Latino teens hit by COVID-19
Dailen Rios said her family took every precaution, but the novel coronavirus hit them.
She, her husband and a nephew tested positive for COVID-19, but she was especially worried about her son because he suffers from asthma. Alejandro Gonzalez, 18, came down with symptoms on Aug. 11 or 12, his mother said. He had a bad headache, body aches, a cough and diarrhea.
“Thank God he didn’t have to go to the hospital,” Rios said.
She and her family, who are from Cuba, have been in Houston five years.
Her son is in a group that appears to be getting infected by the coronavirus more frequently.
Data emerging about two groups coming down with COVID-19 has led Dr. Paul Klotman, the president of Baylor College of Medicine, to be concerned about Hispanic teens.
COVID-19 is continuing to infect a younger population, with recent data suggesting more Houston-area teenagers are testing positive for the disease. At the same time, COVID-19 cases among Hispanics of all ages increased 14 percent.
The knowledge and perception of COVID-19 have evolved dramatically over the course of
“There are certainly some young people who will have very serious consequences from this, including death.”
Dr. Rob Phillips, chief physician executive at Houston Methodist
this year. Initially, COVID-19 was thought to predominantly affect an older population. As cases became more evenly distributed across age groups, reports began to show how it disproportionately affected people of color.
And now, data is suggesting an uptick in cases among children and teenagers.
In data for the nine-county Houston area, COVID-19 cases among all people under 20 years old increased 34 percent between April 30 and early August. Most of those cases were in people 15 to 20 years old, said Klotman, citing information that he said came from Eric Boerwinkle, dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health (Boerwinkle declined to provide the raw data, saying it came from Harris County and the Texas Medical Center and that he did not have permission to share it).
But the trend of young people getting COVID-19 isn’t just happening in Houston. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, new child cases increased 21 percent (adding 74,160 cases) between Aug. 6 and Aug. 20.
More than 442,000 children have tested positive for the disease since the pandemic began, though mortality remains low. In the 45 states (and New York City) that reported mortality by age, no more than 0.7 percent of children with COVID-19 have died since the pandemic began.
In Houston and Harris County, there have been more than 9,200 confirmed cases among those 10 to 19 years old. Four people have died, according to a Harris County Public Health and Houston Health Department dashboard.
With teenagers seeing the biggest percentage increase for age and Hispanics seeing the largest increase for race and ethnicity, public health specialists say the trend of more Hispanic teens coming down with COVID-19 has emerged.
Klotman of Baylor said there might be gatherings of young Latinos where the disease is spreading.
“If it was just families, you think it’d be all age groups,” he said.
More movement, more cases
Nationwide, children who are hospitalized are more likely to be Hispanic or Black. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, of 526 children hospitalized between March 1 and July 25 (for whom race and ethnicity were reported), 46 percent were Hispanic, 30 percent were Black and 14 percent were white.
“This is a virus that we’re still learning about. It affects many different parts of the body: blood vessels, lung, kidney, brain,” said Dr. Rob Phillips, chief physician executive at Houston Methodist. “People can respond to it differently. And what we’re seeing is that there are certainly some young people who will have very serious consequences from this, including death.”
In a paper published online with the JAMA medical journal, Houston Methodist noted the second COVID-19 surge had an overall younger age demographic admitted to its eight Houston-area hospitals.
During the first surge, which the paper identified as March 13 to May 15, Houston Methodist noted that 27 percent of its COVID-19 patients were 50 or younger. During the second surge, May 16 to July 7, that demographic increased to 35 percent of patients.
“We had a definite shift from the first surge where we had a lot more people who were over the age of 60, and now it got much more evenly distributed,” Phillips said.
He speculated that during the first surge Houstonians were more locked down and not leaving their homes, but the older demographic was still vulnerable and therefore admitted to the hospital.
During the second surge, he said younger people may have ventured out more while the older demographics opted to stay home. The JAMA paper also reported an increase in Hispanic people being hospitalized. During the first surge, 26 percent of COVID-19 patients in Houston Methodist hospitals were Hispanic. That increased to 43 percent during the second surge.
“The virus does not spare any community,” Phillips said. “And for reasons which I don’t think we really completely understand, the Hispanic community now is having a higher rate. It’s possible that they’re in jobs in which they are not as able as others to social distance.”
Messaging the community
Porfirio Villarreal, public information officer for the Houston Health Department, also noted that more Hispanic people could have essential worker jobs in retail, food service or construction. These are jobs they can’t do from home.
They might also have two jobs, and they may live in dense apartment complexes that make social distancing difficult. Chronic illness and pre-existing conditions might contribute, too. Rios said her family took stringent measures to try to avoid getting sick, but she and her husband both have to work outside the home in jobs with contact with others and believe they must have caught it somehow at work.
“We are waiting to get negative tests so we can go back to work,” she said. She said she’s grateful they could get free testing and none of them had to go to the hospital.
Villarreal said the Health Department began noticing the greater impact of COVID-19 on the Hispanic community in May, and it launched the “Todos Juntos. Mejor.” (Better Together) educational campaign on July 6 — three weeks before launching the broader, English-language Better Together campaign.
Through its Spanish-language campaign, the department hired a marketing firm to develop a toolkit for community leaders, increase COVID-19 health segments in local Spanish news media outlets and distribute key prevention messages using social media advertising and local Hispanic social media influencers. It also emphasized that the city-affiliated COVID-19 testing sites would be free. They would not require health insurance, and they would not ask about immigration status.
“The most important thing we will ask when you go get tested is the phone number,” Villarreal said. “The phone number will allow for people to receive their test results.”
At the county, state Rep. Armando Walle, the Harris County COVID-19 recovery czar, said efforts to reach Hispanic communities have included passing out masks and information at popular flea markets, setting up COVID-19 testing sites at churches and hiring a bilingual staff to go into communities and talk to people.
He sits on phone calls with health care experts and, like Klotman with Baylor, has heard public health experts mention an uptick in Hispanic teenagers (and even preteens) who have contracted COVID-19.
“We need to get the message to them,” Klotman said. “They’re a real important part of the community. They can help us by being careful: mask-wearing, keeping groups down to less than 10, not having big social events.”