MESSAGE
| DATE | 2020-07-14 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] COVID-19 and food shortagees IV
|
propublica.org
Emails Reveal Chaos as Meatpacking Companies Fought Health Agencies Over
COVID-19 Outbreaks in Their Plants
by Michael Grabell, Claire Perlman and Bernice Yeung
28-35 minutes
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published.
For weeks, Rachel Willard, the county health director in Wilkesboro,
North Carolina, had watched with alarm as COVID-19 cases rolled in from
the Tyson Foods chicken plant in the center of town. Then Tyson hired a
private company to take over testing, and the information suddenly
slowed to a trickle.
Blinded to the burgeoning health crisis, Willard and her small staff
grew increasingly agitated. The outbreak had already spread across 100
miles of the North Carolina piedmont, and two workers had died. But
nearly a week after Tysons testing ended in May, the county health
agency had received less than 20% of the results. The little information
it did receive was missing phone numbers and other data, hindering
critical efforts to follow up with infected workers, to tell them to
isolate and to trace their contacts.
Our fear and alarm is the fact that close contacts and positive cases
are walking around, potentially shedding the virus and infecting others,
Willard, who was coordinating the response while on maternity leave,
wrote to state officials on May 14.
Only after the state public health director warned Tyson that its
testing company could face injunctive relief or prosecution did the
health department receive the information. As of Wednesday, 599 workers
had tested positive, more than a fifth of the plants workforce.
The dangerous delay by the nations largest food company is one of a
series of breakdowns revealed in tens of thousands of pages of emails,
text messages, meeting notes and reports that ProPublica obtained from
dozens of public health agencies across the country.
As the coronavirus swept through the nations meatpacking plants this
spring, chaotic scenes like those in Wilkesboro have played out in small
towns that have become some of the countrys biggest hot spots. The
candid, often emotional messages provide a real-time reckoning of how
the companies responsible for a critical part of the food supply chain
were hazardously unprepared and how a system that relied on tiny local
public health agencies was quickly overwhelmed by the consequences.
In Tama, Iowa, where more than 250 workers at a National Beef plant
tested positive for the virus, one local health official emailed her
colleagues a meme of the chef Gordon Ramsay shouting, SHUT IT DOWN!
Obtained by ProPublica via a public records request
Obtained by ProPublica via a public records request
They just dont get it! Mindy Benson, the county emergency management
coordinator, later wrote to the group. They will keep going until all of
their employees have this virus. They would rather risk their employees
health and keep their production going. (National Beef did not return
calls and emails seeking comment.)
The nations meatpackers along with federal and state officials have for
years planned for pandemic flu outbreaks that could wipe out herds and
flocks and threaten Americas food supply. But those efforts focused on
animals rather than the army of humans mostly immigrants, refugees and
African Americans hired to slaughter them and cut them up for
restaurants and groceries.
The failure to have a coordinated plan for workers left small, often
rural communities vulnerable. More than 24,000 coronavirus cases have
been tied to meatpacking plants, ProPublica has found. Though many
havent suffered severe symptoms, at least 87 workers have died. More
than 25 of the dead worked for Tyson.
The coronavirus response was complicated by a lack of clarity over which
agency had the authority to order meatpacking plants to make changes or
shut down. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could only
offer guidance. The U.S. Department of Agriculture dealt with animals
and food. The Labor Department had few rules that applied to a virus.
And the power of local and state health officials varied from state to
state.
In an emailed response to questions, Tyson acknowledged the delay in
releasing the test results in North Carolina. When we learned that there
was a delay with our lab partners, we acknowledged the urgency of the
situation and worked to address the situation immediately, spokesman
Gary Mickelson said.
He said Tyson formed a coronavirus task force in January to assess risks
and work on mitigation plans and began engaging with the CDC and other
health officials shortly thereafter. At the majority of our facilities
across the country, there have been no cases of COVID-19 that we know
of, he said. ProPublica found cases at slightly less than half of Tysons
major processing plants.
But the scores of emails and other records show that best practices to
protect workers, such as slowing the processing line to accommodate
social distancing, installing plexiglass barriers and having workers
wear masks, werent implemented until outbreaks began to occur. Instead,
meatpacking companies spent crucial early weeks urging officials to keep
their plants open.
Demonstrators outside the Smithfield Foods pork plant in Sioux Falls,
South Dakota, on April 17 after it was closed indefinitely because of a
rash of coronavirus cases among employees. (Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
In mid-March, a few weeks before a massive outbreak at its South Dakota
pork plant, Smithfield Foods chief executive Kenneth Sullivan sent a
letter to Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts saying he had grave concerns that
stay-at-home orders were causing hysteria.
