If you want to understand why meat is cheap and slaughterhouses are COVID-19 hotspots, here’s some really good journalism about John Deranamie, 50 year-old survivor of the Liberian civil war, and now COVID-19:
He’s one of 3,700 workers at the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, where more than 800 employees have contracted the novel virus spreading across the world. But those employees are just a fraction of essential workers across the nation who are feeding America.
Deranamie understands the importance of his role in the food supply and keeping Americans fed. But he’s risking his life every time he steps into his uniform, he said.
“I don’t like the term essential worker,” he said. “Essential worker just means you’re on the death track.”
Deranamie makes $18.50/hour as a night shift worker at Smithfield. His wife works there, too. They support 8 kids on their pay, and send half of his paycheck home to his family in Liberia.
The story details how he kept going to work until he became ill, then quarantined in his bedroom while his wife and family (six of the eight children) stayed in the rest of the house. Luckily, nobody else got sick.
Part of the reason there was a big cluster around Smithfield is that the immigrants not only work close together, but a lot of them live together in densely packed housing near the plant.
Slaughterhouses like this are just one part of a food chain optimized for cheap meat. Other prices we pay for cheap meat: stinking, cruel confinement farms, overuse of antibiotics to the point where they lose effectiveness in human beings, and watershed contamination from manure spills, pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer runoff. Those are just off the top of my head.
Open Thread: This’ll Make That Orange Head Explode
rikyrah
I just….
there is so much to write about these meat packing plant breakouts.
Sigh..??
The Moar You Know
That’s not luck, that’s a fucking miracle.
Americans are not paying for cheap meat and eggs. They are paying the owners of these hellholes to make profit margins that are literally unimaginable to even hardened capitalists.
Go to Europe. The meat, dairy and eggs are not allowed to be made under the vile, inhumane and exploitative conditions we see here. And yet, consumer prices for these commodities are at most 20% more than they are here in the US. At most. And the quality…don’t get me started on German milk. My God. Paradise in a glass. Scottish chicken. I’ve never had chicken like that in America, not anywhere, because we will not treat chickens as well as they do in the UK.
We don’t have cheap meat. We have insanely wealthy meat tycoons.
trollhattan
@rikyrah:
There’s a reason ag states have fallen all over themselves writing “ag-gag” legislation, making it illegal to videotape their operations. Decent folk are appalled at what goes on, so let’s make it against the law to show them.
Betty
@The Moar You Know: Apparently many of these companies are not even owned by Americans. Smithfield is Chinese. Some are Brazilian, I understand.
rikyrah
????
trollhattan
@rikyrah:
Trump Coronavirus Task Farce: “We got this.”
Narrator: “They do not.”
jl
@rikyrah: Thanks for info. Not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. Do we really want a Trumpster/GOP WH epidemic task force?
Calouste
@trollhattan: It seems like they just believe that graph that whatever bozo made in Excel that shows there will be zero deaths next week. And the cult will believe it as well, rather than their own dying eyes.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@The Moar You Know:
That’s probably going to no longer be the case under the Tory regime soon
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Calouste:
Or rather Trump does and they’re all forced to go along with it
narya
There are times when I’ve felt so helpless to change these systems (and, really, I am). That said, I’ve made a choice to use the privilege I have to purchase meat, fish, eggs, veggies, and cheese from purveyors who treat their animals well. (I also have a friend who hunts.) My (perhaps wishful . . .) thinking is that my support may help keep them going–and, of course, I get much better food and don’t contribute to that wreckage. Perhaps it’s a good sign that the CSA has seen explosive growth. I realize this isn’t an option for folks who can’t afford it. My fear is that the big mega-companies will just be able to use the pandemic to roll over everything, but my hope is that at least some folks will realize that big mega-companies are a model that is only sustainable if workers are just expendable cogs in a machine rather than humans. Also; good choice for the post title.
jl
@Calouste: Hard for me to believe that the ridiculous ‘cubic’ model is as ridiculous as I feared. I’m forced to use it as an example of what not to do in statistics for my class. I’ll have to figure out a way to make that little presentation ‘balanced’ and nonpartisan.
