Tyson Pork Plant Closes After More Than 20% of Workers Test Positive for COVID-19

A Tyson Foods pork plant in Storm Lake, Iowa announced it would close Thursday after more than 20 percent of its workforce tested positive for the new coronavirus.
The closure comes about a month after President Donald Trump issued an executive order for meat processing plants to stay open despite virus outbreaks at several slaughterhouses. Those outbreaks led to the closure of around 20 plants in April, Reuters reported.
Tyson Foods announced the closure late Thursday, hours after the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) had confirmed 555 coronavirus cases at the plant out of a workforce of 2,517, the Des Moines Register reported.
This is out of 2,517 tested, equalling 22% of the workforce at Tyson Pork so far.— The Storm Lake Times (@The Storm Lake Times)1590683488.0
"I honestly feel like the company has failed its employees," Storm Lake League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa Vice President Mayra Lopez told the Des Moines Register. "With 555 cases confirmed, that seems pretty steep."
Lopez, who has friends and family among the plant's many minority workers, said that she had heard of employees waiting up to a week for coronavirus test results.
"By the time they get the results, it could be too late and they've passed it on to someone else," she said.
Tyson Foods said that the closure was due to a delay in testing results and the absence of employees due to quarantine. It said it would stop slaughtering and finish all processing over the next two days.
"Additional deep cleaning and sanitizing of the entire facility will be conducted before resuming operations later next week," the company said in a press release reported by the Des Moines Register.
The incident has added to concerns about employee safety in meatpacking plants forced to remain open despite the fact that crowded working conditions make social distancing difficult. Tyson said it implemented wide scale testing at the Storm Lake plant and required employees to wear masks, but the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) said that meat companies and the Trump administration could do more to protect workers, Reuters reported. More than 3,000 U.S. meatpacking workers have tested positive for COVID-19 and 44 have died, the union said.
"Too many workers are being sent back into meatpacking plants without adequate protections in place, reigniting more outbreaks in the plants and our communities," Nick Nemec, a South Dakota farmer who is part of an advocacy group that works with UFCW, told Reuters.
Previously, coronavirus outbreaks had forced Tyson Foods to shutter plants in Waterloo, Columbus Junction, and Perry, Iowa, as well as in Dakota City, Nebraska; Logansport, Indiana; and Pasco, Washington, according to the Des Moines Register. However, most of those plants have since reopened, The Hill reported.
In April, Tyson Chairman John Tyson warned that "the food supply chain is breaking." The warning preceded Trump's executive order by two days.
However, a recent Food and Water Watch report has cast doubt on industry claims of shortages. It found that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that cold storage of beef, pork, chicken and turkey was up 2.1 percent in April 2020 compared with April 2019. Further, meat exports have been on the rise in May.
At the same time, plants have persisted in switching to the New Swine Inspection System, which allows fewer inspectors and faster slaughter speeds. Plants that have switched to this system have seen increased coronavirus cases. One such plant in Guymon, Oklahoma reported 440 cases, the most in the state.
The USDA's warning of an impending meat shortage was false. "Claims of impending food shortages are hogwash — meat… https://t.co/1aCs8HtVNM— Food & Water Watch (@Food & Water Watch)1590616817.0
"The USDA itself is showing that industry claims of impending food shortages are hogwash — meat exports are actually increasing and cold storage stockpiles of meat are growing. Meanwhile, the numbers of workers in deregulated plants are proving for us the importance of meat slaughter line speed caps and federal meat inspection," senior government affairs representative for Food & Water Action Tony Corbo said in a statement. "USDA should take a long, hard look in the mirror and reverse course immediately by forcing industry to cap line speeds, follow federal inspection guidelines, mandate worker safety protocols, and keep plants closed as long as necessary to prevent the spread of COVID-19."
- Meat Processing Plants Close as Working Conditions Encourage ... ›
- 'Dangerous Proposal': USDA Seeking to Replace Government ... ›
- Tyson Foods Warns of Meat Shortage Following Coronavirus ... ›
- 4 Ways Tyson Foods Made 2020 Even Worse - EcoWatch ›
Heatwaves are not just distinct to the land. A recent study found lakes are susceptible to temperature rise too, causing "lake heatwaves," The Independent reported.
- Climate Change Will Be Sudden and Cataclysmic Unless We Act Now ›
- There's a Heatwave at the Arctic 'Doomsday Vault' - EcoWatch ›
- Marine Heatwaves Destroy Ocean Ecosystems Like Wildfires ... ›
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>Trending
President Joe Biden officially took office Wednesday, and immediately set to work reversing some of former President Donald Trump's environmental policies.
- Biden Reaffirms Commitment to Rejoining Paris Agreement ... ›
- Biden Likely Plans to Cancel Keystone XL Pipeline on Day One ... ›
- Joe Biden Appoints Climate Crisis Team - EcoWatch ›
In many schools, the study of climate change is limited to the science. But at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, students in one class also learn how to take climate action.
Listen:
<iframe style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/17278520/height/45/theme/standard/thumbnail/yes/direction/backward/" height="45" width="100%" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe><p><em>Reposted with permission from </em><em><a href="https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/01/college-course-teaches-students-how-to-be-climate-leaders/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Yale Climate Connections</a>.</em></p>By Daniel Raichel
Industry would have us believe that pesticides help sustain food production — a necessary chemical trade-off for keeping harmful bugs at bay and ensuring we have enough to eat. But the data often tell a different story—particularly in the case of neonicotinoid pesticides, also known as neonics.
- Bees Face 'a Perfect Storm' — Parasites, Air Pollution and Other ... ›
- European Top Court Upholds French Ban on Bee-Harming Pesticides ›
- UK Allows Emergency Use of Bee-Killing Pesticide - EcoWatch ›