‘America’s salad bowl’ is fertile ground for COVID-19
YUMA, Ariz. — The Rev. Emilio Chapa was delivering a homily on a recent Sunday when he paused to lament a sight that had shaken him as he entered the sacristy before Mass.
The board where his staff posted requests for funeral services was covered with names. “I had never seen it so full before,” he told his parishioners at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in central Yuma.
Yuma County, which produces the lettuce, broccoli and other leafy greens that Americans consume during the cold months, is known as “America’s salad bowl.” Now it has become a winter hothouse for COVID-19.
Over the course of the pandemic, the Yuma area has identified coronavirus cases at a higher rate than any other U.S. region. One out of every 6 residents has come down with the virus.
Each winter, the county’s population swells by 100,000 people, to more than 300,000, as field workers descend on the farms and snowbirds from the Midwest pull into RV parks. This seasonal ritual brings jobs, local spending and high tax revenue. But this year, the influx has turned deadly.
Chapa’s parish is weathering the full spectrum of the pandemic’s surge. In Spanish and English, he ministers to Mexican American families who have been rooted here for generations as well as the seasonal residents, all of them a±icted. The church is handling three times the number of funerals it usually does.
“Some families have buried multiple relatives,” Chapa said. “It’s a dire situation.”
While coronavirus cases are starting to flatten across the country, the virus is still raging in many border communities. Three of the six metro areas with the highest rates of known cases since the outbreak began are small cities straddling Mexico: Yuma; Eagle Pass, Texas; and El Centro, Calif. And Laredo, Texas, is adding cases at a per capita rate more than three times what is being seen in hard-hit Los Angeles and Phoenix.
Seasonal migration, the daily flow of people back-and-forth and lax measures to contain the virus’s spread have created a combustible constellation. Arizona has seen among the highest increases in newly reported deaths of any state over the past two weeks — and it is not clear when this troubling trend will abate.
Halfway between San Diego and Phoenix, but geographically isolated from both, Yuma has only one hospital.
Understaffed and overwhelmed with cases, it has been airlifting critically ill patients to other cities. And the fallout from Christmas and New Year festivities is not over.
“It’s a wave of critically ill people that isn’t breaking,” Cleavon Gilman, an emergency medicine doctor at Yuma Regional Medical Center, said after a recent 12-hour shift.