According to the BBC, the Middlethorpe Hall Hotel closed on Sunday when as many as 20 staff reported feeling unwell. The staff are all currently being tested to see whether they have been affected by the norovirus illness. It is not known whether any customers at the hotel suffered illness and the decision to close the hotel temporarily has been acknowledged to be a preventative decision made in the interests of staff and customers.
According to the NHS website, the noroviruses are a group of viruses which are a common cause of gastroenteritis (or upset stomach). They affect between 600,000 and 1 million people in the UK every year and are particularly infectious due to the range of ways in which they can be transferred from person to person, through contact with contaminated surfaces and through eating contaminated food or drinking contaminated water.
With such a large number of staff taken ill at the same time it is easy to suspect that the most common cause would be that the staff have all eaten contaminated food as the virus would most likely have spread less swiftly if it was being passed from person to person.
The hotel should make sure to employ a good system of hygiene to include hand washing after food preparation, contact with infected people and after using the toilet. The hotel should have these preventative measures in place anyway to stop this kind of outbreak occurring and if food contamination is the cause of the illness then the hotel will need to review its food hygiene criteria to make sure that it does not put staff or customers at risk of this or more deadly illnesses occurring in future.