By STEPHEN GROVES

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — Kulule Amosa’s husband earns $17.70 an hour at a South Dakota pork plant doing a job so physically demanding it can only be performed in 30-minute increments. After each shift last week, he left exhausted as usual — but he didn’t want to go home.

He was scared he would infect his pregnant wife with the coronavirus — so much so that when he pulled into the parking lot of their apartment building, he would call Amosa to tell her he wasn’t coming inside. When he eventually did, he would sleep separately from her in their two-bedroom apartment.

“I’m really, really scared and worried,” Amosa said Monday.

This was no abstract worry: At the Smithfield Foods plant, the locker rooms were so tightly packed Amosa’s husband told her he sometimes had to push his way through a crowd. Coughs echoed through the bathrooms. The plant in Sioux Falls clocked so many cases that it was forced to close this week. It has reported 518 infections in employees and another 126 in people connected to them as of Wednesday, making it among the largest known clusters in the United States. A 64-year-old employee who contracted COVID-19 died Tuesday, according to his pastor.

The concentration of cases has highlighted the particular susceptibility of meat processing workers, who stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the line and congregate in crowded locker rooms and cafeterias. As many as half a dozen plants have shut because of outbreaks. Because the workers who slaughter and pack the nation’s meat are vulnerable, so, too, is the supply of that meat. Smithfield CEO Kenneth Sullivan said the closure of the plant, which produces roughly 5% of the U.S. pork supply each day, was “pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply.”

Amosa and her husband, who are originally from Ethiopia, once saw working at the plant, where she also had a job until she became pregnant, as key to building their new life in the United States: It was well paid, union employment that gave them a community. But amid the coronavirus pandemic, the couple found themselves — like many workers whose jobs cannot be done remotely — exposed on two fronts: Both their health and their livelihoods were at risk. The couple agreed to speak to The Associated Press on the condition that Amosa’s husband not be named because he feared losing his job.

The plant is vital to a burgeoning immigrant community in Sioux Falls, offering opportunities for even those without a college degree or fluent English. Smithfield offers pay starting at over $15 an hour, health insurance and plenty of overtime.

The plant has attracted a diversifying workforce to the city, where Somali and Vietnamese restaurants have joined diners and craft breweries. But the city remains fairly divided, with many immigrants living in neighborhoods near the plant, which employs 3,700 people in a city of about 180,000.

The outbreak at the plant has also presented a significant test to a governor who has resisted issuing sweeping stay-at-home orders. As Republican Gov. Kristi Noem was pressed again this week to impose tighter restrictions on Sioux Falls, her response instead was to announce that the state would give wide access to an anti-malarial drug championed by President Donald Trump as a promising treatment for COVID-19, but that has yet to be proven effective.

Noem has fired back, arguing that plant workers were deemed essential and would have been reporting for duty regardless.

For most people, the new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms, but, for some, especially the elderly or infirm, it can cause severe illness and lead to death.

Even before the coronavirus began sickening workers, jobs in the meatpacking industry have been considered among the most dangerous in the U.S. Workers are exposed to a long list of dangers from hazardous chemicals to sharp knives. Just last month, a maintenance worker at a Tyson Fresh Meats plant in Kansas died after investigators say he got caught up in the assembly line belt.

The work is physical, starting with butchering hogs that weigh nearly 300 pounds (135 kilograms). On the processing line, repetitive-motion injuries are common. One worker at Smithfield described often waking up with his right hand so swollen he couldn’t make a fist.

Union leaders and immigrant advocates cheered the decision to close the plant indefinitely but wish more had been done sooner.

Smithfield spokeswoman Keira Lombardo said difficulty in getting masks and thermal scanners led to delays in implementing some safety measures when the plant was open. But she said last week the plant was adding extra hand-sanitizing stations, scanning employees’ temperatures before they entered and installing Plexiglas barriers in some areas.

Six current employees interviewed by the AP who, like Amosa’s husband, insisted on anonymity because they feared they would be fired described far more haphazard measures. They said they were given flimsy masks made of hairnet-like material, hand-washing stations were in disrepair, and there was pressure to keep working even if they felt sick.

