- Click to share on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
- Click to share on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
- Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in a new window)
- Click to email a friend (Opens in a new window)
Editor's Note: Kent Sepkowitz is a CNN medical analyst and infection control expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The opinions expressed in this comment are the author's own. More in the Opinion section, at CNNe.com/opinion
(CNN) - Recognition of the covid-19 threat to the food supply and its workers has followed a peculiar sequence: from the table to the farm.
Attention was first directed to those who sell or deliver food and the risks of contact with customers. Next, cases of covid-19 were observed among supermarket workers and food distributors, whose vulnerability had been less appreciated until people began to die.
More recently, large outbreaks have been reported among workers at meat processing plants. A Smithfield plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, closed after 644 workers fell ill. At Cargill Meat Solutions in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, 130 workers were infected and a union leader died. And a JBS plant on Grand Island, the largest city in Hall County, Nebraska, reported 588 cases in a population of about 50,000. Alarmingly, the virus has also spread to local health care centers and nursing homes.
A final group must now be recognized: agricultural workers, especially migrants. Spring leads workers to harvest the first crops, and many have begun to reach farms where they have worked for years.
The result could be a problem. In Singapore, which has carried out the world's strictest, best designed and executed covid-19 control program, migrant workers have been among those caught up in a second wave of cases, likely related to their homes, narrow and insufficient. Some dormitories in Singapore accommodate 12 to 20 workers in a single room.
Migrant farm workers in the U.S., most of whom are Latino and all too often live in relatively unhealthy neighborhoods, may end up at the center of covid-19's next hotspots. Should that occur, the result may not only bring illness and suffering, but also contempt and reproach against immigrants, even as the problem, unacceptable conditions of workers' homes, remains unsolved.
Some groups have raised the alarm, but the problem has hardly been registered at the national level. However, some states with large populations of migrant workers are preparing. Oregon and North Dakota have begun to consider appropriate steps to improve housing.
A few weeks ago, even before a peak of 100 cases at a Grand Forks wind power plant, North Dakota Commissioner of Agriculture Doug Goehring in a statement suggested a response for containing covid-19.
"Agricultural producers are preparing for spring work and preparing to go out into their fields," he said. “Many of these producers rely on H-2A (foreign) workers and workers from other states to fill the employment gaps. Producers who have workers arriving from other countries or states must follow proper (containment) procedures upon arrival. ”
Randy Hatzenbuhler, president of Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation in Medora, North Dakota, set a higher bar: He claimed that any worker who comes from another state for seasonal work would be quarantined for two weeks. And he promised that "while they are in quarantine, these employees will be paid their normal salary and will have at their disposal the delivery of meals."
This approach can prevent a worker from bringing infection to a community, but it will not prevent the spread in overcrowded housing if only one case occurs. Take, for example, sparsely populated Mountrail County, North Dakota, with a population of 10,545. There, 33 cases of covid-19 have been diagnosed, for an infection rate of 323 per 100,000, a higher rate than that of St. Louis.
The source of the Mountrail cases is unknown. Mountrail County borders the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, and cases have also been diagnosed there.
However, transmission is occurring, Mountrail County has significant farmland. It is difficult to know how many migrant workers can spend time there this season. However, according to the Environmental Work Group's farm subsidy database, in 2019, 334 farms in Mountrail County received $ 6.9 million in federal farm subsidies, suggesting many farms with many crops to harvest. The combination of community spread, as is likely to occur in the county, with a seasonal influx of farm workers, can lead to a substantial increase in covid-19 infections.
The problem of inadequate housing for migrant workers is old and poorly resolved. In the 1970s, the Justice Department tried to address the problem, but a substantial gap persists.
A report from The Pew Charitable Trusts showed that basic sanitary conditions are often not met. Bedbugs, overcrowding, and shared toilets make daily life not only uncomfortable, but with covid-19 life-threatening.
Migrant farm workers are critical infrastructure workers. Unfortunately, their lack of safe housing is in line with recent failures to protect most other workers from essential infrastructure areas.
Avoidable deaths will continue to occur among police officers, health and transportation workers, as well as those in the food industry. Many of these deaths occurred due to an unacceptable lack of protective equipment or safe working conditions, even after guidance from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. on worker safety.
This cruel abrogation of the basic social contract should shake up the many people who feel that the government "backs them up" as they prepare to "reopen" an economy that for now, given the very low amounts of testing done, should remain closed.
Any society that has proven incapable or unwilling to protect essential personnel from infrastructure sectors surely has no plans to reduce risk for those planning to return to work in states like Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida. People hoping to resume business soon should consider this track record of indifference before deciding on their next steps.
Foods