Covid-19 pandemic spread across the United States, officials including the sheriff in Black Hawk County, Iowa criticized Tyson Foods on April 17, 2020, for failing to close a Waterloo, Iowa plant where an outbreak of the disease began. Tyson closed the Waterloo plant on April 22. According to an Associated Press report, the company said the shutdown "would deny a vital market to hog farmers and further disrupt the nation's meat supply". Steve Stouffer, president of the fresh meats division at Tyson Foods, expressed some resistance to universal testing of their workers. "Everybody wants to test meatpacking employees, but nobody is testing the communities around them to show what’s the baseline," Stouffer said, adding "And until we know the baselines, my question has always been: Are we the cause or are we just the victim of our surroundings?" On April 21, Tyson announced the closure of a plant in Center, Texas, which is located in Shelby County, a rural area with a rate of coronavirus infections about four times higher than the state average. A local physician reported that over half of the county's cases were associated with employees of the Tyson facility. On April 22, Tyson announced the closure of a pork processing plant in Logansport, Indiana. The president of the Indiana Farm Bureau said that the organization is "extremely concerned about the closure of the Tyson pork processing facility. This is a devastating blow to the pork producers who sell hogs to Tyson." On April 23, Tyson announced that a beef processing plant in Wallula, Washington was closing. Tyson executive Steve Stouffer said, "Unfortunately, the closure will mean reduced food supplies and presents problems to farmers who have no place to take their livestock. It’s a complicated situation across the supply chain. On April 26, John Tyson, chairman of the board, wrote in the New York Times that "The food supply chain is breaking...There will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we are able to reopen our facilities that are currently closed." In June 2020, ProPublica reported that well after outbreaks had occurred, Tyson did not implement recommended safety measures to protect its workers, such as physical distancing, plexiglass barriers, and wearing of face masks. On June 21, the government of China announced that it was suspending imports of chicken from a Tyson factory. The company confirmed that the affected facility was its