COVID-19 and the U.S. Meatpacking Industry

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has affected countless lives and disrupted numerous industries. The effects of the initial outbreak and lockdowns are still being felt today, and even with vaccines now readily available, infections continue and many restrictions remain in place. The prevalence of cell phones, tablets, and other mobile electronic devices provides us with a large source of data on the movement patterns of individuals over time. Our overall goal is to leverage this granular data to identify and measure COVID-19-related disruptions in the supply chains of food in the United States. For this project specifically, we focus on the meat packing industry, which has been an object of controversy due to corporations enacting inadequate safety measures and denying responsibility and/or compensation for employee COVID-19 infections and deaths. We attempt to identify and track the movements of employees of these companies in order to study their relation to COVID-19 infection rates. Our findings suggest that certain existing estimates of the impact of meatpacking-related COVID-19 cases may be underestimated. These results could be further used to better quantify said impacts, and the methods employed may be extended to other industries for similar analysis. Recent privacy policy changes, however, limit the feasibility of these methods in the future.