A Case Study on the Practical Use of Low-Fidelity Modeling to Mitigate the Spread of COVID-19 Amongst the Underserved Farmworker Community.

In March of 2020, with the full magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic yet to be seen, Costa and Martin released a report through the Economic Policy Institute noting that "To prevent infections and the spread of COVID-19 on farms, farm employers should be planning and implementing safety measures to protect their employees" (Costa D, Martin P, Coronavirus and farmworkers: farm employment, safety issues, and the H-2A guestworker program, Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/publication/coronavirus-and-farmworkers-h-2a/, 2020). The report goes on to provide multiple observations recognizing the seasonal nature of farm work, effects increased unemployment may have on the workforce, industry dependence on H-2A visa farm workers, impact school closings would have on worker availability, and includes recommendations for safety equipment, social distancing, as well as worker housing and transportation. This paper focuses on the worker housing component of those recommendations and describes an effort to rapidly develop and deploy a computationally efficient, web-based, low-fidelity mathematical model of COVID-19 spread in dormitory style housing to support education and mitigation strategies for the historically underserved farmworker community.

A Scoping Review of Safety and Health Interventions in the High-Risk Dairy Industry: Gaps in Evidence Point to Future Directions in Research.

The occupational injury rate of the dairy industry (6.6 per 100 full-time workers) is twice that of the national average across all industries (3.3 per 100 full-time workers). While dairy farms are becoming larger in size and fewer in number, this rate has not changed. A scoping review was conducted to identify published reports of occupational safety interventions in the dairy industry. An additional criterion was that the study included an evaluation of the intervention. Out of 22 articles that met the first criterion (discussion of interventions specific to the dairy industry), 19 met the second of having an evaluative component. These 19 articles corresponded to 16 unique studies, because 4 articles corresponded to the same study. Of the 16 unique studies, only 3 had a comparison of treatment vs. control effects, and none measured the impact of the intervention on injuries and fatalities. Of the 16 interventions, 6 were focused on training or informational campaigns in which the evaluations primarily measured knowledge acquisition. Additionally, none of these studies had a sufficient sample size to compare injury rates as an outcome. Our study demonstrates that the literature lacks any rigorous evaluation of whether dairy safety interventions are making an impact on injury prevention. Given this, it is not possible to determine how work-related injuries and deaths can be prevented in the dairy industry. Recommendations for future research include incorporating rigorous evaluation into research designs and attempting to develop low-cost, unobtrusive methods for collecting data on intermediate and final outcomes.