One employee told his supervisor on March 30 that he had a fever the previous day, but he was told to report to work and not to tell anyone about the fever. He worked that day, missed the next two and returned when the fever broke, he said.

“No one asked if I went to the doctor, if I was tested,” the employee said.

Lombardo said Smithfield “fully rejects any claims that employees were pressured to report to work,” calling it “completely counterproductive” to do so.

Smithfield has said it plans to clean the plant and implement more protections in the hopes of reopening. The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control sent a team to the plant this week to examine how it can be safely restarted.

But that may be difficult. Workers say they cannot fathom how butchering lines could be reconfigured to accommodate social distancing.

Meanwhile, Amosa and her husband are both home now — nervously awaiting their first child. But they also have a new worry: His coronavirus test came back positive Tuesday.

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Associated Press writer Amy Forliti in Minneapolis, Minnesota, contributed to this report.

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER and ANNE D’INNOCENZIO

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. retail sales plummeted 8.7% in March, an unprecedented decline, as the viral outbreak forced an almost complete lockdown of commerce nationwide.

The deterioration of sales far outpaced the previous record decline of 3.9% that took place during the depths of the Great Recession in November 2008.

Auto sales dropped 25.6%, while clothing store sales collapsed, sliding 50.5%, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Restaurants and bars reported a nearly 27% fall in revenue.

U.S. consumer confidence has plunged and the vast majority of Americans are hunkered down at home under shelter-in-place orders. Consumer spending drives two-thirds of the U.S. economy, and the record drop in retail sales is a symptom of the sharp recession that most economists believe the U.S. has already entered. Economists at JPMorgan Chase now forecast the U.S. economy will shrink by a record-shattering 40% in the April-June quarter.

“With clear signs of panic buying of necessities and the fact that lock downs were introduced only around the middle of the month means that far worse is to come in April and the second quarter more generally,” said Michael Pearce, an economist at Capital Economics, a consulting firm.

Signifying the titanic shift in consumer behavior, grocery store sales jumped by nearly 26% as Americans stocked up on food and consumer goods to ride out the pandemic. And a category that mostly includes online shopping rose 3.1%.

Spending may be falling at an even faster pace than the retail sales figures suggest. Wednesday’s report doesn’t include spending on services such as hotel stays, airline tickets, or movie theaters, all of them suffering some of the most severe financial duress during the outbreak.

The toll of the devastation is being unearthed as the U.S. releases more data from different sectors of the economy. On Wednesday, the U.S. reported that industrial production, which includes manufacturing, mines and utilities, posted the biggest drop in March since 1946.

The pullback in spending is intensifying the problems facing brick and mortar retailers which were already struggling with online competition.

With a nationwide shutdown of malls and most stores, the pandemic is putting many clothing retailers in peril, while increasing the dominance of big box stores that have remained open during the pandemic because they sell essentials like food and household goods.

More than 250,000 stores, including Macy’s, Nordstrom and Nike, which sell non-essential merchandise have been shuttered since mid-March. That’s 60% of overall U.S. retail square footage, according to Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalRetail Research

Major retailers including J.C. Penney, Macy’s and Nordstrom have furloughed hundreds of thousands of workers, while Walmart and Amazon are on hiring sprees to try to meet the surging demand of shoppers buying online or for curbside drop-off or delivery.

Department stores and mall-based chains have cut executive pay, suspended cash dividends and stock buybacks or repurchases to preserve cash. They’re also drawing down their credit lines to make sure they have a bigger pile of cash on hand.

Nordstrom warned last week that it doesn’t know when it will be able to reopen its physical stores and that prolonged closures could cause it to become financially distressed. Ralph Lauren and Gap Inc. have announced that, for now, they’ve stopped ordering products for the fall. Other retailers will likely follow.

Discretionary spending by shoppers is expected to collapse 40%-50% in the first-half 2020, according to Fitch Ratings. And department stores lead a group of consumer companies that have seen their odds of default spike over the past month, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.