Short Wave - One Way To Slow Coronavirus Outbreaks At Meatpacking Plants? A Lot Of Testing

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

Meatpacking plants have been some of the biggest COVID-19 hot spots in the country. Thousands of workers have been infected, dozens have died. As plants reopen, one strategy has helped slow the virus's spread: large-scale employee testing. NPR food and agriculture correspondent Dan Charles explains how this approach could be a lesson for other industries as well.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Maddie Safai here with Dan Charles, food and agriculture correspondent. Hey, Dan. Hi, Maddie. So, Dan, you've been following outbreaks of the coronavirus in meatpacking plants across the country. Yeah, these have been some of the biggest COVID-19 hotspots in the entire country. More than 10,000 workers in these plants have been infected. Dozens of them have died.

and it really just started, you know, like mid to the end of March. Yeah, I mean, I specifically remember hearing about a plant in South Dakota, I think, and how dire things were there. Right. That was a Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls. It was one of the first plants where this really became visible and obvious to people. It's also a really big plant, one of the biggest pork processing plants in the country. And, you know, there was this moment. At the end of March, the beginning of April.

when the workers in this plant, they knew that some workers had gotten sick, but the company was not saying how many, and the workers just felt really vulnerable. They didn't have any protective gear. They didn't have any masks. They didn't have anything that could protect them from getting sick at work. This is Nancy Renosa. Years ago, she worked at the plant.

Now she runs a local news service in Sioux Falls for Spanish speakers. She was getting calls from people. She got a call from one friend in particular, she remembers. I have a friend of mine that told his boss that he was going to quit because he felt afraid for his family. And he said the words from his boss were that he was failing the American people by leaving. Failing the American people? Wow. Yeah.

It's outrageous. Yeah, Dan, that's a lot to put on somebody. You know what I mean? Right. And you have to remember that in the meatpacking industry, many of the workers are immigrants, sometimes refugees. The jobs are tough, but they're pretty good jobs. I mean, they pay $16, $18 an hour, good health benefits. So there are reasons to keep working.

Nancy told me about another one of her friends who worked at the plant, a man in his 60s, Augustine Rodriguez. She says he kept working after he got sick. But eventually it was too much. He went to the hospital. He eventually died. Oh, my gosh, Dan. Okay. So this was a couple of months ago when it was especially bad for the meatpacking industry.

Since then, more and more plants have, you know, reopened again. So what have the company's been doing now to keep their workers safe? They've been trying lots and lots of different things. But there's one thing in particular that I thought was really interesting. One key strategy, which I think is relevant for other parts of the economy, too, large-scale coronavirus testing. Okay. So today on the show, the massive coronavirus outbreaks in meatpacking plants and how large-scale employee testing could help and be a lesson for other industries.

This is Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. Okay, so these outbreaks started becoming visible in early April and a whole bunch of plants. What productive measures did the companies start to implement at that point? Well, they started with the things that people were talking about doing back then, which was things like temperature checks for workers before entering the plants, which we know now was not particularly effective because people with the virus don't always, you know, show symptoms. They started trying to implement a little more space in break rooms, locker rooms, to make social distancing, you know, possible. But, you know, as the weeks went by, as the days went

by in a lot of these plants at the beginning of April, the numbers just were going up and up. The things that they were doing was not enough. And local communities, health officials, the workers themselves were putting pressure on these companies, protesting. saying you've got to shut these plants down. Yeah. I mean, I remember some of them shutting down and some of the CEOs running those companies being like very public and very up in arms about it.

Right. The CEO of Smithfield said the nation has to make a choice. Are we going to produce meat or not? I mean, Tyson, that company took out a full page ad and said things like the meat supply chain is breaking down. they and politicians who were supporting them sent a letter to the White House saying you have to declare meat plants essential infrastructure and in fact in fact the White House did they issued an executive order basically saying meat plants have to stay open but that doesn't solve the problem

you know it doesn't solve the coronavirus problem and the companies realized they had to basically test a lot of their workers yeah I mean we've talked about how important this is on the show, like how widespread testing has allowed other countries to reopen in certain places because, you know, they have an actual idea of where the outbreaks are and where they aren't. What does widespread testing look like in in this situation, Dan? Okay. One example, and this was actually the first one that I became aware of, there's a Tyson plant, a big one in Black Hawk County, Iowa. In mid-April, they also had lots and lots of workers showing up in clinics in the town with symptoms of COVID-19. They had a local,

you know, public health director, Nafisa Cis Ebonnier, who was telling plant managers, they had a big problem. I talked with her, you know, just a couple of weeks ago. We were communicating that there is a huge volume. There is an outbreak. Who first said, you've got to test absolutely everybody? Was it the company or did you say that? Oh, the local health department. We said that. I said it. You have to get a sense of what's going on in the plant. So first, they shut the plant down, shut it down completely, and they asked all the employees, 2,800 people, to come to the plant's parking lot, line up, and get tested. Oh, wow. So like all 2,800 workers?

