In scandal of Green Empire Farms outbreak, there’s 1 death you’ve never heard about
By: Marnie Eisenstadt
Oneida, N.Y. — Roxanne Whaley had worked at the Super 8 in Oneida for more than 20 years.
The 68-year-old scrubbed the bathroom floors on her hands and knees, for minimum wage. The work was hard, but honest and predictable. Until December.
That’s when the hotel began housing dozens of migrant farm workers from Green Empire Farms, a sprawling indoor greenhouse, she said. The workers lived in three hotels, jammed four to a room and two to a bed.
At least 169 Green Empire Farms workers became infected with the Covid-19 virus.
The virus got Whaley, too. She fought off an infection for weeks, going to the doctor twice before she was offered a coronavirus test, she said. It came back positive April 29.
By then it spread to her husband, Lansing “Lanny” Whaley. He spiked a fever that night; she stayed up with him.
He was already weak from a bout with pneumonia and a years-long battle with Stage 4 bladder cancer.
Lanny died May 7, a week after he went into St. Joseph’s Hospital.
Over the days in which the largest coronavirus outbreak in Upstate New York exploded, authorities talked with relief about how none of the farmworkers became seriously ill.
But no one spoke about Lanny and Roxanne Whaley, who were counting on more time together.
Roxanne and Lanny met when she was in eighth grade. She was 18 when they married. She talked to him that first time because he was cute. But she stayed because he was kind.
They had two sons, four grandkids and two great-grandkids. He loved cars, the kids and her. Now, he is gone. There will be no big funeral. No procession of shiny classic cars.
Roxanne Whaley reluctantly talked to Syracuse.com for this story, and she did not want their photo published. They are private people. She is not angry at the hotel or the workers. But to her, it seems wrong the way the farmworkers were forced to live so close together for so long while the virus lurked.
“I know they are trying to make a living, but don’t put them in those conditions,” she said of the farm workers. “It was a bad situation.”
Public health officials in Madison County last week brought in state help to test greenhouse workers. But it’s unclear how much testing has been done of employees at the three hotels. (Two are in Madison County and one is in Oneida County.)
Madison County Public Health Director Eric Faisst said last week that the county tested 16 hotel workers and none of them was positive for the virus.
When Whaley and her family heard that, they were confused, she and her son, Michael Whaley, said. She was sick. She had a positive test. She had a public health nurse checking in on her every day. Her husband died. Surely they must know she has the virus and she works at the hotel.
On Monday, Samantha Field, a spokeswoman for Madison County, confirmed there are hotel workers who tested positive for the virus — just not among the 16 workers who were tested with the greenhouse workers. She did not say how many hotel workers have tested positive.
County officials recently asked the state whether the hotels should be considered migrant living quarters and held to those standards under New York State Public Health Law, which also requires a permit for migrant farmworker living quarters.
Most of the 250 migrant workers were brought to town by MAC Contracting, an Indiana labor company that provides farm workers for several large greenhouse farms run by Green Empire’s parent company from Canada, Mastronardi Produce.
The company put up the workers at three hotels — the Super 8 and Days Inn in Madison County and the La Quinta in Verona.
Whaley has no question about where she caught the virus.
“I know I caught the virus there,” she said of the Super 8.
Whaley said she had been sick on and off since March. At first, her doctor told her it was a sinus infection and prescribed antibiotics and steroids, she said. No one suggested a coronavirus test. Whaley is high-risk for complications from the virus: She has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which makes it hard to breathe.
The antibiotics seemed to help some, but the infection nagged at Whaley. She returned to urgent care April 27, she said. She had run a fever the previous week, one of the criteria for getting a coronavirus test in some counties. Two days later she got a phone call that her test was positive.
That day, April 29, was the same day county public health officials heard that local hospitals were seeing a spike in cases from greenhouse workers who lived at the hotels.
Whaley knew some of the risk she was taking when she went to work. But they had bills and a mortgage. She told Harry Patel, her boss and the owner of the hotel, that she was worried.
“I told him I was scared. He said we need the money, you need the job,” Whaley said.
So Whaley did what she could to protect herself.
She said Patel could not get masks for the hotel workers, so she brought her own from home. Patel did supply gloves, she said, which Whaley wore except when changing the sheets. She also brought her own hand sanitizer and disinfecting sprays.
There were signs before April that farmworkers at the hotel were not well. Near the end of March, some workers were moved to different rooms and the doors were covered in plastic wrap, Whaley said.
She said she was told the workers had pneumonia and were quarantined. Patel said this was true.
Patel said he, too, told the migrant contractor, MAC, that he was concerned about having so many men crammed into the rooms with the coronavirus circulating.
He asked them to look elsewhere, but the company could find no other place for the dozens of workers.
In recent weeks, Patel became sick, too.
He tested positive for Covid-19 and was hospitalized, he said. He is still quarantined.
Whaley said the migrant workers told her they were scared. A few spoke English; some used Google Translate to communicate with her.
“Whoever brought them here shouldn’t have had them sleeping like that,” Whaley said.
She said the workers were mostly respectful, but the hotel rooms weren’t made to be lived in by that many people for so long. They cooked on hotplates and often ate at the hotel desks in their rooms, Whaley said.
She said most of the rooms were four men to a room, two to each bed, as county officials have said. There was at least one larger room with five or six men.
Most of the migrant workers were bused out to the greenhouse May 2 for tests.
By then, Lanny Whaley was in the hospital and getting worse.
And Roxanne Whaley could not leave their home in the Madison County countryside. She could not go see the man who’d been by her side since before she was old enough to drive a car or drink a beer.
He’d been hospitalized a few weeks before for pneumonia and been tested for the virus then. He was negative. He came back home, he got better.
He mowed the whole lawn by himself. He was so proud, she and her son said.
Cars were Lanny Whaley’s business and his passion: He ran Rolling Hills Street Rods and Restoration until he retired in 2018. He had a 1934 Ford Coupe that he still took to car shows.
When it was clear Lanny was near the end, the couple’s sons were allowed to see their dad. But not Roxanne because she had the virus.
Her last words to her husband were through a video chat. The boys held up the phone so Roxanne and Lanny could see and hear each other.
Lanny could no longer talk. Roxanne told him she loved him, so much. “I tried to give him comfort,” she said.
Then they said good night. Lanny Whaley died the next morning.
Roxanne is still in quarantine. She’s done with the hotel, she said.
But she worries about the workers, who are now quarantined in the rooms she cleaned on her hands and knees.
Whaley remembered making small talk with a new worker a few weeks ago.
Can I ask you a question? the young worker said. How can they make us sleep together in the bed?
I don’t know, Whaley said she told him. That isn’t up to our boss. It’s your boss. The one that hired you and brought you here.
He told her he was worried he’d get sent home if he spoke up. And he wanted to work.
He asked her: What can I do?
Article Obtained from:
https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus/2020/05/in-scandal-of-green-empire-farms-outbreak-theres-1-death-youve-never-heard-about.html
