New Report Says Meat, Poultry Plants Are Covid Hotbeds

[douglas9]

Working conditions in meatpacking plants likely led to the spread of Covid in rural areas of the United States in the early months of the pandemic, a new U.S. Department of Agriculture research shows.

The space between workers, who stand close together on production lines as they make the same cut over and over, was probably the main factor that caused the Covid hotbeds and outbreaks, according to the USDA’s report published last month. Overall, meatpacking plant workers were much more likely to be exposed to the virus than workers in other manufacturing jobs.

“It is a strong possibility that specifically the physical proximity of the workers in meatpacking plants is directly linked to the outbreaks that we saw in the spring and summer of 2020,” said Thomas Krumel, one of the paper’s authors and now an assistant professor at North Dakota State University.

The paper, according to the researchers, could be the first effort to empirically identify conditions that caused coronavirus outbreaks in meatpacking plants at an industry-wide level.

The paper’s conclusions support what many meatpacking workers and advocates suspected during the early months of the pandemic: Working close together and high speeds of production, which lead to an even more compact workplace, contributed to the virus’ spread.


https://www.dcreport.org/2021/10/10/new-report-says-meat-poulty-plants-are-covid-hotbeds/