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Health Officials Wanted to Close a Meatpacking Plant. The Governor Said No
…because nothing sells healthy food better than a virus-infested mucus-spittle flavoring!!!
'Scuze me while I puke…
And Joe/Jane trying to make a living have to risk their lives ? SAD .
I was listening to an interview with Tom Colicchio today. He’s plan to protect the workers and keep the plant open made so much sense, and since it made sense it’s no wonder it went over a Republican’s head.
His plan would be to place the workers into teams. No one on team A ever works with anyone else on another team. If a member of team A gets infected then the whole team goes into quarantine mode, and plant is cleaned and team B comes in after the cleaning.
So the plant production would slow down, but health outcomes are better. And as Rachel has pointed out once someone from a meat processing plant is infected then it moves through the community. No matter what that frickin’ supreme court judge in WI thinks.
Stearns county in Minnesota now has more cases than Noble county where the JBS pork plant is located. This huge jump in numbers is due to a spread in a turkey plant in Melrose (Hormel) and a chicken plant in Cold Spring owned by Pilgrims Pride.We’re close to 1,200 cases today. I’m very close to Stearns county.
In the emails, JBS officials said they were open to testing but repeatedly expressed concern about public disclosure of the results. “We want to make sure that testing is conducted in a way that does not foment fear or panic among our employees or the community,” JBS chief ethics and compliance officer Nicholas White wrote in an email to Anderson on April 15.
Yes, better to hush the whole thing up than to allow people to discover the truth. I’m sure the workers and their families all feel much better now that they’ve learned that JBS was trying to hide how bad things were getting and it all came out anyway (which was inevitable since people getting sick are hard to ignore).
This is ridiculous. Instead of instituting appropriate safety precautions, they pressure the governor to allow them to continue killing people. Pretty bad when your employees are that expendable. A large percentage of meat-packing employees are Hispanic so that likely weighs in on the respect they get.
One of the most vocal “open back up!” counties in Colorado is also home to one of it’s biggest hot spots - a meat packing plant, also owned by JBS which has seen 4 COVID-19 deaths.
I’ve found it difficult to go vegetarian, but this may be the catalyst to make it happen.
So it looks like we’ve just given up and will accept whatever death and destruction follows. I wonder though how we’ll be received in other parts of the world with them know that we’ve tossed in the hat and don’t care if we are contagious or not. Will we be able to travel out of this country? Canada’s border is closed and so is Mexico’s. The European Union has travel restrictions so we may get that isolationist thingy trumpian’s have always wanted…until they don’t.
Isn’t Gov. Ricketts getting awful close to or crossing into the Flint, MI lead-contaminated water territory here? Didn’t elected officials get arrested in that case?
The Hits just keep coming. Sick of “winning”
So, it’s follow the science, or follow the politics? Let me see…
Take care of yourself.
I note that we presently have added almost 29k new Corona Virus cases and over 2100 fatalities today. We have a total of 1,292,000 cases and 76,904 fatalities. We will reach 1.3 million cases tomorrow and 80,000 fatalities by the weekend. Six different states reported fatalities in the triple digits.
In NYC
The arrests of black and Hispanic residents, several of them filmed and posted online, occurred on the same balmy days that other photographs circulated showing police officers handing out masks to mostly white visitors at parks in Lower Manhattan, Williamsburg and Long Island City. Video captured crowds of sunbathers, many without masks, sitting close together at a park on a Manhattan pier, uninterrupted by the police.
At all times it is profit over lives in plants like this.
When your policies are meant to take advantage of poor, minority workers, giving a shit about their lives isn’t a priority. That goes both for the Republican governors and the meet packing plant owners…if either of them had cared one whit for their workers then the plants would have ceased production for a few days and put in safety measures, and opened back up at whatever production rate they could handle safely. This would have been backed up by the federal government, laying out standards and enforcing them on factories that didn’t come up to speed. I’m sure there are individuals in the plant management and government that want to do the right thing, but they are apparently powerless against the combined forces of Republican politician and owners who want to take advantage of the workers.
We have a situation in this nation where the wealthy and powerful don’t see the lower class workers as actual people, just resources to be used and thrown aside. What’s happening in the meat packing plants is just a clear indication of this worldview, and it’s one that really needs to be destroyed in this nation. It’s ironic that the same people who chanted “All lives matter!” don’t actually care about any lives but their own.
Still not enough testing going on.
Thanks for the link.
The testing in concept is simple, well maybe to me, since I began doing ELISA (Enzyme Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay) 30 years ago. I created a test for pregnancy in horses which the high end breeders liked. And a compatriot of mine did the same for humans. He made a lot more money than I did. The false positive/negative percents were pretty low as well for both tests. The technology ought to be employed all over the country for covid by now and it is criminal that it is not. This test could easily be done at home in a simple yes/no kit like the pregnancy test is these days. I suppose if trump were making a profit then we would indeed have what we need. It’s that corrupt in DC these days.
bingo
Where is Upton Sinclair when you need him. It is a real Jungle in Grand Island.
Tonight he’s having an on-line town hall about the status of the virus in NE tonight…I hope he gets tortured. The Grand Island mayor was pushing him on this weeks ago…Ricketts was trying to placate him and sent the national guard to do a day of testing. I live 15 miles from GI…our town is seeing a smaller but consistent increase in the number of diagnosed cases, also. Ricketts was just congratulating himself with some other douchebag governors in a recent op-Ed for how well he’s handled the epidemic. What a flaming asshole.