Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
43 DAYS UNTIL JOE BIDEN AND KAMALA HARRIS TAKE THE OATH OF OFFICE
Markian Hawryluk at Kaiser Health News writes—Tracking COVID’s Spread Inside a Tight-Knit Latino Community:
Early in the pandemic, Ximena Rebolledo León, a registered nurse at Telluride Regional Medical Center in southwestern Colorado, needed to find everyone who’d been in contact with a sick Latino worker whose boss had told him he would lose his job if he didn’t show up.
The man had gone to work and infected four co-workers, all Latinos, with COVID-19 — so Rebolledo León then had to track down their movements to determine who else had been exposed to the coronavirus in the wealthy ski resort community.
“I ended up calling 13 different families, and I put a total of 85 people in isolation or quarantine,” Rebolledo León recalled.
People fighting the spread of COVID-19 face many unique challenges when doing contact tracing among low-income Latino immigrants in tight-knit communities. Long-standing health care disparities, job insecurity, immigration status, language barriers and a profound distrust of government all complicate the already tricky task.
COVID-19 has also highlighted how essential those immigrants are to their communities. While Telluride is known for its glitzy resort tucked into the mountains, the place functions because of the workers — many of them first-generation immigrants — within the surrounding San Miguel County. When the medical center implemented new COVID-cleaning protocols, it fell to the cleaning staff of Latinos. Grocery stores, restaurants and many other businesses remained open only because their Hispanic workers continued to come to work.
“They are the backbone of what makes this town go round,” Rebolledo León said.
That’s why Latino front-line workers in Telluride and across the country suffer some of the greatest consequences of COVID-19. Hispanic people in the U.S. face higher rates of infection than the general population. And while they make up about 17% of the population, they have accounted for 24% of COVID deaths. [...]
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
- The Best Economic Metric, by Faiz Shakir. The non-college workforce has been told for too long that jobs are gone and aren’t coming back. We need to be sending a very different message now. To look at our ailing and dysfunctional health-care system, the state of our public education system, crumbling infrastructure, outsourced supply chains, inadequate child care and home care, and so on is to understand that there is plenty of important and valuable work for the government to take the lead in creating.
- Love Letter: The Legal Community Gears Up for Battles Ahead, by Purvi Shah. The spirit and core of this collective message—which concludes with a call to “commit to the long arc of social change and get comfortable with being uncomfortable”—is a spur to action across fields, disciplines, and sectors.
- Annual Report Card Marks Another Disastrous Year for the Arctic, by Bob Berwyn.
Persistent and accelerating warming in the region is affecting local communities and ecosystems, as well as the rest of the global climate system.
TOP COMMENTS • RESCUED DIARIES • THE BRIEF
“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is
extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.” ~~Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
At Daily Kos on this date in 2004—Rummy feels their pain:
Rummie thinks soldiers in Iraq are “girly men.”
Army Spc. Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team, which is made up mainly of citizen soldiers of the Tennessee Army National Guard, asked Rumsfeld in a question-and-answer session why vehicle armor is still in short supply, nearly two years after the war started.
"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?" Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense.
Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question.
"We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north," Wilson said after asking again.
Rumsfeld replied that, "You go to war with the Army you have," not the one you might want [...]