One of the benefits of keeping a kosher home is our immunity to product scarcity now that the new coronavirus has temporarily closed down the Smithfield Foods plant in South Dakota that processes five percent of the nation’s pork products. Smithfield meat processing facilities in Missouri and Wisconsin also have been shut down. Another five percent came off line when three JBS meat and pork processing plants shuttered indefinitely because of COVID-19 infestations among workers.
Outside our home I am not strictly kosher, though I try to avoid foods that outright say they are pork or ham. I fudge the truth when it comes to wontons, sweet sausage topping for pizza and the occasional side dish of bacon. Don’t ask me to justify my choices. They cannot be rationalized.
Kosher adherents shouldn’t feel holier-than-thou to pork eaters affected by plant shutdowns. Empire Kosher Poultry closed a Pennsylvania chicken plant because workers have been infected.
One cannot confine blame to the plants, kosher or not, nor the workers. Workers commonly live in perfect breeding grounds for virus transmission—multiple beings to a residence in densely populated areas with less than optimum sanitary conditions. Workers often do not have health insurance nor do they have sufficient cash reserves to stay home from work. No matter how a plant might try to safeguard its employees it is inevitable that contamination will surface at some point, especially since workers cannot maintain safe distances from each other in many facilities.
It can be expected that similar exposures will occur in all types of workplaces across the country if governors lift shelter in place orders to regenerate economic activity, as aggressive protestors have been demanding over the last week, with support from Donald Trump.
We will be turning governors into actuaries, weighing the number of acceptable deaths against the financial benefit of business as usual. We are pitting love of cold cash against the more-than-common cold.
In whom shall our governors place their and our trust, in Trump-aligned corporals of industry or in teams of infectious disease epidemiologists who warn that a premature lifting of quarantine measures could boomerang into a second wave of epidemic?
We already have examples of businesses trumping safety. Car companies and the airline industry in the past dispensed with product recalls for inexpensive individual safety fixes—but costly if done systemwide. They chose to accept some injuries and even fatalities from crashes, and pay out reparations but only if successfully sued.
They followed what actuaries do—they weigh the financial consequences of risk. In deciding when and how much to reopen their states to commerce, governors will be forced to risk the lives of their respective citizens against the possibility of a resurgence of the pandemic.
Let’s hope intelligent reason prevails.
In Case You Didn’t Know: In an example of truth being stranger than fiction, guess who owns Smithfield Foods? The Chinese. Smithfield sold out back in 2013 (https://mol.im/a/8223423). JBS, by the way, is owned by a Brazilian company.
Spoiler Alert: Lest we forget, in our obsessive-compulsive washing of hands to destroy all germs, it was bacteria that killed the alien invaders in H.G. Wells’ classic “War of the Worlds.”
Common Sense: Aside from respiratory deficiency, does the coronavirus also affect one’s intelligence, at least as it pertains to members of the Trump administration?
An example of brain lock came last week from presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway. She asserted COVID-19 was named thusly after 18 other viruses had been exposed to mankind. Her point was the prior 18 viruses didn’t trigger a pandemic and economic catastrophe so why have we locked down for this viral iteration?
She was arguing in support of Trump’s push to speedily reopen the country’s slammed economy despite warnings from medical experts of insufficient capacity to safely monitor the spread of the disease.
You can’t fault her for trying, but you can chastise her accuracy. COVID is an acronym for COronaVIrus Disease. The 19 refers to 2019, the year when it was identified. It does not mean there were 18 prior viruses.
All of a sudden Republicans may be seeing the light. They are aghast that a hands-off-business government posture that encouraged profits at all costs including shipping manufacturing jobs overseas while failing to protect American workers was bad policy. Or so it seems if a New York Times Op-Ed from Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is any indication. Rubio advocates for “rebuilding a more productive and pro-worker economy” (https://nyti.ms/2VITjFw).
Rubio in the past has said quite a few progressive ideas, but when it has come down to voting he has hewn to the Trump line.
