Getting Covid Gets You Fired When You’re a Food Worker on a Visa
- Two workers get fired, lose visas, for going to hospital
- ‘We were like living dead, like zombies in the plant’
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As coronavirus cases explode at U.S. farms and food factories, the foreign migrants who pick fruit, clean seafood and sort vegetables are getting trapped in tightly packed bunkhouses where illness spreads like wildfire. Often, they can’t leave -- unless they’re willing to risk deportation.
In Oxnard, a small city just outside Los Angeles, a Covid-19 outbreak raced through a dormitory where farmworkers slept seven to a room. By early July, 198 out of its 215 residents tested positive. About 100 miles north, in Santa Maria, California, at least 85 people were infected at group housing facilities within a few weeks. And in Coldwater, Michigan, close to 70 guest workers caught the virus at a barracks on a produce farm.