Coronavirus hits people of color harder in the U.S. How about Idaho? Nobody knows.
States and counties around the country are recording disproportionate rates of coronavirus infections and fatalities for communities of color — especially blacks and Latinos. Community leaders say Idaho’s still-incomplete data is a concern because of early misfires and delays in outreach to the state’s Latinos.
On Friday night, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare released preliminary race and ethnicity breakdowns for fatalities for the first time. Fourteen of the 25 Idaho deaths were white and two were Asian or Pacific Islander. All 16 of those were listed as non-Hispanic. But there were nine cases for which state officials didn’t know the race or ethnicity of the person who died.
“The race/ethnicity data the department currently has is incomplete; the department has it for some cases but not for all of them,” said Niki Forbing-Orr, spokeswoman for the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. “It’s not currently commonly collected for communicable disease investigations, but that is something the department may change in the future.”
In New York City, the coronavirus has killed Latino and black residents at twice the rate as white people, according to the New York Times. Oregon reported last week that Latinos make up a disproportionate number of people testing positive, especially in the agricultural areas of the state.
Latinos make up almost 13% of Idaho and face some of the same language barriers and income, health, immigration status and insurance disparities as their counterparts across the country. But Latino community leaders said they need the state to record race and ethnicity just to know if they’re getting the message — about the stay-home order, the dangers of community spread, or how to stay safe — to the people who need it.
“My biggest concern at the beginning was that we have so many isolated communities that have high concentrations of Hispanic families, so isolated that we can’t even guarantee that they have radio,” said Margie Gonzalez, executive director of the Idaho Commission on Hispanic Affairs. “That was my biggest fear.”
Slow state rollout of Spanish materials and outreach
More than 120,000 Idaho residents speak Spanish, according to Census Bureau estimates. About 40% of those Spanish speakers —roughly 48,000 people — reported they speak English “less than well.” Large swaths of Idaho’s Latinos, including many of those Spanish speakers, fill essential jobs on farms and dairies, in food processing plants and in construction and thus are still heading to work in areas with widespread community transmission.
In a March interview with the Idaho Statesman, University of Idaho sociology professor Dilshani Sarathchandra warned it was “absolutely dangerous” for people not to have information about a global pandemic in a language they could understand easily.
“We are possibly going to see affected community clusters due to community spread,” Sarathchandra said, explaining how non-English speakers could possibly fare if they weren’t adequately informed about the coronavirus and how it spreads. “If they are not getting accurate information, they can’t prepare. It is going to lead to more and more community clusters.”
Yet a week into state officials’ evolving and increasingly urgent attempts to mitigate the spread of the deadly coronavirus across Idaho, crucial updates from Idaho health officials and local jurisdictions still weren’t in Spanish. Instead, many state officials and health districts relied on broad information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that did not provide information about which city services were unavailable, individual social distancing rules or anything that would help Spanish speakers understand rapidly changing rules in their cities.
When Idaho Gov. Brad Little announced and published a statewide stay-home order and a list of essential industries exempted from the order, he told reporters that the order would be available in Spanish on the state’s website later that evening. Emails obtained by the Idaho Statesman via a public records request show staff from the governor’s office asked the Idaho Commission on Hispanic Affairs to translate one document during the press conference and then again asked the commission to translate the order, essential services list and two other documents at 10:57 a.m. the next day — a full 20 hours after Little’s press conference.
The documents were not distributed to health districts and other state agencies until much later in the afternoon. During the day-and-a-half delay in the publication of the state’s list of essential jobs in Spanish, readers and Spanish-speaking Idahoans scoured social media for answers on whether they could show up to their jobs in the morning. Some called the Idaho Statesman, worried about getting a permit to leave their house for work. A permit to work at an essential job or leave the house is not required.
The emails also showed the state received emails and requests from state employees requesting Spanish materials and concerned bilingual residents pointing out inaccuracies and confusing Spanish phrasing on the governor’s official coronavirus site. The website uses a Google Translate filter to translate the English into Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, French and Russian.
As of Friday, the city of Caldwell had one partially translated document including a message from the mayor and a list of city building closures. About 37% of Caldwell residents are Latino. The city of Boise’s COVID-19 update website had a Spanish resource page that was easy to miss. The link that eventually leads to the list of city closures, explanations of Boise’s social distancing order and city services changes in Spanish and six other languages is small and written in English. The only visible Spanish on the coronavirus homepage was at the very bottom and linked to generic CDC coronavirus info. The city of Nampa created a page of local Spanish resources in late March after inquiries from the Statesman.
Some state health districts, state agencies and local officials have begun giving information and interviews to local Spanish radio stations in order to answer residents’ questions about coronavirus. Some school districts in the Treasure Valley and Magic Valley frequently send press releases in both Spanish and English.
Maria Andrade, a Boise immigration lawyer and the founder of Immigrant Justice Idaho, was part of a committee that urged Boise Mayor Lauren McLean to provide translations and public health information in other languages before coronavirus hit Idaho. When Andrade conducted her own search for Spanish materials, she was frustrated to see there was still little accessible Spanish information for people like her clients.
“Every day that we don’t have a really transparent, accessible, clear guidance from the community, from city leaders and state leaders, we all have reasons to be very concerned that there are people in our community needlessly exposing themselves or their community,” Andrade said. “Not because of any ill will, but because of lack of information.”
Battle against misinformation in state’s largest Latino communities
Like the state, the two health districts with the most Latinos haven’t released racial or ethnicity data for coronavirus cases or fatalities. That includes South Central Public Health, which covers agricultural Magic Valley as well as Blaine County. Herbert Romero, a community organizer in Hailey, said the virus has hit the Latino community. Tourism to the area and Sun Valley Resort has been linked to why the small mountain community has had the highest coronavirus infection rate in the country, and Latinos fill many of the resort industry jobs in the area.
“It’s on record that we’re on top of the list of deaths,” Romero said, referring to the high fatality rate for Latinos and blacks nationwide. “I am very surprised that it’s not being done.”
Unlike many other jurisdictions, South Central Public Health set up a bilingual call line early on in Idaho’s coronavirus response, the Twin Falls Times-News reported, and distributed frequent Spanish press releases about changing Blaine County policies. Yet Romero said he and other leaders on the newly established Hispanic LatinUs Leadership Task Force are constantly engaged in “rumor control” and “myth busting” while trying to provide food, mental health services and information to survive economic distress. By the time important coronavirus information trickles down to isolated Spanish speakers in places like Bellevue and Hailey, Romero said, it’s often riddled with misinformation.
Southwest District Health encompasses Canyon County, which has the largest Latino population in the state. The district told the Statesman last week that it wasn’t collecting race or ethnicity data for COVID-19 cases or fatalities.
“Ethnicity is not consistently reported and is often unknown or unconfirmed,” district spokeswoman Katrina Williams told the Statesman on Wednesday. “Ethnicity does not provide a clear picture of the virus’ impact on our communities and should not be used as evidence of any trends.”
Gonzalez from the Hispanic commission didn’t agree with the assessment.
“It would be interesting to know because of the lack of information that had been available for families since this first hit the state of Idaho,” Gonzalez said. “I think it would be of interest to know.”
