U.S. Poultry Farm Ravaged by Coronavirus Is Ordered To Close
Eight workers have already died at the facility in Merced County, California, which has been struggling to contain the virus since an outbreak was declared in June.
A stock image of a chicken slaughterhouse. Credit: Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals.
A poultry plant that has the “most severe and long-lasting outbreak in Merced County” of COVID-19, has been ordered to close.
Foster Farms, in the city of Livingston, California, will be shut for six days, to allow for deep cleaning and testing of its 2,600 employees.
The Order imposed by the Merced County Department of Public Health (MCDPH), comes after the facility failed to implement previous recommendations.
Eight workers at the facility have died - six within the past month - and this accounts for nearly twenty percent of COVID-19 deaths in people under the age of 64 living in Merced County.
Five of the deaths have occurred in hospitals outside of Merced County, “illustrating the serious impact of the Foster Farms outbreak on healthcare systems and the county-at-large in California”, says the MCDPH.
Since the first case was reported on June 9, the plant was declared an outbreak location soon after, on June 29.
Directives for a comprehensive testing scheme were outlined by the MCDPH following multiple inspections of the plant, but it says these have not been carried out. Instead, the virus has continued to spread - in the past month alone, an increase of 214 positive cases have been reported.
Under the latest Order, workers will need to test negative twice, before they can return to work.
Meat workers have been particularly exposed during the pandemic, with high infection rates blamed on their working conditions, which involves prolonged, close contact with one another on the production line.
Based in Livingston, Foster Farms has operations throughout the West Coast. It came to the attention of animal rights campaigners in 2018, when one of its trucks crashed en route to a processing plant in Kelso, Washington, killing many of the 5,000 chickens on board. A vigil was held the next day.
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