© 2024 WNIJ and WNIU
Northern Public Radio
801 N 1st St.
DeKalb, IL 60115
815-753-9000
Northern Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Report for America is a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities.

COVID-19 Investigation at FCA Turns Up Results

Fiat Chrystler Automobiles
Assembly Line Floor at FCA's Belvidere Assembly Plant

There’s new information known about COVID-19 cases associated with the Fiat Chrysler assembly plant in Belvidere. 

 

Health officials from the Boone and Winnebago county health departments have been working closely with Fiat Chrysler to identify cases of COVID-19 at the Belvidere plant. The goal is to determine whether cases among workers were through community spread, or if there was an outbreak within the plant itself.

 

The Boone County Health Department says some of the steps taken include: conference calls with FCA management, locating where positive cases reside, contact tracing of those cases and close contacts, and a site visit to the plant to review safety plans. 

 

Based on the latest information available, health officials believe cases that occurred at the plant were the result of community spread. Company officials will continue to partner with local health authorities to monitor any positive cases among employees. 

  • Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco is a 2020 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project which is a national service program that places talented journalists in local newsrooms.
Juanpablo covers environmental, substandard housing and police-community relations. He’s been a bilingual facilitator at the StoryCorps office in Chicago. As a civic reporting fellow at City Bureau, a non-profit news organization that focuses on Chicago’s South Side, Ramirez-Franco produced print and audio stories about the Pilsen neighborhood. Before that, he was a production intern at the Third Coast International Audio Festival and the rural America editorial intern at In These Times magazine. Ramirez-Franco grew up in northern Illinois. He is a graduate of Knox College.