We are increasingly at a very high risk that food production employees
and others in critical supply chain roles stop showing up for work,
Sullivan wrote. This is a direct result of the government continually
reiterating the importance of social distancing, with minimal detail
surrounding this guidance.
Social distancing, he added, is a nicety that makes sense only for
people with laptops.
In a statement, Smithfield said, We have continued to run our facilities
for one reason: to sustain our nations food supply during the COVID-19
pandemic.
Once the virus hit meatpacking towns, it quickly overwhelmed rural
health departments whose primary role before the crisis involved
maintaining vital records and promoting public health initiatives.
Before the virus, many health officials, the documents show, didnt have
much contact with the local meatpacking plant, even though it was often
the towns largest employer.
Decisions about what authority health officials had over meatpacking
plants, who would test workers and who would notify close contacts were
made on the fly. In Dakota County, Nebraska, home of Tysons largest beef
plant, the health director wrote the state on April 16, We are at
capacity for our monitoring as we only have one nurse. That was at 22
cases. The plant now has nearly 800.
The companies, which often employ large contingents of employees from
Asia, Africa and Latin America, nevertheless didnt have health guidance
translated in the languages of their employees. And as the virus raged,
public health officials struggled to communicate with patients in
languages as varied as Qanjobal (Guatemala), Karen (Burma) and Tigrinya
(Ethiopia and Eritrea). Workers phones were often disconnected, and they
lived across county or even state lines, making coordination difficult.
In some states, laws aimed at protecting individual privacy barred
health officials from releasing names of businesses where outbreaks were
occurring, preventing them from alerting their communities. In Louisa
County, Iowa, where more than 200 Tyson pork workers have tested
positive and two have died, the county health director said she felt
that she couldnt even ask her board of health or emergency management
coordinator for help because I couldnt release the information about the
outbreak.
Obtained by ProPublica via a public records request
When local health officials did try to take action, the documents show
that meatpacking companies used their power to go over their heads. In
Schuyler, Nebraska, the regional health officer reached out to Cargill
regarding a considerable outbreak to find out what the company was doing
to prevent the spread. But instead of working with local health
officials, Cargill appealed to the governors office to intervene, which
emails suggest it did. Cargill spokesman Daniel Sullivan said the email
to the governors office was an effort to collaborate with officials at
all levels.
In some communities, the fear of tangling with the main economic engine
was palpable, especially given the intertwined relationships of a small
town. When workers at a Tyson chicken plant in Camilla, Georgia, started
complaining about safety issues, the county health director had a
problem. My husband and I are chicken growers for Tyson, she wrote the
state. I want to recuse myself from any investigation into these
allegations based on the fact that they can and will pull my contract if
I am involved.
In Waterloo, Iowa, where more than 1,000 workers tested positive at
Tysons biggest pork plant, the chair of the county board of health
excused herself from discussions about whether to urge it to shut down
because she worked as a chaplain for Tyson.
A Tyson spokesman said, The contract grower should have no fear of her
contract being canceled.
The meatpackers push to keep their production lines moving ultimately
won over the nations highest office when in late April, President Donald
Trump issued an executive order to put federal muscle behind ensuring
meat processing plants could remain open. In emails, local health
officials expressed frustration that it would only embolden the
companies to ignore their advice. One Kentucky health director, faced
with repeated reports that Perdue Farms was pressuring sick and
quarantined workers to return, wrote, My guess is they will force them
to work citing the presidential order to stay open. Perdue said it has
strictly followed CDC guidelines and the safety of its employees is its
top concern.
Battles between health officials and the companies were compounded by
constantly changing guidance from the CDC about how long essential
workers who tested positive or were exposed needed to quarantine.
Initially, the CDC said two weeks but amended that guidance several
times, eventually saying that asymptomatic workers with a potential
exposure could go back to work immediately but should monitor their
symptoms.
All along, the documents show, some corporate and government officials
sought to shift the focus away from meatpacking plants and onto the
workers themselves, blaming the crowded living situations, carpooling
and lifestyles of immigrants and refugees. In Kentucky, Tyson asserted
the outbreak spiked after 30 Burmese refugees gathered for an Easter
celebration, even though the first infection at the plant was recorded
nine days earlier.
