How Latinx Health Care Providers United to Spread Information About COVID-19

How Latinx Health Care Providers United to Spread Information About COVID-19 “I feel like I’m in the company of brothers and sisters and members of a community who really care, and it feels really, really good.” Anne Blythe INDY Week

It was the first Wednesday after Thanksgiving, and Durham County’s COVID-19 cases were surging much more rapidly than Rodney Jenkins, the county health director, wanted to see.

Governor Roy Cooper had tried to thwart large gatherings by limiting crowds to no more than 10 people, pleading with people to stay home and to forgo travel over the holiday weekend. Some heeded the governor’s counsel. Others ignored his missives.

Jenkins joined a Zoom call at noon that day with words of thanks for a group that has played a pivotal role in helping to get public health messages to a small, but exponentially important, segment of the Durham County community hit disproportionately hard by COVID-19.

“Late spring, early summer, our Latinx population was representing up to 78 percent of all of our active cases,” Jenkins told the Zoom call participants. “Seventy-eight percent. As it stands right now, although still over-represented, they represent 20.14 percent of all of our active cases. So again, to go from 78 to 20.14 is a Herculean effort and I just say, Thank you. Thank you to you all. Thank you.”

The group attracting the health director’s praise was formed by Viviana Martinez-Bianchi and Gabriela Maradiaga Panayotti, two Duke Health physicians who decided in early March to formalize a discussion that had been going on among the two women and several of their Latina colleagues since August 2019 ...

... in early March, when North Carolina reported its first COVID-19 case, Maradiaga Panayotti, Martinez-Bianchi, and others foresaw the importance of elevating the voices of communities of color during a global pandemic.

They came together officially as Latinx Advocacy Team and Interdisciplinary Network for COVID-19, or LATIN-19.

Not only has the group been meeting on Zoom weekly since March 18; they welcome others to listen, join in the discussion, and share information about unsung health programs, new COVID-19-related apps, and more. They highlight longstanding and systemic health care access disparities that continue to plague this state and elsewhere.

LATIN-19 members helped get the word out to Latinx communities about the importance of mask-wearing and social distancing. They helped stage community testing events and stressed the importance of getting tested, especially for frontline workers. ...