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  2020-05-06

  Greenville, SC Chicken processing plant demonstrates failures of US infrastructure

  Two screenshots telling a story about the House of Raeford chicken processing plant less than a mile from my home and a larger story about the failure of the US infrastructure at this time. About 2 weeks ago we began to hear rumors that the meat supply was likely to be affected by the pandemic, workers were becoming sick in huge numbers and the processing plants were closing down. At the same time many of them were currently overloaded with products that they could not sell to restaurants and schools. 10 days ago the processing plant down the road held a huge sale on their overstock meat. Several thousand people lined up in their cars for miles down the road. They hung out in the parking lots of other businesses and moved in and out of them while waiting in the line. Very few people were masked ; none of the plant employees were masked. A few days after the sale President Trump declared meat packing plants essential for the economy and required them to stay open tho he provided no funds for PPE for workers nor any real guidelines on how to keep them safe. 7 days after the huge sale at the House of Raeford plant they reported positive cases amongst their workers. They refuse to say how many people are infected out of privacy concerns. At every step of the way the people involved should have been able to trust the government to keep us safe and we have not been able to. We should have been able to trust in our food supply or at least in the information we received about it so we didn't feel the need to panic buy food. The workers should have been protected from the start and definitely after they were ordered to work. We should be able to know what information to trust to make informed decisions regarding our lives and the lives of our fellow citizens. The US government is spectacularly failing to provide the least feeling of stability at this time.