Oakland clinic offers Mayan interpreter for COVID-19 vaccinations.
La Clínica de La Raza is targeting Latin Mam community for vaccinations
OAyLANc >> A new COVID-19 vaccination clinic in the Fruitvale neighborhood offers interpreter services for the Latin Mam or Mayan-speaking community.
This month, La Clínica de La Raza began offering the community-targeted vaccination service at 32 locations across the Bay Area, including Ascend Elementary School on East 12th Street, where Latinos who speak Mam, K’iche and Q’eqchi’ can get translation help from appointment to inoculation on Thursdays.
There are over 22 Mam dialects spoken primarily by people of Guatemalan and Mexican descent. According to a recent UC San Francisco study, Mayan people with Guatemalan roots are the fastest-growing ethnic group in Oakland.
“I’m here to support my community, getting them the service that they deserve,” Brenda Sucely Perez, the on-site interpreter at Ascend, said last week while about 450 eligible people were vaccinated.
Staffers at the Fruitvale site have administered roughly 2,000 Moderna vaccines per week since opening March 4, according to La Clínica officials.
Salvador Garcia, an Oakland firefighter, volunteered at the vaccination clinic.
“Coming to get the vaccination is a good thing because it would help prevent the spread,” Garcia said, adding that it’s es
pecially important given how close relatives in the Latino community live.
“When you’re around people in such tight quarters
around here, the way the families live with each other, it’s just good to have the preventative measure of the vaccination.”
It’s also one of the reasons the nation’s first and strictest stay-at-home orders proved ill suited for the hard-hit Latino community,
a four-month Bay Area News Group investigation found. That analysis showed COVID-19 case rates for the region’s Latino residents are nearly four times higher than for White residents, and the Latino population has fared worse against the virus across California.
During the fall surge, economic pressure to keep working outside the home became another major factor in the Latino community’s higher COVID-19 positivity rate in the Fruitvale neighborhood than the rest of the state, according to a
UCSF study conducted in September.
The results of that study found that antibody-positive prevalence was 9.8% overall among people who live and work in Fruitvale, a predominantly Latino neighborhood. The number spiked to 26.8% among the Latin Mam, or Mayan-speaking, community, USCF researchers noted. The COVID-19-antibody test shows that someone once had coronavirus.