One Meat Plant. One Thousand Infections.

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

One of the largest coronavirus outbreaks in the United States has been inside the Smithfield pork factory in Sioux Falls, S.D. Today, we speak with a worker at the plant, a refugee who survived civil war and malaria only to find her life and livelihood threatened anew. Guests: Caitlin Dickerson, who covers immigration for The New York Times, spoke with Achut Deng, a Sudanese refugee who works at 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. Now they face mounting illness and the sudden loss of their jobs.

Transcript

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0:25.6	I came to America thinking I can never go through hell, but what if this comes to me?
0:42.0	This virus is very dangerous.
0:44.4	It caught everybody off guard, including myself.
0:48.8	I was never prepared for it.
0:53.0	From the New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro.
0:59.0	This is the Daily.
1:03.0	Today, one of the largest outbreaks of the coronavirus in the US has been inside a meat
1:11.0	processing plant in South Dakota.
1:14.2	My colleague, Caitlin Dickerson, speaks with one of its workers.
1:26.4	It's Monday, May 4.
1:38.0	As an immigration reporter, as soon as I hear that COVID-19 is starting to spread across
1:42.5	the country, I start thinking about who are the most vulnerable people in this pandemic.
1:48.9	Right away, meat and poultry plants come to mind.
1:52.6	These facilities tend to be staffed by immigrants.
1:55.6	There's going to be a lot of pressure on workers to show up for work because they've been
	...

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