At-home coronavirus tests administered

The pilot program will focus on increasing testing among the city’s Latino population

Alarmed with the disproportionate toll that the latest coronavirus surge is taking on Latinos in Santa Clara County, health officials this week launched a pilot program sending Spanish-speaking volunteers door to door to offer at-home coronavirus tests to residents in some of the hardesthit areas of the county.

The county is partnering with two community groups out of East San Jose — Somos Mayfair and META, which stands for Mujeres Empresarias Tomando Acción — to help identify residents who may be infected with the virus and connect them to services and treatment before the disease turns fatal.

A team of community residents, known as promotoras, was trained by the county’s COVID-19 testing officer, Marty Fenstersheib, to hand out coronavirus test kits to residents, oversee them as they self-administer the test and then transport the swabs to a lab to be tested.

Dr. Analilia Garcia of the county’s Public Health Department said the volunteers will play an essential role in overcoming fear in the Latino community about the test and potential positive results, which could put essential workers out of work without a paycheck for weeks. This is especially true for immigrants here illegally who are trying to weather the pandemic without some of the typical safety nets offered to American citizens.

“This is an opportunity to work in partnership with our community residents to not only bring folks tests but then connect them with our COVID support services, like isolation and quarantine, and provide them with rental assistance and food,” she said. “Families are hurting and families need support and working in partnership, we are able to bridge that separation.”

In Santa Clara County, Latino residents now are becoming infected with the virus at more than quadruple the rate of White residents, county data shows. They represent 55.4% of all coronavirus cases reported in Santa Clara County, yet account for only 25.8%

of the population.

And the majority of the county’s hardest-hit zip codes are all within East San Jose, which consists predominantly of Latino residents that long have been poorly served by existing health care systems. East San Jose’s 95122, for instance, has the county’s highest rate of infection with 5,585 cases per 100,000 residents. Meanwhile, Palo Alto’s 94306 ZIP code has a rate of 813 cases per 100,000 residents, according to county data.

As an immigrant here illegally and living in East San Jose, Jacqueline Franco, 26, who helped found META, understands the fears and barriers that keep some of her fellow neighborhoods from traveling to get a coronavirus test. She hopes that the athome tests will help to eliminate those barriers such as transportation, technology, language and appointment availability for her fellow community members.

“I really do think that we are going to make an impact,” Franco said. “I feel confident that having people from the community and who they know live in their neighborhood come to their home and tell them ‘ this is going to happen’ and ‘if you test positive, you are going to be taken care of,’ then people won’t feel like they have to go through this alone,” Franco said.

Franco said the county and her team from META and Somos Mayfair will need to build upon the relationships that they establish through the testing program to help aid a smoother rollout of the coronavirus vaccines once they arrive for the public.

“Once (the vaccine) is available to the community, I think that’s going to be a whole other conversation, a whole other strategy that we’re going to need to figure out,” she said.

At least for the start of the program, the teams of about eight promotoras will go out from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays to deliver the test kits in East San Jose, but Franco said she has plans to try to shift some hours to the weekends to reach more residents.