Contact tracers working to slow the spread of COVID-19 are having difficulty in immigrant communities because of language barriers and fear. Four of the hardest-hit states, Florida, Texas, Arizona and California, have large Spanish-speaking populations.
Dr. Michelle LaRue sits for a portrait in Hyattsville, Md., on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2019. LaRue is a manager at CASA de Maryland, an immigration advocacy group that has partnered with health officials in Prince George's County just outside of Washington. D.C., to make the calls to Spanish speakers. She said earning trust begins with hiring contact tracers who not only speak Spanish but also intimately understand immigrant communities.
And the language barriers go beyond Spanish: Minneapolis needs tracers who also speak Somali, Oromo and Hmong, Chicago needs Polish speakers and Houston’s Harris County is grappling with a population that includes Vietnamese, Chinese and Hindi speakers. All that can significantly affect tracers’ ability to reach 75 percent of a patient’s contacts within 24 hours of a positive test, a threshold that experts say is necessary to control outbreaks.Contact tracers take pains to reassure patients that nothing will be passed along to immigration officials, that they don’t have to provide Social Security or insurance information, and that their contacts won’t know who shared their names and phone numbers.
The University of California-Irvine is trying to help counties by training people from low-income, minority areas to be contact tracers in their own communities, said Daniel Parker, an infectious disease epidemiologist and assistant professor of public health. LaRue is a manager at CASA de Maryland, an immigration advocacy group that has partnered with health officials in Prince George’s County just outside of Washington. D.C., to make the calls to Spanish speakers. She said earning trust begins with hiring contact tracers who not only speak Spanish but also intimately understand immigrant communities.“I feel the connection right away,” said Rivera, a bilingual contact tracer with a company called HealthCare Dynamics International.
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