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The Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN) announces that its long-time reporter, Leah Douglas, is leaving to take a job with Reuters.

FERN is also giving up its counts of Covid cases and deaths among farm workers and meat-packing workers.

This week we wrapped up the mapping project of Covid-19 outbreaks at food-production facilities and farms around the nation. This nearly 18-month-long project, spearheaded and updated almost daily by staff writer and associate editor Leah Douglas, came to an end largely because of a lack of reliable data.

As Leah explains, companies and states have decided to keep much of their data secret, even with the rise of the Delta variant. But to date she has counted nearly 100,000 cases and 466 deaths among food system workers.

Here is an example of the data she produced.  In the absence of any industry or government tracking, her project was all we had.

And here’s another one.

You can see why these companies don’t want anyone to have these data.  Leah did a great job of working with what she could find.

I will miss her work on this project but look forward to seeing what she does for Reuters.

Congratulations Leah!

One of the great revelations of the Covid-19 pandemic had to do with working conditions at meat-packing plants.  Keeping the plants open under crowded conditions led to rapid transmission of illness.

In the absence of government tracking, Leah Douglas of the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN) has been collecting and publishing data on cases and deaths among meat-packing, food production, and farm workers.

Here data show that as of July 1, “at least 90,166 workers (58,856 meatpacking workers, 18,155 food processing workers, and 13,155 farmworkers) have tested positive for Covid-19 and at least 400 workers (297 meatpacking workers, 60 food processing workers, and 43 farmworkers) have died.”

Researchers have investigated the effects of those cases on the communities in which these workers live.  Their data show:

• The presence of a large beef packing facility in a county increases its per capita infection rates by 110%
• Large pork and chicken processing facilities increase transmission rates by 160% and 20%, respectively.
• Over time daily case rates converge such that rates observed in meatpacking- and non-meatpacking counties become similar.
• 334 thousand COVID-19 infections are attributable to meatpacking plants in the U.S.
• Associated mortality and morbidity costs total more than $11.2 billion.

The North American Meat Institute insists that that the meat industry’s worker protections have made its case rate “more than 85% lower than rates in the general population (18.25 cases per day per 100,000 people) and more than 98% lower than the May 2020 peak in the sector (98.39 cases per day per 100,000 workers).”

The research study offers an explanation: infected workers infect communities.