Amir Khalid
@rikyrah:
Probaby just as well. It’s not like they were achieving anything useful.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@jl: I don’t know what I want. They were useless, but I’m appalled that the administration just seems to be brushing its hands together and walking away. Done! We solved Covid!
Amir Khalid
The post headline: that’s a quote from Jackson Cage, off Bruce Springsteen’s 1980 album The River. What do I win?
cmorenc
The contrast says everything:
This is what you get when you elect a narcissistic greedy sociopath con-man as President.
dmsilev
@rikyrah: “Mission Accomplished”
sdhays
@rikyrah: Time to get that “Mission Accomplished” banner out of storage…
bemused
@rikyrah:
They’re tired of their sham taskforce and just telling us to die already.
jl
Pulling rank as a stats dude, epid models and historical analysis (former techno gewhizz latter less so) strongly suggest that we are in a place where it is very difficult to forecast reliably no matter how rigorous and sound the methodology. In a situation coming down from epidemic peaks, which have heavily influenced (aka ‘flatten the curve’) by extreme and lengthy shut down control policies, is precisely the time the epi system is very sensitive to what controls come next. Can easily get into situation where the epidemic dynamics either work with or against the next control policy put in place. You want the former, not the latter. Unexpected results not only may occur, but are to be expected. Except in states doing nutty and dangerous things, like FL, GA, MS. Hard to observe details of a state’s policy may send into sustained steady state that can be well managed by good outbreak control, or swinging back into another big wave of epidemic requiring another extreme shut down.
Of course, the need for extreme and lengthy shut downs in the first place, IMHO, shows a failure to use best practices early in the epidemic. And several countries, like Taiwan and South Korea, have shown us that, IMHO. Probably best thing to look for in individual states is whether they have adopted a strong and responsive outbreak control program. That is, surveillance, testing, contract tracking and individual quarantine of infected and seriously exposed with high risk of infection. Better to be an exposed person with high risk of infection who has to stay home for 2 or 3 weeks, than have all of society shut down for several months.
sdhays
@Amir Khalid: If you won something, you might get “tired of winning”…
HinTN
@rikyrah: Where is our Steinbeck?
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: Our awe and admiration.
Capri
@The Moar You Know:
There are 4 conditions that have to in place in a society for animal welfare to be considered. Without them it is not going to happen, with them it is inevitable. Those are: an urbanization of the culture, acceptance of evolution, anthropomorphism of animals, and egalitarianism. Animal uses that are utilitarian rather than anthropocentric are exported to places where those 4 conditions do not hold. So a lot of the eggs you eat in Europe come from battery cage layer hens in Turkey.
In the United States there is a lot of tension between the anthropomorphic and utilitarian views of animals- and it plays out the most in how we treat food animals. A lot of the welfare advances are being driven by places like McDonalds and Wal Mart, because it looks good for their image to state that all their eggs are cage free or there are no gestation crates in the farms that produce their pork. It’s easy for them because they don’t have to make any structural changes, they just refuse to buy products that don’t meet their specifications.
Amir Khalid
@Gin & Tonic:
Which I am proud to accept.
Ksmiami
As I’ve said before, The Republican Party dies or America dies. There can be no peaceful coexistence with the death cult.
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid: And with that and $2.75, you can get yourself a ride on the NY subway. Just think of the souvenirs you could come home with.
download my app in the app store mistermix
@Amir Khalid: I figured you’d get that one – crossed swords on the killing floor.
Emma from FL
@The Moar You Know: Sausages. Scottish sausages. Pigs fed locally with local food. You have never lived until you’ve eaten a sausage that taste just a bit like the ocean because they’ve been fed seaweed. One year I traveled alone by train all over Scotland and ate where the natives sent me. BTW, the local at Dunvegan gets its fish delivered daily to their back door by boat. Fish and chips is such a common name for ambrosia.
