[barkingcat]

If you didn't get the memo - meat plants and slaughterhouses are places where you definitely don't want sick workers handling raw meat.

If you think about it, meat plants are the wet markets of the US. Albeit with sanitary standards, refrigeration, etc, but if there was going to be another zoonotic crossbreeding event, where the human coronavirus from a sick plant worker merges and mutates with a bovine coronavirus within dying slaughterhouse animals - you could be looking at a worse event.

These plants are not shutting down because of precautions, they are shutting down because the plant workers are sick and test positive.