Virus symptoms soar for Latinos

In Wake Forest, North Carolina, a town of about 40,000 near Raleigh, a sweeping national survey of COVID-19 symptoms exposed a staggering ethnic divide.

Nearly two-thirds of Wake Forest’s Hispanic homes surveyed reported suffering the combination of symptoms most closely tied to the coronavirus, compared with less than 1% of everyone else.

The survey by a marketing research company is believed to be the largest measurement of symptoms of the virus. Since March, 1.6 million people have answered the basic question: Is anyone in your home experiencing symptoms ranging from a dry cough to difficulty breathing?

Across the nation, Hispanic households said yes to symptoms of COVID-19 – the lung disease caused by the virus – nearly a third more often than others, a USA TODAY analysis found.

When the list of symptoms is narrowed to what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently identified as the most serious pairs of ailments – dry cough and difficulty breathing, or fever and loss of taste or smell – the differences were far starker: Hispanics experienced them almost twice as often.

Overall, 1 in 12 Hispanic households said someone at home experienced those combinations at least once from late March to late May, compared with 1 in 21 non-Hispanic households.

Those findings made sense to Clarissa Martínez de Castro, deputy vice president of the nation’s largest Latino nonprofit advocacy group, UnidosUS.

“Data is now emerging that matches the reality that we’re seeing,” Martínez de Castro said. “There are lots of factors at play, but among the biggest is the overrepresentation of Latinos in frontline jobs that don’t allow working from home.”

The gap between Hispanics and the rest of the population is even wider in the symptoms data than in confirmed coronavirus case counts across 33 states that break down their tallies by race and ethnicity, USA TODAY’s analysis found.

That was true in the Wake Forest area, too, where the proportion of Hispanics reporting symptoms far exceeds their showing in coronavirus case counts both locally and statewide. Roughly a 10th of Wake County and North Carolina residents are Hispanic, but they account for a quarter of cases in the county and a third of cases across the state, according to Wake County spokeswoman Leah Holdren.

The grim picture “has only magnified health inequities that we have been aware of for a long time,” said Jose Cabanas, Wake County’s director of emergency medical services.

“When I meet with patients in our community, it’s clear that their jobs make it difficult for them to socialdistance,” Cabanas said. “Add to that a language barrier, the need to provide shelter for large families and it ends up being hard to follow official recommendations.”

As the pandemic progresses, evidence is mounting that the virus has hit people of color the hardest for reasons ranging from chronic health problems to service sector jobs. The symptoms survey, however, offers a unique window into the hidden prevalence of COVID-19, public health experts said.

USA TODAY analyzed the responses, through an agreement that kept names private, from a COVID-19 Symptom Map created by Dynata, an international data and market research company. Dynata said the goal is to leverage the company’s strength – the reach of 62 million consumers worldwide recruited to respond to its surveys – to help “solve the biggest challenge of our time.”

The symptoms data may offer a completer picture of the virus’s true toll, said Daniel Lòpez-Cevallos, associate professor of Latino/a/x Studies, Ethnic Studies and Health Equity Studies at Oregon State University.

The gap between symptoms reported and cases, he said, suggests Latinos may be less likely to seek testing for reasons that include mistrust in health care systems. In Latino homes where some family members are undocumented, add to that a fear of being reported to and monitored by government agencies.

“We have already seen that the consequence of all these barriers is delaying care until it is absolutely necessary,” Lòpez-Cevallos said.

The plight of Latinos in the U.S. needs to be addressed if only because it is inextricably linked to the fate of the nation as a whole, says Priscilla González, campaigns director at Mijente, a national social justice organization.

“If the world wants a full recovery, we need relief for communities that are hardest hit,” González said.