Another Scott
@jl:
Yup. 4.mumble% of the world’s population should not have 30+% of the deaths unless the outbreak started here. China showed that even large outbreaks of a totally new pathogen can be controlled. Other FE nations showed that governments that are willing to collect data an act on it can prevent large outbreaks. Donnie’s demand that he didn’t want bad news, and his hiring of people who would keep him from hearing bad news, means that we lost ~ 8+ weeks when we could have done much, much more to ramp up testing, PPE, and all the rest.
Strongly suspected human transmission in China was announced by the WHO on January 14. That should have been the latest starting point for taking this deadly seriously given international travel.
It was an epic failure in the USA, and he’s still doing far too little to enable the federal government to get this thing under control.
Grrr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
Everything necessary has to be as cheap as possible so that workers can afford it at their wages. None of the geniuses of wealth have figured out that if most people were a bit better paid, especially the lower paid segment, they could buy more. They just figured that if they paid less they could set up a large portion of the economy to be as cheap as possible. That gave us a crap economy where we don’t produce much of consequence to sell to the rest of the world but have to purchase the stuff made in other countries.
This also keeps the separation of people by income and race, a twofer for the wealthy class racists.
jl
@Another Scott: As I noted before, I was finding peer reviewed articles in last half of January, first week in February, that told the world what the basic covid-19 epidemic characteristics were that we needed to know for effective control policies, especially policies that would minimize the need for extreme lengthy and risky shut downs that produced serious counterproductive side effects. That included high likelihood of lots of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, how fast epidemic could spread about the world, how little time travel bans would get a country. Some research estimated the time bought by a travel ban was a few days to a week. That was one bit of research that raised my eyebrows, but now with apparent confirmation of very early cases in France and Santa Clara, looks like that research was right.
The world knew what the challenge was in late January early February. Some countries listened, others did not.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@jl:
What do you think of Ohio’s reopening process, if you have an opinion? This is from a working group here looking at reopening restaurants:
Guidelines to reopen Ohio restaurants to be submitted by Wednesday
My opinion? The fact that capacity limitations didn’t even come up speaks volumes to me. I have no idea if the “restart Nashville” model is worth anything. There was a study from China that showed how the air system in a resturant spread viral particles from an infected person around the restaurant. Several people were infected and got sick. These guidelines seem completely inadequate
Aaron
I am impressed that they are paying him a living wage.
$18.50 an hour, can be lived on.
particularly if you have affordable housing/health care/pto/retirement
Ruckus
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Well walking away is what shit for brains has done his entire life and it would mean that he won’t be fucking it up worse every damn day. And as this would be the most positive thing he’s done in probably forever………
patrick II
@rikyrah:
The task force served its purpose — Trump got to announce a task force because that looks like something someone who knew what they were doing (Obama) would do.
Ruckus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Why would you expect better from any republican?
jl
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I don’t know. I live on West Coast, and just following that to estimate the chances of my own fate has occupied my attention. I’ll look at it.
For a lot of this stuff, I read and defer to experts with lots of practical outbreak control: Ebola, Nhipa virus, TB, bacterial meningitis, Zika, whooping cough. They have lots of practical experience in how to evaluate and apply math modelling to design practical control efforts, how to be roughly right in implementing next control policy versus being precisely wrong, etc. I have experience in modelling and stats consulting for projects, absolutely none in practical field work, and experience in that I think is absolutely essential. When I read a model and forecasts, first people on intertubes I check for their opinion is people with lots of practical experience in epidemic and outbreak control. Societies have honed their skill using sound scientific methods at that for 100 years now, I think need to listen to them. Think about what we do know about the disease that is similar to past diseases, rather than gawking and panicking at what we don’t know. And since diseases of all kinds are always evolving, like multiple drug resistant TB, there will always be more we don’t know than what we know for dozens of existing and emerging infectious diseases that could get a lot of us killed, it’s been like that throughout human history and will be so for foreseeable future.
