This is not 2020’s pandemic.

It’s still COVID. It still puts people in the ICU, and some in caskets, particularly if they have eschewed the vaccines. It’s still an equal-opportunity virus, with some variants easily contracted even by the vaccinated, as pretty much the entire Meatingplace team can attest.

But the dent the current surge has put in the meat supply chain’s production will, in the foreseeable future, be a statistical blip. This isn’t 2020, when Meatingplace tracked the weeks-long closures of plants as they rolled across the country, in some areas more than once. Treating the dominant omicron variant, at this point in time, like the OG COVID virus in the pre-vaccination era is a cynical political exercise.

I roll my eyes, then, at the Canadian press that is churning the news that 44 people at Cargill’s High River plant in Alberta have tested positive for COVID. “Potentially growing COVID-19 outbreak” at the plant, say the context-free headlines, prompted by a release from local union representatives. Yes, the number is likely to grow past 44 but won’t reach nearly the hundreds of employees who were sick there 20 months ago, three of whom died.

Yes, a Cargill spokesman confirmed for Meatingplace that the plant is running at a “slightly reduced” capacity due to worker absences, but in 2020 the plant was shut down for two weeks.

Same story in Sioux Falls: Smithfield has relaxed its vigilance against COVID, the local union head says, amid a “drastic rise in cases,” according to a report in the Argus-Leader newspaper.

“We believe the company can do more in enforcing social distancing and sanitizing. We believe our workers are at risk …,” the local UFCW leader said.

Smithfield has reportedly acknowledged that not all the safeguards put into place in 2020 are still adhered to daily: The union estimates that at least 80 people have contracted the virus at that plant in recent weeks, but that’s still a small fraction of the 3,000 production workers employed there. Of those, the union estimates about 60% are vaccinated. Smithfield doesn’t disclose its workforce vaccination rate, but safe to say the risk just isn’t there to warrant hall monitors enforcing social distancing 24/7.

Meat processing has seen plenty of dark periods in its industrial history; 2020 was one of the darkest. The companies made plenty of mistakes then, and people died; companies also made a lot of changes, investing millions in safer working conditions, and people died. A full accounting of how all the public health, policy, corporate decision-making and human behavior factors came together to create that disaster will be years yet in the making. And a full accounting is absolutely necessary, out of respect for those who died.

But that isn’t now.

I’m not pooh-poohing the effects of the pandemic. It’s still going strong after two years and has fundamentally changed global society. I am scared to death, frankly, of what could be next: An omega variant, perhaps, that takes no prisoners. This isn’t the stuff of dystopian science fiction anymore. But, that also isn’t now.

For the sake of all of the meat supply chain’s many players, we need to stay focused on the now, instead of fighting 2020’s battles over and over again.

Make no mistake: It's 2022

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