Coronavirus Reporting

The longer the state of Nebraska doesn’t issue a stay at home order, the more positive cases of coronavirus we’re going to have statewide.

The Kearney Hub’s Erin Duffy wrote an article titled, “Meatpacking plants are Nebraska’s newest battleground in war against coronavirus.” By this she means that cases are spreading all over in counties that have big meat packing plants like Tyson or JBS beef plant.

The positive case numbers are only going up and yet we’re still allowing people to go shopping and go to work. Pete Rickets even said that as of Monday more than 2,000 coronavirus tests came back and almost half were from either Dawson or Hall County. Hall County has Grand Island JBS plant and Dawson has a Tyson Foods, so no wonder the cases are so high there.

This article is important because Duffy highlights that if these outbreaks keep happening it’s only going to hurt the food supply chain. It hurts everyone who works there and everyone needing that food to survive. That includes grocery stores and farms that help supply the meat. Other plants that are employing thousands of workers are closed because of the amount of people who have gotten sick and died.

Duffy makes sure the readers know that the spread of the virus is happening rapidly throughout these meatpacking plants. We don’t realize that this is that bad of an issue in our state until we see that facilities that are important parts of our communities have numerous positive cases. The more cases that come up in the meat packing plants the more it’s going to hurt the meat industry.

In her article, Duffy points out that a job in the meat industry can’t be done from home and that these workers spend most of their time elbow-to-elbow with other coworkers. English isn’t the first language for many of these workers, so health news also needs to be translated into other languages so precautions can be spread throughout the plant.

The meat plant in Hall County, which Grand Island is located in, his home of the most coronavirus cases in Nebraska. There’s known to be at least eight workers at the Tyson plant in Madison County that have tested positive for the virus. The coronavirus seems to be getting closer to my home and my family. Hopefully people will start to take this suggested stay at home order seriously. Maybe the state will take it more seriously and turn it from a suggestion to a law that people need to stay home.

If we want the spread to stop, we need to be on the same page as a state. There can’t be some stores closed and others hoping to open. Nebraska is one of the few states that isn’t on a full lockdown and because of that our case numbers are constantly rising, and Duffy does an excellent job of reporting that.