Case numbers spike in meatpacking cities
Across the country, production at meatpacking plants and other food processing centers has slowed or stopped because of large outbreaks, including one at a Smithfield facility in South Dakota that sickened more than 1,000 people and three at Tyson facilities in Iowa that sickened hundreds of people.
The Times has identified more than 60 food processing facilities across the country with coronavirus outbreaks. The CDC said at least 4,900 meat and poultry processing workers had been infected across 19 states, and at least 20 had died. Though outbreaks have been reported in every region of the country, the rural Midwest and South have been especially hard hit.
Some companies, including Tyson and Smithfield, have refused to answer even basic questions about the size of their outbreaks. And in some places, state and local health officials have also been silent. In Kansas, state officials said there were 544 meatpacking-related cases spread across six clusters, but they refused to name those facilities. In Nebraska, where the National Guard has helped with the mass-testing of meatpacking workers, state and local officials have often refused to provide details. Officials in Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina, among other places, have also not provided that information.
Small metro areas with large meatpacking industries are seeing some of the country’s highest rates of growth in cases. In the county that includes Green Bay, Wis., where there are outbreaks at three meatpacking facilities, cases have more than doubled in two weeks. In Cass County, Ind., where at least 900 Tyson workers tested positive, the number of known cases surged from roughly 50 to more than 1,400 over three weeks. And in Dakota County, Neb., which has the second-highest per capita infection rate of any American county, roughly one of every 14 residents has tested positive.
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Mr. Trump recently declared the meatpacking plants to be critical infrastructure, part of an effort to keep the facilities open. … Representatives for meatpacking workers said more protections were needed in order for the facilities to keep operating. In central Nebraska, the mayor of Grand Island called for federal help testing employees of his city’s hard-hit JBS USA beef processing plant.
“The president, by his stay-open order to JBS, is now responsible to make sure the workers at JBS are tested,” Mayor Roger Steele said recently.
