For meat plant workers, virus makes a hard job perilous

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Kulule Amosa’s husband earns $17.70 an hour at a South Dakota pork plant doing a job so physically demanding it can only be performed in 30-minute increments. After each shift last week, he left exhausted as usual — but he didn’t want to go home.

He was scared he would infect his pregnant wife with the coronavirus — so much so that when he pulled into the parking lot of their apartment building, he would call Amosa to tell her he wasn't coming inside. When he eventually did, he would sleep separately from her in their two-bedroom apartment.

“I’m really, really scared and worried,” Amosa said Monday.

This was no abstract worry: At the Smithfield Foods plant, the locker rooms were so tightly packed Amosa's husband told her he sometimes had to push his way through a crowd. Coughs echoed through the bathrooms. The plant in Sioux Falls clocked so many cases that it was forced to close this week. It has reported 518 infections in employees and another 126 in people connected to them as of Wednesday, making it among the largest known clusters in the United States. A 64-year-old employee who contracted COVID-19 died Tuesday, according to his pastor.

The concentration of cases has highlighted the particular susceptibility of meat processing workers, who stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the line and congregate in crowded locker rooms and cafeterias. As many as half a dozen plants have shut because of outbreaks. Because the workers who slaughter and pack the nation’s meat are vulnerable, so, too, is the supply of that meat. Smithfield CEO Kenneth Sullivan said the closure of the plant, which produces roughly 5% of the U.S. pork supply each day, was “pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply.”

Amosa and her husband, who are originally from Ethiopia,...