Outbreak ravaging Hispanic community
DINUBA, Calif. — When the coronavirus first spread to the fields and food processing factories of California’s Central Valley, Graciela Ramirez’s boss announced that line workers afraid of infection could stay home without pay.
A machine operator at Ruiz Foods, the nation’s largest manufacturer of frozen burritos, Ramirez stayed on the job to make sure she didn’t lose her $750-a-week wages.
“I have necessities,” Ramirez, a 40-year-old mother of four, said in Spanish. “My food, my rent, my bills.”
Soon her co-workers started to get sick, and when Ramirez became congested and fatigued and couldn’t smell the difference between the rice on her stove and the sopa de fideo in her soup bowl, her test, too, came back positive.
It was a variation on what has become a grim demographic theme. Infections among Latinos have far outpaced the rest of the nation, a testament to the makeup of the nation’s essential workforce as the American epidemic has surged yet again in the past couple of weeks.
Latinos in the United States are hardly a cultural monolith, and there is no evidence yet that any ethnic group is inherently more vulnerable to the virus than others. But in the past two weeks, counties across the country where at least a quarter of the population is Latino have recorded a 32% increase in new cases, compared with a 15% increase for all other counties, a Times analysis shows.
The analysis affirms broad national tallies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which show Latinos making up 34% of cases nationwide, a much higher proportion than the group’s 18% share of the population.
The disparity is particularly stark in populous states such as
Texas, California and Florida. But it also has sprung up elsewhere.
In North Carolina, Latinos make up 10% of the population but 46% of infections. In Wisconsin, they’re 7% of the population and 33% of cases.
In Yakima County, Washington, the site of the state’s worst outbreak, half of the residents are Latino. In Santa Cruz County, which has Arizona’s highest rate of cases, the Hispanic share of the population is 84%.
Detailed coronavirus data broken down by ethnicity is incomplete in many places, making it difficult to know why Latinos have been infected at higher rates.
Counties with a high proportion of Latinos also tend to have attributes that have made them vulnerable to the recent surge: crowded households, younger populations and hotter weather that drives people indoors, said Jed Kolko, a researcher and chief economist at Indeed.com, a job search website.
Contact tracers in some areas also have associated spikes in infection with large family gatherings.
But the inexorable rise since Easter in infections among Latinos — both here and in Latin American countries — has alarmed health officials and Latino organizations, who are calling for more targeted testing, more comprehensive data collection and better workplace protections as the economy reopens.
And it has become a political flashpoint in red states, where infections also are rising. Latino Democratic and civil rights leaders demanded an apology this week from Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, who attributed the steep increase in positive COVID-19 tests in his state to “overwhelmingly Hispanic farmworkers.”
DeSantis’ critics say his administration is scapegoating immigrant workers after ignoring pleas on their behalf for more testing and protection.
In California, where Latinos make up 39% of the population and nearly 57% of new cases, the spikes have been particularly confounding. The state was the nation’s first to shelter in place, and cellphone data indicated that its residents were among the most committed to limiting their movement, and with it the spread of the disease.
Infection rates have remained relatively low in affluent neighborhoods, including those occupied by the state’s wealthy Latinos.
But sheltering in place never happened for many Latino families with members who work in industries that never shut down, making them especially vulnerable to the virus.
During the lockdown, millions of Latino workers kept a barebones economy running: at the cutting tables of food-processing plants, as farmhands, hospital orderlies, food preparers and supermarket workers and in many other jobs deemed essential. And they brought the virus home to often cramped living quarters, compounding the spread.
“This was totally a blind spot,” said Dr. Alicia Fernandez, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who specializes in Latino and immigrant health. “Much, much more needs to be done in workplace protection.”