There have reportedly been tens of thousands of cases of coronavirus in meat and poultry plants, more than 44,000 employees across the country tested positive for the virus and more than two hundred died, according to Food.
Last April, President Trump issued an executive order urging factories to remain open. Since then, CBS News has identified only a few factories that have been temporarily closed through government agencies due to COVID-19 outbreaks. Poultry farms in Merced County, California.
Despite political pressure, the county’s small fitness branch closed the Livingston plant for a week due to an outbreak of COVID-19 that claimed the lives of some workers.
One of the staff members, Perla Meza’s father, Filiberto, 61, who said he worked on truck unloading at Foster Farms for years until he fell to COVID-19.
“He was quarantined for 3 days when everything got worse,” Meza said.
In August, he went to the hospital and then went into a coma for three days, Meza said, and then died.
About 2,600 more people paint on the floor. Merced County public fitness officials reported an outbreak there last June and, on one visit, advised Foster Farms to review all of its employees, branch director Rebecca Nanyonjo-Kemp said.
“You will need to conduct a universal review of all your staff. You have too much staff here to be able to determine a factor. They guide you through points because you have so many other people here,” Nanyonjo-Kemp said. “Don’t let your illness invade your facility. “
The plant said it would pay attention to advice, Nanyonjo-Kemp said.
“Unfortunately, that didn’t happen,” she told CBS News customer survey correspondent Anna Werner.
In July, two staff members died of COVID-19, he said.
The county continued to monitor the outbreak and on August 7 Foster Farms provided a list of the number of actively inflamed personnel and those they described as “resolved. “
But the county’s fitness chief, Dr. Salvador Sandoval, noted that the list contained no deaths, county fitness officials said staff told them there were more.
The Department of Health emailed Foster Farms asking if there were “known deaths,” and the following week it won a new list. This time, Sandoval said, five names in the past indexed only as “resolved” were now indexed as “deceased. “
The company put the names “in a category that made it difficult for our researchers to label them as deceased,” Sandoval said.
He described what the company did as “misleading. ” I don’t think that’s true,” he says.
The company told CBS News, “There was no intentional effort in the Foster Farms component to lie to the Merced Public Health Decomposer (county),” and said, “All issues similar to knowledge disclosure were temporarily resolved.
But until late August, with 8 deaths and more than 350 cases shown, county fitness officials told Foster Farms that the plant would be temporarily closed.
That’s when Nanyonjo-Kemp said it was discovered talking to federal agencies, adding one, he said, mentioning the Defense Production Act, which is a component of the president’s executive order to keep plants running.
When asked if anyone had told him not to close the plant, Nanyonjo-Kemp replied: “Yes. I’ll be next. Yes, I do. “
“From the federal government?” Werner asked.
“Right, ” said Nanyonjo-Kemp. They should intimidate. We refuse to be intimidated. “
“The general concept of this is that another 8 people died. How many more have to die for this to be a problem?You know, for us, that’s enough,” Nanyonjo-Kemp added.
The U. S. Department of Agriculture has not been able to do so. But it’s not the first time He showed a phone call with federal and state agencies, but did not respond to the CBS News query about whether he was pressuring county fitness officials to keep the plant open.
The factory was forced to close for a week and then reopened under county surveillance.
Foster Farms said it followed the needs of public fitness officials and had now passed a benchmark control with a positivity rate of less than 1% among its workers, with what it now says is California’s “largest control program. “
The company states that “the fitness and well-being of workers has been Foster Farms’ most sensible priority. “
But Meza disagrees. One of the five names revealed died on his father’s list of moments in August.
“They don’t care. I don’t think they care. Eight dead. Eight,” he said.
The county now says deaths have been reported, bringing the total number of employees who died to nine. Although the county no longer considers this to be an epidemic, it said the company would continue to provide reports.
Foster Farms said it is implementing other mandatory county requirements, adding the hiring of an authorized fitness professional to oversee its COVID-19 systems and individualized COVID-19 education for its employees.