This is a culture issue, notes from a conference call local officials
had with Tyson about the outbreak read.
For health officials like Willard, the issue was even more basic. It was
unclear whether she could do anything about it.
As officials in Wilkesboro discussed how to respond to the growing Tyson
cluster, Willard told them the department couldnt even make a statement
about a business having an outbreak. We have no regulatory authority
over Tyson, she wrote local officials. We are not legally able to
mandate that they put any additional measures in place or shut down. In
an interview, Willard explained how that created a difficult dynamic.
Meat processing plants sit in this weird limbo where the USDA has some
authority, but then the health department doesnt really regulate them,
she said. So theres this weird gap of who really has the power and
authority to make any decisions to shut the plant down.
National planning for pandemic influenza began during the George W. Bush
administration, largely in response to the H5N1 bird flu that arose in
the late 1990s and wiped out flocks in Asia, Europe and Africa.
It is impossible to predict whether the H5N1 virus will lead to a
pandemic, the plan issued in 2006 warned, but history suggests that if
it does not, another novel influenza virus will emerge at some point in
the future and threaten an unprotected human population.
Over the next 14 years, meat producers, animal disease researchers and
government regulators developed detailed and coordinated systems for
planning and responding to animal outbreaks. But protections for workers
further along the supply chain at meatpacking plants were not considered
in those preparations.
So when a virus that was infecting humans alone began in other parts of
the world, the meat industry had no clear model to follow. When the
virus hit China hard in January, the country locked down. Throughout
China, slaughterhouses and poultry processing plants closed and didnt
reopen for weeks, wreaking havoc on the nations meat supply but largely
preventing outbreaks.
Those events appeared to do little to mobilize U.S. meatpackers. In the
cache of public records, there are no emails discussing the risk of
coronavirus in meatpacking plants until March, when some companies began
restricting the travel of their executives, increasing sanitation and
educating workers about hand-washing and COVID-19 symptoms.
But other measures meatpackers took, such as using attendance bonuses to
keep workers on the job, coupled with long-standing policies to
discipline workers who called in sick, may have helped fuel the spread,
the CDC and other health officials said.
Some of the first emails local health authorities received about the
coronavirus and meatpacking plants came not from the companies but from
workers and their relatives. On March 16, the mayor of Green Bay,
Wisconsin, received one about a JBS beef plant.
I have family members that work at JBS, the son of a longtime worker
wrote, and to my understanding there hasnt been any communication about
the virus, what their plan is if someone gets infected or anything of
the like.
Around the same time, 700 miles west, workers at a JBS plant in Grand
Island, Nebraska, told the governor they were working
shoulder-to-shoulder and sent him photos of workers eating in a crowded
cafeteria.
Both plants would eventually have outbreaks infecting more than 300
workers each.
In fact, one of the first communications from JBS to public health
officials in Colorado concerned not the workers in its Greeley
processing plant, but whether the cafeteria at its corporate
headquarters had to abide by the states restrictions on restaurants. And
it came from its executive chef.
The Greeley plant would shut down weeks later as cases among its workers
multiplied. To date, nearly 300 workers there have contracted the virus
and seven have died, state data shows.
A worker at the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, on April 30.
(RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
JBS spokesman Cameron Bruett said in an email that the company began
holding daily COVID-19 planning meetings to track CDC guidance in
February. Before and during this crisis, we have had regular,
transparent and proactive communication with all applicable federal and
state health organizations, he said.
Roxanne Smith, the health director in Louisa County, Iowa, was one of
the first local health officials to contact a meatpacking company about
the coronavirus when she asked for Tysons help in getting public health
guidance to the areas Burmese residents in early March. None of the
Tyson managers she contacted responded. The situation, Smith said in an
interview, was challenging.
Nearly a week later, the plants nurse manager sent an email to introduce
herself, part of what appeared to be a corporate initiative to establish
communication and begin coordinating with local health departments or
as a Tyson safety manager in East Texas put it, to contain the spread of
any of the negative around the virus, and the actual virus itself.
Several local health directors seem to have developed close working
relationships with the nurses at their local plants. But those employees
were often limited themselves in how much they could do.
At the Tyson plant in Wilkesboro, health officials learned that the test
data had to go from the lab back to the testing company and then through
Tyson corporate before it reached the local nurses who could share it
with them.
When the test results finally arrived, they were so disorganized that
the communicable disease nurse had to spread them out on her kitchen
table and enter the data manually. I am having to work from 3 different
spreadsheets because of the methods used to provide us with the data,
she wrote to the state.
