One Meat Plant, One Thousand Infections: Revisiting Achut Deng

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2020

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For the remainder of this week, “The Daily” is revisiting episodes with people we met in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic to hear what has happened to them since our original conversations were aired. One of the largest coronavirus outbreaks in the United States was inside the Smithfield pork factory in Sioux Falls, S.D. Today, we revisit our conversation with a worker at the plant, a refugee who survived civil war and malaria only to find her life and livelihood threatened anew — and ask her how she has been doing since. Guests: Caitlin Dickerson, who covers immigration for The New York Times, and Achut Deng, a Sudanese refugee who works for Smithfield. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: Refugees from around the world worked at the Smithfield pork factory. Then they faced mounting illness and the sudden loss of their jobs.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Michael. This week, we're revisiting people we met in the early weeks of the pandemic,
0:06.5	listening back, and hearing what's happened to them since our original conversation.
0:12.6	Today, a chute dang, a pork factory worker in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
0:20.4	It's Wednesday, July 15th.
0:22.9	I came to America thinking I can never go through hell, but what if this comes to me?
0:38.6	This virus is very dangerous. They caught everybody off guard, including myself.
0:45.5	I was never prepared for it.
0:46.8	From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is the Daily.
0:59.8	Today, one of the largest outbreaks of the coronavirus in the US has been inside a meat processing
1:08.4	plan in South Dakota. My colleague, Caitlin Dickerson, speaks with one of its workers.
1:23.0	It's Monday, May 4th.
1:25.6	As an immigration reporter, as soon as I hear that COVID-19 is starting to spread across the
1:39.5	country, I start thinking about who are the most vulnerable people in this pandemic.
1:44.8	And right away, meat and poultry plants come to mind. Because these facilities tend to be
1:50.8	staffed by immigrants, there's going to be a lot of pressure on workers to show up for work because
1:55.9	they've been deemed essential by the federal government. And because of the nature of the work,
2:01.3	the facilities are massive. And often you have thousands of people working at a single time,
2:06.8	and they literally stand shoulder to shoulder. They're touching all the time.
2:11.9	Hello. Hello. Are you there? Oh, shoot. You just dropped out. Something happened.
2:16.9	So I'm putting touch with a woman named Achute Dang. We did it. Yes, we did.
2:26.0	Just to start out a shoot, can you just kind of introduce yourself and tell us what work you do?
2:32.8	So my name is Achute Dang. I work with Smithfield. We produce a pork.
	...

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