Few farmworkers isolate in free hotel rooms
In the first days of August, Fresno farmworker Brenda Yamileth, lined up for a COVID-19 test alongside her mother and brother. Feverish and headachy, she held her 10-month- old daughter. Soon, all four tested positive.
She quarantined with her baby in one bedroom of her Mendota house while her husband and 2½-yearold son slept in the other. Daughter Michelle cried nonstop, and Yamileth worried for the baby’s health. At the same time, she feared infecting her husband and son, steps away. Her husband developed a cough as she quarantined, but never got a test.
Quarantining at home wa sn’t sa fe, Yamileth thought: “Creo que no era sana.”
The virus has continued to wreak havoc on her life, resulting in a stroke months later.
Weeks after she was first diagnosed, Fresno County launched Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Housing for the Harvest, a program designed for farmworkers such as Yamileth, who could not isolate or quarantine safely at home. The program provides hotel rooms to infected or exposed farmworkers, and if it had been ready, Yamileth said, she would have taken it.
A joint investigation by the Documenting COVID-19 project at the Brown Institute, CalMatters and The Salinas Californian reveals just around 80 of the state’s over 800,000 farmworkers have quarantined or isolated in hotel rooms for agricultural workers since the program was announced in July.
In interviews with nearly 20 farmworkers, advocates and administrators, as well as a review of internal county emails obtained through record requests, reporters found a potent cocktail of fear, testing barriers and miscalculations have hobbled the statewide hotel isolation and quarantine program even as the virus spreads faster in California’s vast farmworker population than in the general public.
In that time, over 16,500 California farmworkers have fallen ill from COVID-19, according to estimates by Purdue University.
‘Everything about it is a barrier’
Newsom a n nou nc ed Housing for the Harvest on July 24, calling for an “abundant mindset” to help these essential workers.
The governor was inspired by a relatively successful program that the Grower- Shipper Association of Central California mounted in Monterey County in April which has temporarily housed 401 farmworkers and their dependents. It expanded to Yuma, Ariz. and the Imperial Valley in early November, housing another 50 between the two new sites.
It “likely limited the potential for large, cluster outbreaks,” said the association’s president, Chris Valadez, who cited the program’s lack of barriers as reason for its comparatively high number of guests.
Grower- Shipper’s program was spurred by dire conditions among the region’s farmworkers, many of whom live in overcrowded homes. Internal Monterey County emails from June showed workers didn’t have enough space to isolate and quarantine and some faced threat of eviction from their landlords. In a recent study of Salinas Valley farmworkers, 43% of respondents said they had nowhere to isolate and one in five had contracted COVID-19 at some point, per antibody tests.
The need seemed self-evident across the state, too. About four in 10 Californians who live with an agricultural or food processing worker also live in an overcrowded home — defined as having more people than rooms — according to a CalMatters analysis of census data.
But the farmworking community has largely declined to use the state-sponsored housing. According to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, 81 rooms have been booked as of Dec. 16 across 12 counties. The program launched in San Luis Obispo County as well, but has not yet seen any guests. Reservation totals may be higher than the actual number of guests, though, as counties say some cancelled.
T he state has spent around $75,000 as of Dec. 4, of which the federal government will reimburse 75% — on hotel reservations, while local governments cover food, protective equipment and staff training.
County and state officials, as well as advocates, say farmworkers fear the hotel rooms open them up to job loss, deportation, problems with citizenship or residency cases, even the fear of battling a deadly disease alone.
Santa Barbara County’s Agricultural Commissioner Cathy Fisher was optimistic at the outset. In an August email to the county’s public health director, she wrote, “I think the program is going to be popular,” after attending a meeting in which state officials said they were in talks with six hotels in the county.
By late November, one in eight, or 1,300, of the county’s COVID-19 cases were agriculture workers, but Housing for the Harvest has made just 12 hotel reservations.
“Everything about it is a barrier,” said Lisa Valencia Sherratt, Santa Barbara’s Housing for the Harvest coordinator. It takes time to build a government-funded program that is culturally competent, she said.
Still, Housing for the Har vest organizers say farmworkers are flocking to call centers, financial assistance and in-home isolation resources that counties and nonprofits have quickly scaffolded around the self-quarantining program, on their own dime.
María Reyes, a Mendota farmworker is currently isolating after testing positive in the one-room home she shares with her 16-year-old daughter.
She called Housing for the Harvest after seeing a television ad that promised help with rent and food. She was desperate: too sick to work, and unable to pay her bills or buy food.
She resisted taking a hotel room, though, worried about leaving her daughter, who tested negative, behind. She didn’t know that in some cases, Housing for the Harvest allows farmworkers to bring their dependents.
Around the program’s launch, one Fresno administrator predicted their county’s program would host at least 1,000 farmworkers in their hotel rooms. Instead, 15 have made reservations.
“What comes to mind to a lot of people is family separation,” said Fernando Serrano, who runs a food pantry for farmworkers in Tulare County. The county has tracked more than 1,500 cases since July and 40 deaths among agricultural workers since the start of the pandemic, but has only made 18 reservations through Housing for the Harvest. Serrano initially thought the program could help, but soon noticed every time he told families about the state-funded hotel rooms, “it was like a red light in their head.”
Eleven days later, Reyes was still waiting for the promised $250 and groceries and no one had returned her calls, she said, her sentences broken by coughs. To make matters worse, her landlord had begun to press her for December’s rent.
A spokesperson for the Fresno organization that administers the hotel rooms said they refer people who decline hotels to another organization, which should contact them within 72 hours. It’s not clear if Reyes qualified.
Even as the program has fallen short so far of providing farmworkers a safe place to isolate at scale, officials say that hotel stays are increasing, more than tripling over the last six weeks.
“This is about serving the needs of the individual, not about getting big, high numbers in a hotel room,” said CDFA Undersecretary Jenny Lester Moffitt.
For some, a hotel room is a lifeline.
In early November, 19-year-old Coachella Valley farmworker Fernando Perez isolated in his Chevrolet truck after he was diagnosed with COVID-19, rather than risk infecting his parents.
For four days he parked the truck in different places, far from people. His family would leave broth and other food for him outside the vehicle; he retrieved it once they’d left. He slept, uncomfortably, in the cab.
“Estuvo feo,” he said of the experience. In English, it was awful. Soon, Perez enrolled in Housing for the Harvest.
To date, he’s the only person to isolate in Housing for the Harvest’s Riverside hotel. Program staff brought him three meals a day and a $2,000 check to cover lost wages.
Johns Hopkins Public Health Associate Professor Dr. Stefan Baral lauded California for providing the rooms given that crowded housing is “probably your best global predictor of COVID” transmission. But Baral, who has studied crowded housing and COVID-19 among Latinos, counseled that the success of the program going forward depended on administrators consulting farmworkers to improve its design.
‘It comes down to trust’ Housing for the Harvest requires farmworkers test positive or have a physician’s referral, required to get federal reimbursement for the hotel rooms. Those turn out to be formidable barriers.
“This is about serving the needs of the individual, not about getting big, high numbers in a hotel room.” — CDFA Undersecretary Jenny Lester Moffitt