The burden the meatpacking plant outbreaks placed on health officials
was evident across the country. Epidemiologists and nurses were updating
colleagues after 1 a.m. They worked on Easter and Mothers Day.
In Tama County, Iowa, health and emergency management officials joked
about snacking on Reeses Easter eggs to get through the stress and
having Cheetos and Dr Pepper for breakfast. Im having one of those
nights where its just like I want to throw in the towel, Benson, the
emergency management coordinator, wrote to her colleagues one evening.
As the outbreak unfolded at the National Beef plant there, Benson wrote,
That petri dish needs to close.
The truth, however, was that the local health agencies on the front
lines had little power to make the plants do much of anything. And when
plants did shut, or local authorities could order them to, the politics
were tense, requiring the organized effort of multiple local officials
and navigating last-minute appeals by company officials to governors.
Health officials carefully worded their letters to the companies, often
noting the plants economic importance to the community.
After ordering the JBS plant in Greeley to close, local officials
discussed whether to use the word shall or should when talking about the
need for workers to quarantine. Shall is a loaded word, the county
health director replied. Should is more collaborative.
In Nebraska, Gina Uhing, the director of the Elkhorn Logan Valley Public
Health Department, wrote to the governors staff after Tyson refused to
give her department the names of workers whod been exposed to someone
infected so the workers could be tested. We are being met with corporate
gridlock, Uhing wrote, and it makes containing these outbreaks
incredibly difficult at the most inopportune time when time is of
critical essence.
Tyson said that the email chain reflected only a small part of the
discussion, and that the company worked collaboratively with the
department.
As plants began to reopen, several health directors worried that the
companies werent doing enough to ensure the virus was under control. I
am very concerned about their handling of this situation, Smith, the
health director in Louisa County, Iowa, wrote state officials. I am
concerned politics are winning over what we know is right for the
citizens of our county and state.
Tensions with the companies were only one of the challenges. In Iowa,
which saw some of the countrys biggest outbreaks, the state communicable
disease law prohibited local officials from disclosing the identity of a
business where an outbreak occurred unless approved by the state medical
director. Health officials in Sioux City noted that without being able
to mention where the cases were coming from, were dancing all over the
place.
The law stymied the local response and prevented health officials from
informing other businesses about how to protect their customers and
employees. In Louisa County, Kent Wollenhaupt, the president of the
State Bank of Wapello, wrote to Smith to complain that he hadnt been
told of the outbreak. The husbands of two of his three tellers worked at
Tyson, he said, and the bank served many of the plants employees. We
could have implemented these precautions 2 days earlier, if informed, he
wrote. Privacy issues, he said, should not come ahead of public
interest.
After weeks of outbreaks across the state, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds
eventually released staggering numbers in early May. It wasnt until then
that the health director in Dallas County, Iowa, found out that 58% of
the employees at the local Tyson plant tested positive, resulting in 730
cases. This was largely because testing was being done by the state, and
most employees lived outside the county where the plant is located.
The chaotic nature of the response was underscored further by the lack
of coordination among the hard-hit counties and the governors office.
In mid-April, Reynolds suddenly announced the state was sending 900
tests to Tysons plant in Louisa County without apparently coordinating
with local officials on how the testing and contact tracing would be
carried out. Even with all the other counties helping, I dont think it
can be done, Smith wrote to a state epidemiologist she had been working
with. What900? the epidemiologist replied. You are joking???
Reynolds office didnt respond to a request for comment.
Communication issues were even greater for Iowas Siouxland District
Health Department, which borders Nebraska and South Dakota. A
significant number of its cases came from Tysons Dakota City, Nebraska,
beef plant, where workers cross the Missouri River bridge each day for
work.
Andom Yosef, 38, who works at Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in
South Dakota, tested positive for COVID-19. (Kerem Yucel/AFP via Getty
Images)
Because some testing of Iowa residents was done in Nebraska, Siouxland
had to rely in part on the Nebraska Department of Health and Human
Services. To further compound the situation, the DHHS system they set up
has a glitch in it and we are not even getting phone numbers for many of
the positive cases, Siouxlands director Kevin Grieme wrote in one email.
It has created an undue burden upon us and my staff bears the brunt of
the frustrated individuals that are already nervous about their results
and then cant get them.
In an interview, Grieme said the glitch delayed the response four to
five days.
