Staggering coronavirus infection rates among Latinos have been found in state after state. That’s a result—at least in large part—of the United States’ toxic racial and economic inequality, with many Latinos still on the job and being exposed to the virus as essential workers, unable to isolate at home because they live in close quarters with many other people, or both. But the government response to this crisis has also been lacking. (Shocking, I know.)
In Washington, D.C., and neighboring areas of Maryland and Virginia, The Washington Post finds that while Latinos are 10% of the population, they’re closer to a third of coronavirus infections. In an area with high housing costs, COVID-19 is tearing through houses and apartments shared by multiple generations of one family or by several families. But local governments aren’t doing enough to get people who test positive into hotel rooms to protect their family members and housemates, advocates say.
Virtually no Spanish speakers are getting text alerts from key local governments, so tens of thousands of Spanish-speaking residents aren’t hearing the public health information their cities or counties are trying to put out. Contact tracing efforts don’t necessarily include interpreters. And when Jair Carrasco, an organizer with D.C. street-vendor advocacy group Vendadores Unidos, was waiting to see a doctor about his own symptoms, he tried to call a Spanish-language coronavirus hotline. Three transfers later, he hadn’t gotten the information he was looking for.
”What if I was only a Spanish speaker and they’re giving me this go-around?” he told The Washington Post. “That can make the difference between someone getting help and people suffering.” And that’s if someone feels safe looking for information. Many immigrants fear, with reason, that if they go for testing or treatment, they’ll be walking into an ICE trap.
The impact is horrible: One in four Latino adults knows a victim of COVID-19, compared with just 10% of white adults who can say the same. That’s despite the fatality rate being much lower than among African Americans. And of course, these racial disparities are one reason Donald Trump and other Republicans feel safe pushing reopening—as Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, “Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience.” As a result of that fact and of America’s racial contract, “The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them.”