Thanks for the article. I actually picked apples and pears in the Yakima Valley (Beautiful). There are agricultural workers and there are migrant workers. These are similar but slightly different IMO. I was there for about a month. I knew no one. I camped or slept in shelters provided by the grower. The entertainment was stories around a fire in the evening. I was exhausted, nursing blisters and could hardly lift my arms up at the end of the day. I think I went to a bar briefly once but again very tired so not much interaction with locals.
Separate from the group of migrant workers were the full time farm workers who stayed year-round. This group, similar to the packing house workers, are living in the area whereas I was moving through.
I arrived, was assigned a farm by the county employment office (I think), filed for food stamps, worked for 3 weeks in the fields living in migratory worker shelters, worked another 7 days or so picking pears and living with the farm family. Nice folks, probably could have stayed on but that was not in my plans.
Working in the fields there is no lunch room. In the fields, you are just trying to keep up with the tractor that is moving the bins. It is more solitary work in that way. Working in the fruit packing house is closer, there is a lunch room (of sorts) etc and I can see how it would be necessary to work hard at preventing transmission. The article addresses these efforts.
The other thing is that these agricultural facilities are often not continuous operation. Crops come in and then there is a pause. Labor finds its own next gig. I can see this as problematic for transmission. OTOH, it is a place to sample and test to see how we are doing or not doing.
I've gotten apples and some pears every fall for decades. I stock up in October and eat them through February. When I lived in Seattle I'd make a trek to Wenatchee and Leavenworth. Since moving to the Portland area we go over to the Hood River Valley in Oregon. I got to know some of the farmers and have done some picking of my own fruit. I've also seen the seasonal guys around.
Most of the larger farms have some full time health who, from their accents, may have started out as seasonal workers and settled down. My sister is a petroleum Geologist in Bakersfield, but has horses (13 at her max, she was trying to breed the perfect trail horse) and has had acreage for years. She has a couple of immigrant handymen she calls on for maintenance and helping out with things. One lives part time in a trailer on her property. I think both of them started out as migrant farm workers.
My partner's father was born in Mexico and fled to the US in the 1930s due to conflict at home. He was fortunate to be one of the haves in Mexico and got an education better than most Americans at the time. But in the US he had to do a lot of farm labor. He eventually ended up doing the books on a sheep ranch because both his math and his written English was better than anyone else there including the white folk.
I also grew up on the border of East LA and knew some Hispanics who's families had come here to work in agriculture. Some had families histories on this side of the border that went back to before the US was a country.
Our county doesn't have much agriculture anymore, but apparently there is at least one fruit packing house. We had to delay opening up for a few weeks in cherry season because the owner of a fruit packing house only did the recommended measures poorly and a number of people got sick.
It's the same in Monterey. The outbreak is hottest among ag workers i(strawberries, lettuce, grapes, artichokes, etc) in the Salinas Valley. Drive by the fields and you do not see any masks. A local yahoo newspaper in Carmel has been crowing about "their" problem not being "our" problem from the very beginning, and how "we lucky few" should be able to open our restaurants (forgetting about who cooks the food and cleans the dishes), our art galleries, construction sites (who do they think is doing the building???) and real estate offices. Here's a short sample:
"As has been happening with the virus almost since it arrived in the county, most of today's new cases were in Salinas and the Salinas Valley, which had 118. The Peninsula and Big Sur had eight new cases, and today for the first time the health department announced a number for Big Sir (zip code 93920), which has experienced a total of five cases. We have no idea when they happened, but we now have a count for that area. And that leaves just three lucky Monterey Peninsula zip codes — Carmel-by-the-Sea (93921), Carmel Valley (93924) and Pebble Beach (93953) — that have had fewer than five cases. In other parts of the Monterey Peninsula, Carmel area (93923) gained one case today and has 10, Marina added none and totals 68, Monterey gained a single case to reach 48, Pacific Grove added two for a total of 19, and Seaside had 5 for a total of 186."
Robin
An attitude has sprung up in some circles that this disease affects "them" and not "us", so why should we worry about it? I suspect that is the dog whistle behind at least some of the anti-mask debate. People aren't willing to come right out and be that openly racist, but an attitude that "good" white folk don't get sick while black and brown people they don't care about means they should be able to do what they want.
Some Southern governors are beginning to take the outbreak seriously in their states because younger white folk are beginning to get sick in large numbers. When it was just seniors and non-white people it was easy to play down the virus.
There was a short story by Edgar Allan Poe called
The Masque of the Red Death that I had to read in school. It was about a plague, much like the Black Death that was ravaging the land. A group of wealthy try to hide out the plague in an isolated castle, but in the end it gets them too. I've been thinking about that story the last few months.
It's online in its entirety here
The Masque of the Red Death - Poe's Works | Edgar Allan Poe Museum
