Workers at SC meat plants infected with COVID 19. Many cases are in the Midlands
Workers at about a dozen meat-packing plants in South Carolina have tested positive for the coronavirus since the state began tracking the spread of the disease in March, according to data released by the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.
All told, the state health agency has identified 125 packing plant workers with COVID 19, many of them employees at facilities in the Columbia and Greenville areas.
While the number of cases reported in South Carolina is small compared to the thousands of cases reported in some states, the statistics for the first time show that multiple workers at Palmetto state packing plants have come down with COVID 19.
Until this week, neither DHEC nor meat processing companies had provided much data to indicate whether the virus was sickening employees at the plants. DHEC now says the first case of COVID 19 at a South Carolina meat-packing plant was reported March 31.
According to the agency’s statistics, about 58 percent of the 125 positive cases have occurred at Amick Farms and House of Raeford plants, mostly in the Columbia and Greenville areas. A total of 72 workers at Amick and Raeford facilities have been diagnosed with COVID 19, DHEC says.
Amick had the most positive cases with 46, with 25 of them at its plant in Batesburg in western Lexington County. House of Raeford, headquartered in North Carolina, had a total of 26 cases, about half of them at facilities in the Greenville area.
DHEC said it has been unable to determine which plant about a dozen of the House of Raeford cases occurred in. So the agency said it doesn’t know if any workers at the company’s West Columbia processing plant have tested positive. But a House of Raeford spokesman confirmed that the West Columbia plant has had some cases.
Packing plants are considered prime spots for the spread of the coronavirus among workers. Some of these facilities rely on production lines in which workers are bunched closely together, often pushed to process a certain number of animal carcasses in short periods of time. Workers who get infected outside the plants can bring the virus in and infect others.
“You can barely imagine a more perfect vector for this virus than an enclosed space where people are working very, very closely together and breathing the same air all day long, with minimal protective equipment,’’ said Sarah Rich, a lawyer with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has documented problems in southern poultry plants over the past decade. “And that is what’s happening. It is completely predictable.’’
Workers at many meat-packing plants slaughter chickens, cattle, hogs and turkeys, cut them into pieces and package the parts for sale as food. South Carolina’s biggest plants, which process mostly poultry, receive animals from growers who have made chickens and turkeys an anchor of the state’s farm economy.
The coronavirus, however, is not believed to spread from infected workers to food that is being processed.
Nationally, more than 25,000 meat-packing workers have tested positive for the coronavirus, according to a story last month in The New York Times, quoting the Food and Environment Reporting Network. In comparison to South Carolina, North Carolina had more than 1,300 cases of coronavirus in meat-packing workers in May, but the number is rising, according to news reports.
Rich, whose organization has spoken with poultry plant workers in South Carolina, said an important way plants could help protect workers from spreading coronavirus to each other is by slowing down the speed of production lines. That would mean processing plants would not need as many workers so close together, she said.
“Slow down the line enough to space workers out on the line, and just process fewer chickens,’’ Rich said.
COVID 19 is a threat to people because it can easily pass from those who don’t show symptoms to others. Those with the most severe cases of the coronavirus have difficulty breathing. Overall, the virus has killed more than 700 people in South Carolina and infected more than 35,000 others, with the number of cases rising dramatically in recent weeks amid forecasts of even more cases on the horizon..
Amick Farms spokeswoman Brittni Miller released a statement this week saying the company has taken “many steps’’ to ensure workers are protected at its plants. The company is following U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, she said. It has put in place cleaning and disinfection programs and installed partitions between workers. It also has worked with DHEC to offer free on site testing for workers.
Despite that, the company still faces challenges. Three employees at an Amick plant in Maryland have died from COVID 19, The Baltimore Sun reported last month. Amick reported 150 infections there after the state conducted widespread testing, The Sun reported.
In South Carolina, the company said 11 of its workers are now on paid leave because of COVID 19. The company is unaware of any coronavirus-related deaths in South Carolina facilities, Miller said.
Amick, a mainstay of South Carolina’s poultry industry since it was founded in 1941, has about 3,000 employees nationally, with about 2,600 in the Palmetto State. In 2006, the OSI Group purchased Amick, making Amick part of the 10th largest meat manufacturing company in the world, according to Amick’s website.
“We will continue to monitor the data and science around the spread of the virus and make the appropriate adjustments to help protect our team members,’’ Miller’s statement said.
Dave Witter, a spokesman for House of Raeford, said some workers at company packing plants may have gotten the coronavirus away from work, but that’ s difficult to tell.
Regardless, Witter said the company is doing its best to keep workers safe. House of Raeford put in social distancing measures in March, reinforced the importance of hand-washing and increased cleaning and sanitizing of commonly used surfaces, he said.. The company now is providing face shields to workers who need them and has installed permanent plastic barriers on production lines where workers are facing each other or standing close to each other, Witter said in an email Tuesday.
“The health and safety of our associates is our highest priority,’’ the email said. “We would prefer that no one contracted the coronavirus, but we understand that is not realistic. House of Raeford is thankful that the positive cases among our South Carolina associates is extremely low.’’
House of Raeford has had an “extremely limited’’ number of coronavirus cases at the West Columbia plant, he said. The company, based in Rose Hill, N.C., touts itself as one of the country’s 10 largest chicken producers.
Anthony “Amp’’ Furman, a former House of Raeford worker in West Columbia, said the numbers from DHEC are disturbing but he expected to hear about them at some point.
Furman said many employees at House of Raeford in West Columbia worked within a few feet of each other in the plant where he was employed, but the facility didn’t take enough precautions to combat coronavirus until just before he left the company in early May. He said face shields were not provided for weeks..
“It doesn’t surprise me,’’ he said. “You don’t know who you are working with.’’
Furman, a 38-year-old father of nine, was fired after he and a handful of other employees complained and picketed over the working conditions during the coronavirus crisis at the House of Raeford plant along the Congaree River.
“Ain’t no way nobody didn’t have COVID 19,’’ he said.
In addition to Amick and Raeford, Pilgrim’s Pride, which runs a Sumter County plant, had 13 cases. Tyson Foods, which is closing a meat-cooking plant in Columbia, had 11 cases, including 4 in Columbia. Most other cases involved smaller poultry processors and meat facilities.
DHEC defines a meat-packing plant as a facility that handles meat during the manufacturing process.
Efforts to reach officials with Pilgrim’s Pride and Tyson were unsuccessful.
In an email, DHEC said a few workers who have tested positive actually crossed the state line to work at processing plants in Georgia and North Carolina. But the bulk were associated with South Carolina plants. The agency said there is no way to know if the workers who tested positive got the disease inside a chicken or turkey plant.
Nonetheless, DHEC should consider providing more information that could be useful in battling the disease, the law center’s Rich said.. She said a key unanswered question is the percentage of workers at meat-packing plants who have tested positive. Having the number of people who were tested and those who tested positive would give that percentage. That would be a good indicator of how bad the problem is in South Carolina packing plants, she said.
DHEC said the agency does not have that information, but the department praised the industry for working with DHEC.
“These facilities have been cooperative and supportive of implementing the practices we recommend for protecting employees from COVID 19,’’ the DHEC email said.
This story was originally published July 1, 2020 at 3:40 PM.
