California’s farmworkers have been hit hard by COVID- 19

Farmworkers will be vaccinated after health care workers and seniors living in nursing homes

Low wages, fear of deportation, and crowded living and working conditions all contribute to high rates of COVID- 19 infection among California’s farmworkers, according to a study by researchers at UC Berkeley, which is the first to look at the risk factors for, and prevalence of, COVID- 19 in farmworker communities.

The information could affect treatment programs in Yolo County, where a percentage of the population are Latino. Yolo County’s dashboard, which shows who is infected with the disease, indicates that 40.04% are Latino, even though the ethnicity of the county overall is 30.47% Latino.

This means a greater number of Latinos than those of other ethnicities have contracted the disease. Yolo County health officials have identified farmworkers as being in the next round of people to be vaccinated after health care workers and those who reside and work in assistedliving centers, which have also seen large numbers of people infected.

As of Monday night, there were 6,267 people who had contracted the virus with 4,338 recovering countywide. There have been 89 deaths and currently, 34 people are in Yolo hospitals.

Many farmworkers who plant and harvest our food are forced to live and work under conditions that are ripe for transmission of COVID- 19. During the summer harvest season, coronavirus outbreaks popped up across the nation among farmworkers in agricultural communities, including many in California.

In a white paper published online, public health researchers at UC Berkeley, detail preliminary findings from the first long- term study on the prevalence of, and the risk factors for, COVID- 19 infection among California’s agricultural laborers.

The paper reports that between mid- July and November

2020, 13% of the 1,091 Salinas Valley farmworkers enrolled in the study tested positive for SARS- CoV- 2, the virus that causes COVID- 19. In California as a whole, only 5% of the population has tested positive between the beginning of the pandemic and late November.

By the end of October, roughly 20% of farmworkers recruited for the study tested positive for antibodies to COVID- 19, indicating prior infection. These figures are far higher than estimates of approximately 1% in the San Francisco Bay Area population at large from studies led by the Centers for Disease Control and by other UC Berkeley researchers during the spring and summer.

“These findings validate concerns from researchers, public health professionals and community advocates that farmworkers would suffer from the COVID- 19 pandemic in California,” said Joseph Lewnard, assistant professor of epidemiology at UC Berkeley and a member of the study team. “We have failed to protect this population, while they have continued to engage in essential work through the pandemic.”

California’s Salinas Valley, known as “America’s Salad Bowl,” is home to more than 50,000 farmworkers, many of whom are Mexican immigrants and undocumented. Low wages and food insecurity make many fearful of missing work when they are sick, and fear of deportation may also deter them from seeking health care. The community also faces higher rates of medical conditions like obesity, hypertension and diabetes that can make COVID- 19 infections worse.

Most farmworkers who become sick with COVID19 are entitled to replacement income and emergency housing, where they can safely quarantine. However, some farmworkers also reported not receiving information about these resources from employers. And while a Monterey County Agricultural

Advisory encourages growers to screen employees for symptoms, many study participants indicated that their employers did not have any such screening in place.

“It seems that employers are providing a lot of information about COVID19 and are providing face coverings to farmworkers who don’t have them,” Mora said. “But while the guidelines recommend that they perform temperature checks and ask for symptoms when people arrive to work, most employers are not doing that.”

Language barriers may also have prevented many farmworkers from taking advantage of these resources. Those who tested positive are more likely to speak Indigenous languages, rather than Spanish or English.

The study was funded by the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley and Clinica de Salud del Valle de Salinas.

“These findings validate concerns from researchers, public health professionals and community advocates that farmworkers would suffer from the COVID- 19 pandemic in California.” — Joseph Lewnard, assistant professor of epidemiology at UC Berkeley