San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Workers who live the demographic nightmare of COVID
At the onset of the pandemic, my mom made the initial decision to leave her job because of her health issues and the high-risk environment of the nursing home where she works.
COVID-19 has ravaged through nursing homes around the country. Early fatalities from
COVID-19 were reported from a nursing home in Washington, just as a nursing home was an early COVID-19 hot spot in San Antonio. As of early January, more than 133,000 residents and employees of nursing homes and long-term care facilities across the nation had died from COVID-19.
My mother earns about $11 per hour. As a minimum wage worker, she was no longer able to “stay home.” She returned to work at a nursing home a little more than a month ago, and two weeks ago she became ill with COVID-19 after two residents and multiple employees became sick.
Hers is the story of many other Latinos who make up the bulk of workers in some of the more high-risk occupations and, in turn, the mortality burden that Latinos and Latinas across the country have carried due to COVID-19.
Shortly after my mom became infected with COVID-19, my father did as well. My father cleans offices and buildings.
This month, my father-in-law, who works at a meat market, was also diagnosed with COVID-19.
Structural factors explain why Latina and Latino populations (particularly, monolingual Spanish speakers) are at higher risk for COVID-19 infection. Such factors include occupational risks. Latinos, along with Black and Native American workers, hold more than 50 percent of the in-person jobs deemed essential and nonessential, compared with 41 percent for whites. Think custodians, nursing home attendants, warehouse workers, food service workers, retail workers and child care workers.
Other factors that have been highlighted by researchers in recent months — but have been known by our community for far longer — include lack of health insurance at higher rates, lack of access to healthy foods and multigenerational households. Multigenerational households with members who work in higher-risk occupations increase the risk of transmission within families.
As of December, Latinos in Texas made up 53 percent of all COVID-19 deaths but only 39.7 percent of the state’s population. The stratified impact of the pandemic is indicative of what we already knew about our
institutions: They continue to be exclusionary.
In 2017, Latinos made up 17 percent of the labor force but only 4.3 percent of executive positions. For communities of color, workforce barriers exist. For starters is the economicbased structure of public education systems and the influence that plays on educational attainment.
Another barrier is lack of access to health care and health insurance. Texas leads the nation in the uninsured. This proved problematic as the pandemic worsened and getting tested or seeing a doctor became a financial decision, not a medical one.
When my brother, his wife and their children got sick, I began to think about how I was living all the demographic research I had been reading. Another brother, a licensed vocational nurse, had become infected early in the pandemic. Staying home was not an option for some of my family members, and it is not an option for many other Latinos and Blacks working in essential and nonessential jobs that put them at high risk of exposure.
“I can’t stop working,” is what my mom said to me when she got sick. “We need help.”
Congress’ battle for more stimulus and the resistance from some of its members left struggling families with no choice but to continue to work — sick or not — to survive.
What does the heavy mortality burden on Latinos and
Blacks mean for recovery? It should prompt policymakers to create equitable health policies that increase access and utilization for underrepresented groups. For Texas, the easiest path forward is to expand Medicaid access. Medicaid expansion would cover more than 2.2 million low-wage, uninsured Texans.
Health care access alone won’t be enough. It must be part of a more comprehensive policy that will change the balance of representation of Latinos and Blacks in high-risk occupations. We must ensure real opportunities for economic and social mobility through expanded access to higher education or alternative career training, equitable pay and consequently increased representation in higher level occupations.
Our government must play a role by investing in human capital and human capabilities, but it must do so prioritizing communities of color who have been historically excluded from American opportunities.