Fauci is right, IMHO, with epidemics and outbreaks always assume you are two or three steps behind, focus on what you do know to get it under control asap.
jl
I think sad thing in California is that we missed some cases in mid to early February. Which means it probably arrived here sometime in January. I heard several state and local public health people say if they had known that, there would have been a shut down then. I agree with them. The public opposition to that would have been greater than in mid March, and the Trumpster/GOP would have howled.
But think of the cost of both the disease and the control efforts that would have been avoided if we had a shut down then.
Of course, if the US had sufficient testing, and CA found community spread that early, would have been much easier to go South Korea. But, well, we know some of the sad and tragic and outrageous story of how the US blew having a stinking test. German researchers were distributing a test that was fine for early outbreak control less than a week after the gene sequence was sent out by Chinese researchers in mid January (I think it was mid January)
Dirk Reinecke
$18.50. Its funny how living costs around the world can differ. If we translated that into South African rands he would be in the upper end of the middle class. He is earning twice as much as I ever did at my best paid job, and four times as much as I would have made this year. It blows my mind how rich America is but at the same time how disfunctional it is, I have an unlimited fibre connection for $57.
Its a strange old world.
Jinchi
Mitch Daniels is deeply concerned that we might play the “partisan blame game” post coronavirus.
He compares this to the War with Iraq:
No mention of Dick Cheney heading over to the CIA to smack heads until the intelligence community gave him the intelligence he wanted. I’m sure he hopes that we’ll all blame Dr. Fauci and the medical community for screwing up this one, too.
We went to war with Iraq because Republicans wanted to go to war with Iraq. America is screwing up the response to Corvid-19 because Republicans are actively working to undermine an effective response, right now. Another 70,000+ people are expected to die because of decisions being made by the president, Republican Senators, Governors, legislators, donors and activists across the country.
Republicans absolutely deserve all the blame, Mitch. Maybe you should spend some time pushing them to get it right, before the disaster gets even worse.
hueyplong
Presumably, they’ve hijacked as many ventilators, tests, and PPE as could be hijacked before the governors put them beyond Jared’s ability to continue the process.
So, going forward, the Task Force is failing its real as well as its fictional mandate and, like all things Trump touches, is ready for burial.
Kattails
One fairly simple solution to the high cost of meat is to eat smaller portions. You really don’t need half a pound or more of steak. Back when I was waitressing, I’d see guys packing in 12-oz. steaks that would give me three servings. Mix up your meals as well, veggies, cheese, some soy. I’m very lucky to have a neighbor who keeps chickens and sells organic eggs for $3.50 a dozen. Cooler in the old sugar house with a little sign on the door “eggs”, if you take the last dozen you turn the sign around. Fun because the new chickens will give you little pullet eggs and the old hens can lay jumbos, so the boxes are mixed up; in fact I keep one carton labelled “jumbo” and transfer to that if there are a couple of really big ones that won’t let the normal carton close. Locally, a lot of smaller CSAs and producers around so it’s fairly easy to get decent meat. Sure it’s more expensive, and I don’t make much money. I also prioritize a good diet and especially a good breakfast over some other stuff like fancy electronics. OK Stonekettle had homemade potato, bacon, and cheddar waffles this morning. Here’s the pic, gives ingredients further upthread.
Julia Child always advocated small portions. She ate whatever she wanted. Lived nearly to 100, of course good genetics helped.
hueyplong
@Jinchi: I guess calling a pandemic “a Democratic hoax” was merely an initially failed attempt at a partisan blame game.
“Initially failed” because they’re giving it another go as part of the reopen/liberate campaign.
narya
@Kattails: I completely agree–and as I eat smaller portions of meat, I WANT smaller portions, it turns out. Some of that is due to age, I think, but not all of it.
Mart
I have been to several dozen large meat processing plants. Never thought about workers shoulder to shoulder during a pandemic. Would scare the shit out of me. The work is brutal without disease transmission, with the next carcass coming at you as soon as you finished your cut. OSHA has a ruling that you have to rotate workers to lesson repetitive stress injuries. Remember numbers like 20,000 toms and 23,000 hens/day, 13,000 hogs/day, and 10,000 cattle/day. Been to some hog breeding and fattening up “farms”. Either at 12 or 25 pounds they shipped them to get to weight farms (around 300 pounds) before sending to slaughterhouse. The ones I toured had around 30,000 hogs. Went to a couple egg farms. Guess how many egg laying hens onsite?
