In 2020, California’s Foster Farms became the site of one of the nation’s deadliest COVID-19 outbreaks at a meat or poultry plant. The California Report’s Central Valley reporter, Alex Hall, spent a year and a half talking to spouses and family members of workers who spent decades at the company’s chicken-processing plants. She found that hundreds of Foster Farms workers tested positive for the virus in 2020. 16 people died and at least 20 others were hospitalized. In this episode that originally aired in October 2021, Hall’s investigation shows that as plants stayed open to maintain the food supply, and workers got sick from COVID-19, or even died, Foster Farms didn’t always give a complete picture of the problem to health officials, state regulators and their own employees.