The City of Tampere is to begin a mass coronavirus testing effort at the Uros Live arenaconstruction site, after 10 workers at the facility tested positive for the virus in recent days.
The firm in charge of the construction project, SRV, said that around 50 workers from the site had been ordered to quarantine but added that work would continue on schedule.
SRV's production director, Jouni Hämäläinen, said that the entire construction staff would be tested, noting that the goal was to act as swiftly as possible and to also find possible asymptomatic carriers of the virus.
"The tests will be onsite. About 400 people will be tested," he said.
Tests are scheduled to be carried out this week at a mobile testing facility being set up at the construction site.
While SRV is the main contractor of the project, there are well over 100 other subcontractors involved at the site. Hämäläinen said there was no exact information on how many times infection exposure incidents between various employees have taken place to date.
He noted that the site was undergoing intensified cleaning work.
The Uros Live arena facility is scheduled to open to the public in December, well ahead of the Ice Hockey World Championships slated to begin in Tampere and Helsinki in May 2022.
Regional paper Aamulehti was first to report about the situation at the construction site.