There have been tens of thousands of COVID-19 cases and hundreds of deaths reported among U.S. farmworkers and meat plant workers. Because there isn’t an official tracking system in place, these figures -- based largely on media reports -- are likely an undercount.

And yet, agricultural workers struggle to access the most basic tool to fight the spread of the virus: testing.

“Many farmworkers are both working and living in sometimes isolated rural regions of the country,” says Diana Tellefson Torres, executive director of the California-based United Farm Workers Foundation.

In addition to living far from testing sites, these workers often lack access to reliable information in their language and have a general mistrust of the health care system.

Early on in the pandemic, Gilberto Rosas, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois,  teamed up with medical clinics in the area to organize pop-up coronavirus testing events in a local agricultural community.

But they’ve been frustrated by low attendance at many of their testing events.

Sofia Bolanos Robinette suspects more people don’t turn out for testing, even when it’s available at convenient times and locations, because a positive test can be financially devastating.

“In the case they get back [a positive result], they will have to stop working,” Robinette says. “And then that means for them, they will not get any money for at least two weeks.”

That’s a big deal, she says, especially for farmworkers who earn the bulk of their yearly income doing this work.

For low-wage farmworkers, “every penny counts,” says Torres of the United Farm Workers Foundation. “When you have to worry about putting food on your own table for your family, sometimes that is the focus because there isn't another option.”

Read the full article about coronavirus testing among U.S. farmworkers by Christine Herman and Dana Cronin at Harvest Public Media.