Counties with Meat Plants See Double the Infection Rates
These areas account for 10 percent of confirmed cases, despite only having 7.5 percent of the country’s population.
In the week following President Donald Trump’s executive order forcing meat processing plants to reopen, COVID-19 spread through communities near these facilities at double the rate of other areas.
A Bloomberg News analysis of data compiled by John Hopkins University found that counties with major beef or pork facilities saw a 40 percent rise in confirmed cases, compared to a 19 percent increase nationwide. Trump’s executive order, which he signed on April 28, designated slaughterhouses as critical infrastructure and shielded the companies that run them from lawsuits. In the following week, these counties accounted for 10 percent of the country’s confirmed cases, despite only having 7.5 percent of its population.
Bloomberg’s analysis also found that in 72 slaughterhouse counties with populations of less than 1 million people, there was a 47 percent rise in cases during that week.
Meat plants have become hotspots for the virus. Dozens of plants closed in April, fueling fears the country’s meat supply was in jeopardy, and shining a light on the conditions workers in these plants face. Since Trump’s order, many of these plants have announced plans to reopen and others have closed.
The outbreaks have spread past the workers in the plants and their family members, as other surrounding communities have also gotten sick. More than 10,000 people have been infected due to outbreaks at meat plants and at least 45 workers have died, according to USA Today and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.
More than 170 plants have had a worker test positive for COVID-19, and at least seven more meat facilities have shut down since Trump’s executive order.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].Counties with Meat Plants See Double the Infection Rates
by Alex Robinson, Modern Farmer
May 14, 2020
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
Has any of this been substantiated? Is this something that is being pushed by the gov’t? Is this any different, truly different to the flu seasons.