The crucial job of reaching people who test positive for the coronavirus and those they’ve come in contact with is proving especially difficult in immigrant communities because of language barriers, confusion and fear of the government
Only a handful of contact tracers working to slow the spread of COVID-19 in 125 communities near Chicago speak Spanish, despite significant Spanish-speaking populations. Churches and advocacy groups in the Houston area are trying to convince immigrants to cooperate when health officials call. And in California, immigrants are being trained as contact tracers to ease mistrust.
In the ZIP Code with the highest number of COVID-19 cases in Maryland, 56% of adults speak Spanish. But only 60 of Maryland’s 1,350 contact tracers speak Spanish.And the language barriers go beyond Spanish: Minneapolis needs tracers who also speak Somali, Oromo and Hmong; Chicago needs Polish speakers; and Houston’s tracing effort is grappling with a population that includes Vietnamese, Chinese and Hindi speakers.
Exacerbating the challenges even further is the lag in getting coronavirus test results around the U.S., with waits routinely exceeding a week. The nation also is averaging more than 50,000 new cases a day, which has overwhelmed many laboratories.All that can significantly affect tracers’ ability to reach 75% of a patient’s contacts within 24 hours of a positive test, a threshold that experts say is necessary to control outbreaks.
“I believe there’s a growing stigma about people being sick, so if you’re infected you don’t want to tell,” said Garcia, whose group works with farm laborers. “The personal information we’re asking for is totally protected,” Dr. Michelle LaRue assures viewers in Spanish. The department plans to partner with local organizations to help ensure that people in all communities know they could receive a phone call from health officials, that the caller ID on their phones will indicate clearly who’s calling, and that “it’s really important for the health of the public that folks pick up the phone,” Joshi said.Rosio-Benitez said his tracers’ success rate currently is 40% to 50% because of a lack of cooperation overall — especially in immigrant communities.
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