One Person Per Household Will Be Tested for Coronavirus! With travel restrictions lifted for tea producers, the journey back to their hometowns continues. Meanwhile, a team of 110 assigned personnel is administering coronavirus tests to quarantined tea producers, testing one person from each household. Across the Eastern Black Sea region, harvesting has begun on some 830,000 decares of planted fresh tea, cultivated by around one million households. Preventive measures for COVID-19 and closed borders prevented seasonal tea workers from abroad from arriving, and metropolitan residents were initially barred from entering the province, which led to a shortage of labor.
Within this scope, coordinated by the Interior, Health, Forestry and Agriculture Ministries and organized with the provincial governorates and representatives of related institutions in four provinces, tea harvesting has now started. The related decision was announced last week by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
50,000 People Applied for Fresh Tea Harvesting!
Applications for tea harvesting exceeded 50,000 people. After tea producers submitted requests to the Interior Ministry, permits were issued. Across the four provinces, total applications surpassed 50,000. Following the approval process, harvest workers began arriving as of Wednesday night. Due to COVID-19, extra precautions have been implemented in Rize, Trabzon, Artvin and Giresun. In addition to police and gendarmerie controls at provincial borders, arriving producers undergo health screenings and are placed under quarantine for one week. The number of producers wishing to come to Rize has exceeded 36,000. Nearly 12,000 of those who applied have already arrived in the province, while the remainder are expected in the coming days.
Teams visiting villages and neighborhoods are gathering those who came for fresh tea harvesting. Announcements via mosques and loudspeakers call on arrivals from outside the province to send one person per household to mosques for testing. Producers who test negative will be allowed to leave their homes to attend to household needs; other household members will be permitted only to participate in tea harvesting and must not be present outside the home or fields for other reasons. After completing the 14-day quarantine, producers may return to their normal routines. Test teams, working in groups of three, aim to test 5,000 people within three days.