Many migrant workers make double what they could at jobs closer to home. It’s a prospect they simply can’t turn down, says Sylvia Partida, CEO of the National Center for Farmworker Health.

“Economic necessity… [is] what it comes down to,” she says. “This is their work and they rely on this work to survive.”

“There’s been a lot of fear and a lot of uncertainty,” she says. “[They’re] relying on organizations that might be able to assist them as they try to learn how to safeguard themselves.”

Partida’s organization has been tracking COVID-19 outbreaks among migrant and seasonal farmworkers — who are largely low-income and Latino—around the country. So far, outbreaks in 17 states, including several in the Midwest, have been documented in media reports. But because there isn’t an official tracking system in place, this unofficial count is likely an underestimation, Partida says.

The Food and Environment Reporting Network, which keeps a tally of COVID-19 outbreaks across the nation’s food system, reports more than 8,000 confirmed cases among U.S. farmworkers. Researchers from Purdue University, working in collaboration with Microsoft, estimate that the true number of coronavirus cases among U.S. farmworkers is much higher — about 140,000 — a number they arrived at by applying county-level infection rates to the number of farmworkers and farmers believed to be working in those counties.

In Illinois, COVID-19 cases among farmworkers are not closely tracked, but a clinic that caters to migrant and seasonal farmworkers reports that out of roughly 1,700 people tested by its staff since the start of the pandemic, 14 percent—or more than 200—were positive.

Read the full article about migrant workers during COVID-19 by Dana Cronin and Christine Herman at The Counter.