inquiry to examine, including whether the UK was inadequately prepared for a pandemic.
In a reply to the families’ lawyers on 16 July, Lee McDonough, director general of NHS acute care and workforce, said the government is not yet planning to hold an inquiry. He said:
As the government has made clear, at some point in the future there will be an opportunity for it to look back, to reflect and to learn lessons. However at the moment the important thing is to focus on responding to the current pandemic.
The families’ letter asks Johnson and Hancock to reconsider their position within 14 days, or they will “issue judicial review proceedings without further notice”.
Updated
at 8.36am EDT