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We've been looking into Nashville's response to the coronavirus clusters in immigrant and refugee households. The city didn't over-publicize this, but there was a point in June when 2/3 of all new cases were among new Americans. [thread] https://wpln.org/post/investigation-nashville-health-officials-have-struggled-to-address-covid-clusters-in-immigrant-communities/
We found that Nashville has these 120 contact tracers. But for months, none of them could conduct an investigation in other languages, including Spanish. Yes, they have interpreters they can 3-way in. But it's not the same as having native speakers. Also, there's this other prob.
When people get tested for COVID-19, the form has a box for language preference. But by the time the positive result gets transmitted back from the commercial lab, that's gone. So contact tracers don't know if who they're calling speaks English. Then there's the voicemail issue.
Many people don't pick up the phone of a random number. And often these contact tracers just leave a message to call them back in English. Obviously, this can get lost in translation. You'd think this would be a fairly simple fix, but it's unresolved at the moment.
Also, it took until July to launch a Spanish language hotline and get Spanish PSAs on the air about getting tested. And a program to provide hotel vouchers and cash stipends to help people in crowded households quarantine safely was announced at the end of June but has stalled.
That's not to mention the sharing of patient information with law enforcement for months, which immigrant advocates say had a chilling effect on anyone with uncertain immigration status wanting to get tested.
There's a sense that city leaders lack the appropriate urgency to address these clusters, which have been fairly contained to working class neighborhoods. But as Dr. Morgan Wills of Siloam put it, you wonder what kind of response there'd be if we were talking about Green Hills.