Eight million on each farm! When the bird flu hit they were wiped out, birds went to landfill. They take bio-security seriously – have to shower in, put on their provided clothes on the animal side. Have some old N-95 masks from these tours that I expect are expired, but I am using now. Not worried about people getting iIl, worried about people getting the animals ill.
25 year vegetarian, not because of these tours. Generally not grossed out (rendering plants at slaughterhouses or 30,000 hogs will make almost anyone gag). Went vegetarian as thought it would help balance my enormous carbon footprint.
rikyrah
@patrick II:
Obama didn’t need a task force, because he had a PANDEMIC INFRASTRUCTURE put in place in the government that he could mobilize.
The Moar You Know
@Emma from FL: Had those. So that’s what the flavor was, eh? Freakin’ delicious.
The Moar You Know
@jl: First confirmed death was in the Bay Area on February 6th. No travel history. It’s been here in CA since January and possibly somewhat earlier.
Lawrence
Every day ends in a Tums festival.
rikyrah
He was hunted and murdered ???
rikyrah
THREAD
RSA
@jl:
Maybe a real-world follow-up to Anscombe’s quartet?
cain
@rikyrah:
Watching that video filled me with helpless rage against that man. This seems just like Trayvon Martin – two men decided to go after this man and was losing and they shot him in cold blood.
debbie
@Amir Khalid:
Seconded. It was a front for campaign rallies.
rikyrah
Mike in NC
Fat Bastard treated the virus task force just like one of his failed casinos: declare bankruptcy, hand it off to somebody else to clean up, and then walk away to plan the next grift.
debbie
@rikyrah:
I think this may be a new GOP talking point. Chris Christie made the same point last night. Nothing but brazen from these clowns anymore.
rikyrah
@debbie:
MOST definitely is a GOP talking point. All coordinated with this sociopathic muthaphuckas.
Josie (also)
@Aaron:
affordable housing? (8 people in a small house?) affordable health care? Only if they qualify for subsidized Affordable Health Care Act coverage and that may depend on citizenship status. PTO? Retirement? All doubtful.
Another Scott
@jl:
Thanks for bringing that up. My comments about “international travel” were far too terse. I am no expert on this stuff, but given how dependent the entire world is on trade with China, how long it took to have widespread testing, even I knew then that the idea that Donnie could impose an effective ban on entry of the virus by simply preventing flights from China was fantasy. If the world had no international trade, then travel bans can work. Or, if one is willing to completely shut one’s border to everyone, then bans can work. For a while…
But bans have known (to the experts) side-effects (from January 31):
(Donnie has done the opposite of every recommendation. Imagine that!!1)
Donnie’s proposed travel ban was just another example of his racist policies and his trying to one-up China and demand tribute for restoration of the status quo ante.
And, of course, now we are learning that it was in France in December. I’m assuming that it was just about everywhere in December, and just took a critical mass of infected people in close quarters (nursing homes, conferences, etc.) to start the exponential growth.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
jl
@Another Scott: Thing is that stats and knowledge of how these kinds of bugs spread through respiratory transmission, are reliable enough to suss out basic parameters of the epidemic in all sorts of surprising ways. Even if Chinese Communist government was trying all sorts of dirty tricks to hide the disease in January (I don’t think they were) the effort would have been futile. Data on infections seen in evacuation flights, outbreaks on cruise ships, speed and nature of spread of outbreak through cities in China were all the epi stats experts needed. For most critical parameters, estimates from those data sources needed for effective early control efforts have held up as good as from others.
I found early estimates in peer reviewed articles that travel bans would get Japan 2 fricken days, and countries around the world a week or so, hard to believe. But looky here, deaths in Santa Clara in early February, and looks like a case in France in late December.