COVID-19 working paper: meatpacking working conditions and the spread of COVID-19. (COVID-19 Working Paper No. AP-092.)

ABSTRACT

This preliminary analysis explores how working conditions in meatpacking plants might have contributed to the spread of the Coronavirus (COVID-19). Data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) was used to construct a set of industry-level working condition variables and compare meatpacking to the sample of other manufacturing industries in our comparison group. This novel approach showed that proximity to others in the meatpacking industry is likely the main factor that influenced the spread of COVID-19, nearly three standard deviations higher in meatpacking than our comparison sample of other manufacturing industries. Overall exposure to disease was also found to be 2.5 standard deviations higher in the meatpacking industry compared to other manufacturing industries. Subsequently, we performed a county-level analysis on COVID-19 spread, comparing rural counties that have a large number of meatpacking plants to other nonmetropolitan counties that were dependent on a single manufacturing industry, using the time frame of mid-March to mid-September of 2020. Data analysis begins in mid-March since confirmed cases became national in scope at this point. In mid-April 2020, COVID-19 cases in meatpacking-dependent rural counties rose to nearly 10 times the number in comparison to rural counties dependent on other single manufacturing industries. This difference disappears completely by mid-July, driven by a reduction in COVID-19 cases in the meatpacking industry rather than an increase in other industries, and holds steady through mid-September. The paper concludes by collating evidence from other studies to infer that the meatpacking industry's increased precautions to protect workers help explain why no difference was observed between meatpacking-dependent counties and our comparison group for the final 2 months of the study period. However, this inference should be viewed as suggestive since it cannot formally test using the data referenced in the working paper.