Paul TenHaken, the 42-year-old mayor of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, said it wasn't easy getting the world's top pork producer to shut down one of its biggest plants."It was tense," TenHaken said. "You know, you shut down a plant like that, it has a pretty big impact on the food supply. So we weren't taking this lightly, making this request." TenHaken,realized in early April that his city was turning into a hot spot of the novel coronavirus pandemic. And the infection was spreading most rapidly among the 3,700 workers at a pork processing plant owned by Smithfield Foods. Most of the workers at the plant are immigrants; they speak 26 different languages.
This thing jumped out of a light socket," TenHaken said. Dozens of workers were testing positive for the virus each day. TenHaken worried that Smithfield wasn't doing enough to stop the virus from spreading. He called the company's executives, he said, and told them, "We need to see a temporary closure, not only to calm the community, but to ensure that the safety of your employees is priority No. 1."
On Thursday, Smithfield agreed to close the plant in order to clean it, but just for three days. Meanwhile, the number of sick employees kept climbing, and TenHaken wasn't satisfied with the information he was getting from the company. The breaking point came Saturday morning, when the mayor heard that the number of infected employees had climbed past 100.
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/14/83447...stricken-plant