More COVID-19 Outbreaks Are Hitting Farmworkers
1 min readPhoto caption: The virus is now posing a threat to farmworkers. Photography by mikeledray on Shutterstock. Article by Lindsay Campbell.
It’s not just the meat plants that we need to worry about.
Picking and planting crops shoulder-to-shoulder, sleeping in crowded barracks of 10 to 20 people and piling into vans to commute to work have long been routine conditions for farmworkers in the US.
But as COVID-19 has spread into rural areas and farmhands, deemed essential workers, remain out in the fields, these conditions have been ripe for new outbreaks that could threaten the food supply chain.
In recent news, a farm in Tennessee discovered that all 200 of its workers were infected with the virus. In New Jersey, 110 fell ill due to outbreaks in two neighboring counties. […]