On a hot June afternoon, others gathered at the tables along the city’s main street to grab sauvignon blanc and eat a wood-fired pizza for Dining Under the Lights, an occasion to welcome the citizens of Marin County to one of their favorite pastimes. Training
A kilometer away, Crisalia Calderón crouched in his apartment in front of a sleepless night while suffering the first symptoms of COVID-19.
The 29-year-old housekeeper and her husband, Henry, a structure worker, suffered from terrible back pain and she had trouble breathing. “Every time I tried to sleep, I felt like I was drowning,” he said recently, speaking in Spanish through an interpreter.
A few days earlier, Henry had called her sobbing from a hospital emergency room after testing positive for coronavirus. The couple and their 3 youngsters share their apartment in the Canal neighborhood with Crisalia’s sister and the 4 members of their family. “I didn’t need to go home, ” he said. But what can we do? Where can he pass?
At home, Henry tried to isolate himself in the most sensible bunk in one of his children’s beds. But it’s too late. In about a week, the two homeowners tested positive for the virus.
Low-income communities of color, especially Latino communities, are most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in California, where the spread of infections among poor-serving personnel living in overcrowded situations has highlighted a worsening of racial and economic inequality. These disparities are pronounced in the idyllic Marín, where an outbreak of new cases concentrated in an overcrowded Latin American community has helped put the county on the state pandemic watch list.
Latinos, who account for 16% of the county’s population, account for 75% of coronavirus infections, according to Dr. Matt Willis, Marin County’s public fitness officer. After recording only a handful of cases in the first few months of the pandemic, the county now has the steady rate with a capita in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“This is our main workforce,” Willis said. “This is the result of occasional socializations at satisfied hours.”
The canal, named along the waterway on its northern border that was once the publicityafront of San Rafael, is a flat and densely populated community in a suburb known for its wooded hillside villages and multimillion-dollar views. The 21.2 square miles of the canal are dotted with car shops, scruffy palm trees and rows of low-rise buildings occupied by immigrants from countries such as Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador. An influx of young Latinos has nearly tripled the neighborhood’s population since the 1990s.
“It’s like a Hispanic village where everyone knows everyone,” said Jennifer Tores, 22, a Channel local who works in a clothing store.
Canal is a remote world and is connected in detail to affluent cities like San Anselmo and Tiburon, where mansions bleach, wax Teslas and cook milk at $6.
More than a portion of the neighborhood’s families earn less than $35,000 a year, in a county where the median source of income is nearly three times as much. People are forced to put two or 3 families in an apartment to pay people who are unfortunately Marin’s best hires. The Calderons live on a cheque-to-canopy of part of the rent of $2,100 per month while sending cash to their relatives in Guatemala.
Willis stated that these lifestyles “can seamlessly translate a CASE of COVID-19 into or in 10.”
The spread of incorrect information on the Latin American network is even more contagious than the virus, adding the rumor that local control sites were infecting others and claimed that beer is a cure.
Confused and remote at home quarantined for several weeks with her entire family, Crisalia Calderón began to worry. “I was afraid,” he says. “We ran out of food and no money.”
He spent hours calling county officials and local nonprofits, but no one called again. Eventually, a member of a network organization promised to deliver food to the family, but everything that happened the next day expired the meat from the floor and some potatoes.
Calderón resorted to the same casual protection that he relied on in the rural village he had left at 16 to emigrate north. A Guatemalan neighbor went to Costco and brought him ibuprofen against aches and fevers, as well as diapers and PediaSure for children aged 5, 3 and 2. Someone else brought vegetables, milk and beans from a Latin American market. After 3 hours on the phone, Calderón controlled to qualify for $500 in public assistance by coronavirus for undocumented residents.
Willis said officials are working with Canal Alliance, a neighborhood group, to provide support to residents who contract the virus — in the form of cash and hotel rooms to isolate the infected. The county is recruiting bilingual contact tracers from the Latino community.
Marin is one of California’s healthiest, richest and most productive counties, and also one of the most segregated. The county has fiercely retained its plant appeal and wide open spaces over the years, at the expense of public transportation and affordable housing.
A 2012 report on Marin County through the American Human Development Project showed that less than a portion of the channel’s adults had a higher school diploma. He ranked the neighborhood’s approximately 12,000 citizens last among the county’s 51 census slots for welfare and network opportunities.
Despite these disparities, it’s no wonder that other people like Calderón are falling through the floor,” said Omar Carrera, Managing Director of Canal Alliance.
“These other people were in survival mode before COVID-19,” Carrera said one recent afternoon, in front of a mural decorating the group’s headquarters. People had been queuing since 7 a.m. for loose coronavirus tests that started at 1 p.m. Health officials are struggling to maintain speed with the application for testing, as infections increase and employers, such as gas stations and grocery outlets, have begun asking for staff to undergo testing.
An average of 20% of the Channel’s tests are positive. Some days, the positivity rate reached 40%, Willis said. With many other people inflamed with few or no symptoms, the virus has spread to this young community.
But the other people here have to move on to work, so life happens almost as usual on the channel. The day laborers gather at dawn in the car parks; vendors sit around the corner under colorful umbrellas to spy on toasted corn or fruit bags.
Across California, low-paid workers fear losing their jobs and incomes, and that has made some reluctant to get tested or to quarantine. Undocumented residents also tend to avoid interacting with hospitals and health officials out of concerns that they’ll be deported.
At the same time, conspiracy theories continue to multiply. One circulating in Spanish on social media holds that the virus is a government plot. Another says local testing sites are reusing dirty test swabs to deliberately infect people. The rumors have fed a climate of fear and silence around the virus.
One resident said the neighbors had painted an “X” on the front door of a friend of her husband to warn others that she had become infected.
Crisalia Calderón and his circle of relatives have recovered and have since tested negative for COVID-19, but still, “there are neighbors fleeing us,” he said. She expects to fall behind at night, when there is no one else in her building, to wash her clothes.
The other day, Calderón made the decision that, despite everything, it was time to ask the landlord to come to his apartment to solve a long-running plumbing problem and damaged stove burners. But he said he couldn’t come. I was at home in poor health for COVID-19.
This article was produced through Kaiser Health News (KHN), which publishes California Healthline, an independent editorial service of the California Health Care Foundation. KHN is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.