Officials at Tyson’s poultry processing plant in Shelby County may have waited weeks to tell workers that an employee had tested positive for COVID-19, preventing other workers from taking action to prevent the spread of the virus inside the facility, plant employees told the Observer last week. The company waited even longer to implement rudimentary safeguards (such as breathing masks and plastic screens to separate workstations) as more workers fell ill, were hospitalized, and died, they say.
The Tyson plant emerged last week as a focal point for coronavirus cases in this rural county of 25,400 on the Texas-Louisiana border. The Tyson facility, which employs roughly 2,000 workers from Texas and Louisiana, has been linked to 56 cases of COVID-19, 33 of whom are Shelby County residents. Shelby County has the third-highest number of confirmed cases per capita of all Texas counties. The Texas Department of State Health Services is investigating the Tyson outbreak, along with a spate of coronavirus cases at a JBS slaughterhouse in Moore County in the Panhandle, which counts the highest number of cases per capita in the state.
Michael Bennett, a Tyson employee who tested positive for the virus in early April, says he left work one day this month with a cough and a fever. “I just couldn’t take it. I was weak and feeling real bad and just stayed at home,” he told the Observer. Bennett then sought treatment at the emergency room in the town of Center, the county seat, and received the diagnosis he was dreading: He had COVID-19. Bennett says he was sent to a nearby hospital, where hospital staff told Tyson about his test result, for more than a week. He’s since been released and is at home, where I reached him by phone on Thursday. Bennett can’t be sure how he picked up the virus, he says as his coughs punctuate our conversation, but he suspects he caught it at the plant.