That's a, you know, fairly large-scale testing effort, Dan. Yeah. And here's the thing. Close to 1,000 workers at that one plant ended up testing positive for the virus. Wow. Wow. And Tyson, the company, there were a couple of other plants where they did it in conjunction with the local public health authorities, but they have since hired a contractor to carry out these universal one-time tests of the workforce at a bunch of plants. So far, I think they've done about 20 facilities from Maine to Virginia and Texas. They have tested around 30,000 workers at this point, which is about a quarter of their workforce. Yeah, we all have to swab up the nose.

And it wasn't fun. I'll tell you that. This is Dennis Medburn. He's a union steward at the Tyson plant in Logansport, Indiana. At the time, I was not feeling sick. Not at the time of testing. And again, in his case, a few days later, while I was waiting for those test results, he lost his sense of smell, developed constant headaches.

Oh, boy. Okay. So, and of course, his test came back positive, along with 900 other people at that plant. Wow. It's been the story at one plant after another. Most of the people who test positive seem healthy at the time. No symptoms of COVID-19. Wow. Okay. I mean, that's why testing is so important, right? Lots of these workers would probably have kept going to work. So, okay, Dan, what happens when a worker does test positive?

So the CDC has these guidelines. If you develop symptoms, then a certain number of days after you are symptom free, you are allowed to go back to work. If you never develop symptoms, you wait 10 days after you take the test and then you can go back to work. Scientists say by then you probably are not going to infect anybody. And it seems like getting those infected workers to stay home, to not go to work, has helped. Back in Blackhawk County, Iowa, Nafisa Cis Ebonier told me a couple of weeks ago, new COVID cases at the plant are way down. Actually, today's our first day. We've had a zero, a zero increase in cases. Okay, so like that sounds like tentatively like good news.

And like maybe this approach to large scale testing of the workforce could be working in some way? Yeah, at this point, it seems absolutely essential. But at the same time, just doing it once probably is not going to be enough. Right, exactly. Because I have to, if, you know, these workers could just pick up the virus the very next day and you could have another outbreak on your hands, hypothetically, right? Right. And one of the reasons I was interested in the experience of these plants with testing is there's a whole discussion going on in other parts of society about this exact same thing. You know, universities, other workplaces. Basically, how many people do you have to test and how often? So this is not just a meatpacking story. So on the one hand, you have the union, the United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents a lot of these meatpacking workers. Mark Larson is a top official there. And he, is demanding a rapid coronavirus test for every single worker, every single day.

We really do have to get some sort of daily testing mechanism for all the essential workers in this country. Because he says, you know, a lot of these workers are still afraid to go back to work. And if there was daily testing, they, you know, life would be just much less stressful. They look around the plant. They look around their locker room or their break room. They know that everybody else inside these walls is COVID-free. I mean, Dan, that sounds amazing, but I mean, do you think it's actually feasible? Like testing every worker every day.

Because like you said, this isn't just meatpacking, right? I feel like as more and more businesses and schools and places of worship open up, this question is only going to become more relevant. Right. So the other side of that debate is most of the people that I talk to say that it's just not technically feasible on a really large scale to do that. For instance, I talk with a top public health official in the city of Nashville who dealt with an outbreak at the local Tyson plant there. And he says, no, I mean, today it's not feasible to test everybody at that plant every single day. But he does want them to do some kind of random testing on a regular basis so that he can catch it, you know, if there is a new wave of infection.

And in fact, Tyson Foods, they say they are planning this thing that they call Sentinel testing. some kind of random testing. I asked them, okay, so how many workers? How often? And they said, well, we're still working out the details. Okay. All right, Dan. Thank you so much for all of your reporting on this.

It is super important and really helpful. My pleasure, Maddie. You can check out today's episode page for links to more of Dan's reporting on the coronavirus and meatpacking plans, including an in-depth episode he's reported for NPR's investigative podcast, Embedded. Today's episode was produced by Britt Hansen, fact-checked by Burley McCoy, and edited by Viet Le. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.