This is coronavirus daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Monday, May 25th.

Good morning. Thank you very much for participating.

It's March 24th. About 10 days after cities around the US started shutting down because of COVID-19.

Workers are getting furloughed. Businesses are closing. And about 500 people in the US have already

died. But Ken Sullivan, the CEO of the world's biggest pork producer, Smithfield Foods,

is on a conference call, telling investors that everything at the company is fine.

We are operating all our plants at 100 percent. So there's been no impact so far from COVID-19.

What Sullivan is saying here is that despite all the warnings at that point,

that people in close contact with others could spread a potentially deadly disease,

the business of putting people in plans to process pork is going forward.

Because the government considers pork production essential.

We have been asked to continue to run our operations at full speed.

One investment analyst asks if Sullivan is worried that people won't show up to work.

He says he's not. I think they are grateful to have jobs and a paycheck when so many in the US

are afraid of losing their job or already have.

The risk is that employees get scared and therefore do not want to operate the plants.

Still, he says he is not worried.

So far that has not been an issue. I don't really expect it to be an issue.

But it turns out that same day, maybe even at the exact same moment, Ken Sullivan was on that

conference call. News was spreading through a Smithfield factory in Sioux Falls, South Dakota

from manager to manager and down the line of workers. The virus is here. Someone in the plant has

tested positive. What happened next at the Smithfield factory eventually made national news

...