How the two waves of coronavirus cases swept the Texas Panhandle

When Boutsady Muongkhot went to take the test COVID-19, He wasn’t upset. His daughter told him to do it. 71-year-old Muongkot is the youngest of the 10 children born in rural Laos and one of two brothers who came to America. He is a little over five feet tall (satirical and sociable) and speaks Lao, Thai and French in addition to the English he learned in Texas. His accent is somewhere in between. Some are hesitant in 4th language and some are draws. by the time COVID-19 arrived at Texas Panhandle. So Muongkot spent nearly 40 years of his life cutting meat and retired. However, his wife was still working at the Tyson Meatpacking Factory in Amarillo. His daughter warned him of a pandemic. He was watching the news. But because of all his concerns, Muongkot was lazy in his house. “I know they say they cover your nose on TV and cover your face every time you leave the house,” he told me. “But I forgot to think about my wife.”

This was the first wave of the virus in Texas, centered on the meat-packing plants going north from Amarillo to Oklahoma. Each plant in the early months of the pandemic represented both an intensive outbreak and an amplification of familiar problems throughout the United States: messaging disruption, life-commercial conflict, conspiracy theory and complete denial. .. It all seemed invisible and abstract, at the front line, at the hospital, or in the hardest hit communities, unless you were there.

As a result, Muoncott found himself unaware of one of the first major outbreaks in Texas. A city of about 200,000 people, Amarillo is at the intersection of two counties, Randall and Potter, and most of the immigrants live in Potter. As of July 1, 77% of the city’s 37,700 cases have been issued by Potter. At least one in 25 people is affected by the disease in another large meat-packing factory north of Moore County. This is the proportion of the most affected areas in New York City. As early as February, Muongkot’s wife was listening to rumors. Some people got sick at home, but maybe it was the flu. “The company continues to run,” said Muongkot. “I didn’t think my wife would get a virus and lead to me. We were just ordinary people who spend time together regularly.”

No one knows when the coronavirus first arrived at the panhandle meat packing plant. The first case recorded in Amarillo on March 18 was unrelated to the plant. It involved someone traveling for a basketball game. However, by May, workers had been infected for weeks in a local hospital before Muongkot went to be tested. And the people coming in and those suspected of being healthcare workers were just the tip of the iceberg. Meat packing plants are well suited to completely prevent the transmission of the virus (Amarillo’s doctor who specializes in tuberculosis says he sees about 15 TB cases each year). COVID-19 spreads faster than influenza. People on the line work side by side. The air is kept cold. It’s too loud to hear someone coughing, and loud enough to make people scream in their faces regularly. And in rural towns, such as the cactus (which Waylon Jennings described as “a wide area of ​​the road”), they used to come and go to van factories packed with workers.

“We all knew it was a matter of time as soon as they were talking about a pandemic,” Rodney Young of the Family and Community Medicine Department of Texas Tech School of Medicine in Amarillo told me. It was In China, a pandemic surge in January shut down meatpacking plants across the country for several weeks. In Nebraska, an emergency room doctor sent an email to a local health department on March 31 warning of an outbreak at a local JBS plant. Daniela Dwyer, a lawyer at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, said the agricultural sector was a concern from the outset, and supporters wrote a letter to Mike Pompeo, specifically addressing the vulnerability of temporary farm workers. “I think anyone who worked with low-paid workers or agricultural workers knew this would be a problem,” she said.

Still, the April 12 outbreak surprised authorities and workers when it closed the pork processing plant in Smithfield, North Dakota, which is responsible for 5% of US pork production. Cargill had already closed its plant in Pennsylvania on April 7, and other meatpacking plants were soon closed in the United States. On April 15, the JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado was closed, and five days later another JBS plant in Worthington, MN was closed. By April 22, more than 12 plants had been closed and at least 220 workers from 41 plants across the country were infected. However, Panhandle’s two largest plants, one owned by JBS and the other owned by Tyson, both employed approximately 7,000 workers and remained operational.

So OSHA And the CDC scrambled to devise a workplace protocol, an outbreak alert coincided with a disastrous warning of a breakdown in the US food supply chain. Even if a worker becomes ill, the US Department of Agriculture has allowed 15 poultry factories to exceed guidelines on how many bird workers a minute can handle (in one month More waivers than given up). And on April 26th, John H. Tyson put up a full-page ad in New York. Times And Washington Position It warns, “The food supply chain is broken.” Two days later, Donald Trump Announced that the meat packing plant was considered an essential business. No matter what, the plants had to remain open. Other parts of the world were distant, but workers had to keep entering.

Muongkot has lived in Amarillo for 40 years. His life was influenced by the rhythm of his work at Tyson. When he first arrived, he earned $2.65 an hour to repair a car speaker. He found that he was more slicing meat and paid $4.84 an hour. Over time, my salary went up until I made $13 an hour. He explained that his wife was still cut because she was 20 years younger. “I got married twice,” Muongkot said. “I returned to Laos to meet her, and I tell the truth.” Snow, plants, and his three children. “I’m not educated,” he said. “I just chopped meat, chopped meat, chopped meat.” He worked at the manufacturing site. He sharpened knives and kept a freezer. Initially, the people of Amarillo were unwelcome. He earned money and bought Transam. His neighbor threw an egg and sometimes shook his new car. But more refugees have come.

Since the wave of immigrant raids, in 2006, meatpacking factories around the country became increasingly dependent on the workforce of refugees. They changed the face of the American countryside and created a community within the community. At Panhandle, Karen people from Myanmar rub elbows with refugees from Laos, Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia. Overall, more than 20 different languages ​​are spoken in factories and regions. The meatpacking plant is famous for the difficult working conditions of using saws and knives and standing together for long periods of time, delivering thousands of cows daily and enough to keep the low price of beef in the United States. It is difficult to secure staff. state. Plants offer relatively high salaries in the world of agricultural labor. No English is required and the plants offer English classes and health benefits. Most of them are unionized. According to Muongkot, young workers typically use plants as a springboard to improve their English and move on. But as the number of refugees coming to the United States declined, so did the pool of available workers. “You have a lot of overtime,” said Ryan Pennington, a linguist and head of the Amarillo Refugee Language Project. “They are desperate to get more people there.”