Florida’s ag communities are cradles for coronavirus

Concerns raised over migrating farmworkers spreading sickness

IMMOKALEE, Fla. — Inside her tidy house, a modest patio apartment wedged in a neighborhood of itinerant farmworkers, Angelina Velásquez packed. A half-filled travel bag lay on the couch, surrounded by clothes to be folded. The annual harvest was over in Immokalee, the country’s winter tomato capital, and it was time to head north.

Velásquez, 52, a single mother of two, did not want to go. Not on the long ride in a loaded van up eight states to New Jersey. Not into the crammed living quarters she will share with her daughters, 11 and 15, and other laborers like herself who will spend the summer picking blueberries. Not on a journey whose every step puts them at risk of contracting the coronavirus.

“We’re afraid,” said Velásquez, who so far is healthy. “But where am I supposed to go? There is no work here.”

Velásquez and thousands of other migrant workers make their way each year from southern Florida up the East Coast and into the Midwest, following the ripening of fruits and vegetables. Watermelons in Georgia. Sweet potatoes in North Carolina. Apples in Michigan.

This year, many will bring the coronavirus with them.

Florida’s agricultural communities have become cradles of infection, fueling a worrying new spike in the state’s daily toll in new infections, which has hit records in recent days. The implications go far beyond Florida: Case numbers in places like Immokalee are swelling just as many farmworkers are migrating up the Eastern Seaboard for the summer harvest.

As is the case with agricultural communities around the country, Florida’s farming regions have a high degree of built-in risk. Fruit and vegetable pickers toil close to each other in fields, ride buses shoulder-to-shoulder and sleep in cramped apartments or trailers with other laborers or several generations of their families.

Immokalee has a small federally funded clinic but does not have its own hospital.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has called the contagion in agricultural communities Florida’s “No. 1 outbreak.” He has also repeated the Trump administration’s misleading claim that the rising case numbers in the state should be mostly attributed to more widespread testing and not to the economic reopening. Some bars and restaurants that recently opened have had to close again as employees and patrons have gotten sick.

“We’re not rolling back,” DeSantis said Tuesday.

That farmworkers essential to the economy were vulnerable to infection has been evident for months. In Washington state, labor unions tried to get bunk beds banned in farmworker housing. Regulators let the bunks stay but put other rules in place last month to try to ensure physical distancing.

Despite the known risks, it took many weeks for a coordinated public health response to take shape in Immokalee. Doctors Without Borders, the nonprofit organization that usually deploys to poor and conflict-ridden parts of the world, arrived in April to help at the request of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Its roving testing site has twice set up at the flea market off Main Street, with its outdoor clothes racks and taco stands.

The Florida Department of Health did not do mass local testing until early May, and then found an alarming number of cases in Immokalee and other largely immigrant and impoverished farm towns. A watermelon farm in Alachua County that tested 100 workers after a sick laborer arrived from Miami-Dade County found 90 positive cases, DeSantis said, though only one had symptoms.

Lake Worth, a suburban Palm Beach County community of about 39,000 that has a large population of Guatemalan and Mexican immigrants, has 1,418 confirmed cases, almost as many as St. Petersburg, a city six times larger.

Belle Glade, a sugar cane city of about 20,000, has 514 cases. Indiantown, population 7,000, has 534.

And Immokalee, a community of 25,000 on the western edge of the Everglades, has 1,207 — more than Miami Beach, a city three times larger. The positive test rate in Collier County, home to Immokalee, is 10 percent, about double the state rate.

The office of Nikki Fried, the state’s agriculture commissioner and a Democrat frequently at odds with the governor, disputed that farm towns were spreading the virus as much as DeSantis said, given that most harvests have concluded.

Yet the growing numbers and the potential for the virus to spread further outside of farming communities have remained a concern for state officials.