Latinos make up 16% of the Marin County population, but currently make up almost 80% of the county’s coronavirus cases. It is the largest racial disparity of any county in the Bay Area, and part of the reason the county has landed on the state watch list.
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Another factor is the outbreak at San Quentin State Prison, but cut those numbers out of the equation, and more than half of all cases in the county are concentrated in a 2.5-square-mile neighborhood in San Rafael known as the Canal.
Located among some of the richest zip codes in the country, the Canal looks and feels very different from many of its neighboring communities. He is 80% Latino and largely low-income. Here are not the multi-million dollar mansions, but the densely populated departments of the county’s essential workers.
“In some ways, the virus here is kind of a narrator of the truth about inequalities,” said Dr. Matt Willis, Marin County Public Health Officer. “We are discovering that many of our essential workers – you know our supermarkets, our landscapers, our construction workers – we are seeing that it has been transmitted within those settings among workers, and then we also take it home to places where there may be be multiple people living in one unit. “
According to Dr. Willis, the Canal has a 20% positivity rate, a number approximately three times higher than the Marin County average.
Crisalia Calderón is an immigrant from Guatemala who works as a housekeeper and lives in a three-bedroom apartment on the Canal with nine of her relatives, including two of her children with underlying health problems. She and her husband recently contracted coronavirus. She let her clients know and stopped working.
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“Some reacted: ‘I hope you are well, you and your family,'” Calderón told us in Spanish. “And others asked, ‘Why? Didn’t you take care of yourself?’ They wanted to know how and where we got infected.
“But we started to think. We just go to work, look for gasoline and buy our food. We have not been to beaches or places to expose ourselves, we have not been to parties,” he explained. “So it was very difficult to find out why we were positive.”
If there is one person working to bridge these inequities on the Canal, it is Omar Carerra, the CEO of a small community organization called the Canal Alliance. It partnered with Marin County to open a biweekly, no-appointment free trial as it has since become the most popular in the neighborhood.
When ABC7 News recently visited the test site, people in line said they arrived at 7 a.m., six hours before it officially opened. At 1 p.m., when it opened, Carerra had already started rejecting about 50 people. She said she receives 80 to 120 tests a day and it is never enough.
“There will be a lot of people disappointed,” he said, as he lowered the line to tell people the news. “But it is what it is. I can’t control how many tests we do per day.”
County health officials acknowledge the challenges in the Canal and say they are working to increase testing in the area. The first emerging test site in Marin County was on the Canal. But lack of evidence is far from the only challenge.
“Housing conditions, in addition to being an essential worker, are the perfect combination to make the problem worse and make this a nightmare for everyone,” said Carerra. “We can continue testing people, but if we don’t have a good isolation strategy and follow-up contact strategy, none of that will matter, because the person is tested, but then they have to wait five to eight days to get the results”.
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Calderón described his recent experience after testing positive. She said someone from the county called her and told her to get away from her family.
“I couldn’t leave my children, and where would I go?” she asked. “I need food for my children or to pay the rent.”
Calderón said they told him: “Don’t worry. Tomorrow we will help you.”
“What did they bring me?” she said. “One potato, two pumpkins, expired ground beef for burgers. What could I do with those things?”
Dr. Willis says they are working on solutions. In addition to increasing testing in the area, they are offering income, food and housing supplements to those who test positive.
Carerra says they are important steps, but as he has seen first hand, they are not always perfect in practice.
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“So far, in Marin County, we have received a response from a single hotel located in Novato that really wants to support us,” he said. “All the hotels in other cities in Marín have not raised their hands, ‘I want to help.'”
ABC7 News asked a Marin County spokesman if any other hotel had offered accommodation but received no response.
“This idea that I stay home safe and protected, and that I don’t care what happens around me, is the wrong perception of the problem,” Carerra said. “What the pandemic has done to all of us has shown us that if a person in the community is not safe, no one will be safe.”
“So, the channel’s problems,” he added. “They are Marin County problems.”
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