Grieme also touched on one of the key frustrations of health officials:
In the middle of a fast-moving pandemic, neither the meatpacking plants
nor the health departments were prepared to deal with so many patients
who didnt speak English.
Many of the workers they needed to contact, he said, spoke only Spanish,
Vietnamese, Oromo, Tigrinya, French or Somali. My language line bill is
at $9,000 with only three weeks of work, he wrote in one email. Its
usually $600 a month, he said.
In Dallas County, Iowa, health officials ended email after email with
the word Ugh as they tried unsuccessfully to communicate with Burmese
workers or dialed out-of-service numbers. In other areas, public health
officials showed up to an address to find a vacant lot. And when they
reached out to the companies for help, the human resources offices didnt
even have current contact information for their employees.
In Owensboro, Kentucky, the hospitals patient access director noted that
it often took 30 to 40 minutes to get a language interpreter on the
line. But many of the Burmese workers couldnt understand the directions
to the COVID-19 clinic and didnt know how to use GPS. Some of them
couldnt read.
By the end of April, as dozens of plants closed in response to local
pressure to control outbreaks and implement safety measures, meatpackers
began witnessing huge drops in beef and pork production. Tyson took out
full-page ads in The New York Times, Washington Post and Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette and warned, The food supply chain is breaking.
Tysons message was so effective that the next day, Trump signed his
executive order, promising to help keep plants running and try to shield
them from liability. The news was a gut-punch to many of the local
health departments that were still struggling to rein in multinational
corporations that already had far more power than they did.
This is completely disgusting to me, Julie Pryde, the administrator of
the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District in Illinois, wrote. This is
literally putting human lives at risk. It is also shifting the cost of
their lack of response to local communities. >: (
In Western Kentucky, officials at the Green River District Health
Department already suspected the local Perdue plant was not giving them
the full picture of what was going on inside.
We hear proactive steps from corporate representatives about solid
preventative practices being put in place, Green River health director
Clay Horton wrote his colleagues a week before Trumps order. But at the
contact investigation level, we are hearing stories of management
pressuring people to work while symptomatic and other anecdotal stories
that dont square with the official corporate line.
Obtained by ProPublica via a public records request
One worker who tested positive and still had a cough and sore throat
told the department that Perdue told him as long as he didnt have a
fever he needed to return to work. Another who tested positive said that
Perdue had fired her because they didnt believe I was sick. Conference
calls between health officials and Perdues medical director had become
heated at times, and Kentucky officials strongly considered recommending
the plant be temporarily closed.
But after Trumps executive order, Horton said in an interview, it was
more of like: We cant listen to you because of this executive order. We
have to stay open.
The situation was frustrating, Horton wrote in one email, because the
company wanted public health agencies to provide it with $65,000 worth
of testing without even committing to bar workers who tested positive
from the plant.
I believe we/they should err on the side of caution, Horton wrote. They
are erring on the side of you better get back to work.
So far, nearly 300 workers have tested positive at the plant and at
least one has died.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced a new milestone: beef,
pork and chicken plants were back, operating at more than 95% of their
average capacity compared with this time last year. A statement from the
USDA credited Trumps executive order with the safe reopening of Americas
meatpacking plants.
Local officials, however, have been left thinking about how the virus
exposed the fragility of the system designed to protect the nations food
supply and how few tools they had to respond. The worst part, Benson,
the Tama emergency coordinator, remembers, was watching what was
happening and feeling helpless.
We were flying the plane as we were building it because you didnt have
all the pieces that you needed, she said. But you were still in the air
and still trying to keep things from crashing and burning, and we were
doing the best that we could.
Melissa Sanchez and Benjamin Hardy contributed reporting.
Correction, June 13, 2020: This story originally misstated the CDC's
amended guidance on quarantining. It should have said that asymptomatic
workers with a potential exposure could go back to work immediately but
should monitor their symptoms, not that asymptomatic workers could go
back to work immediately.
Clarification, June 13, 2020: The story was updated to clarify that
while the North Carolina health department warned Tyson about sanctions
if testing results for its workers werent turned over, those penalties
were directed at the testing company Tyson hired, not Tyson.
Correction, June 13, 2020: This story originally misstated the CDC's
amended guidance on quarantining. It should have said that asymptomatic
workers with a potential exposure could go back to work immediately but
should monitor their symptoms, not that asymptomatic workers could go
back to work immediately.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
_______________________________________________
Hangout mailing list
Hangout-at-nylxs.com
http://lists.mrbrklyn.com/mailman/listinfo/hangout
|
|
