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Irene Márquez, 68, has recovered from COVID-19 and is back at work, but the experience has left her frightened. (Photo by Zac Witmer/San Francisco Católico)
May 19, 2020
Lorena Rojas
San Francisco Católico
“When I was told that I was infected with the coronavirus, I said, ‘My God, I’m in trouble,’” said Gustavo Arévalo, a 48-year-old Guatemalan immigrant who lives in San Francisco.
Arévalo tested positive with COVID-19 on March 30 after several days of feeling unwell and with worsening symptoms.
At about the same time of his diagnosis, his mother, Irene Márquez, 68, had been confined for a week in her apartment near 16th and Mission streets in San Francisco, also with COVID-19.
Arévalo said it was unlikely that they caught it from each other because there was no contact between them in the days prior to testing positive.
Although he can’t say for sure where he got the coronavirus, he thinks he may have contracted it at a hospital in San Francisco where he works as a janitor while cleaning the room of a possible COVID-19 patient. He wore a plastic overall and shoe covers but there was nothing to cover his face.
Just a few days later, he began to experience severe body pain, fatigue, fever and loss of taste and smell. Following his doctor’s phone recommendations, Arévalo convalesced at home under the care of his wife. Since he didn’t have serious breathing issues, he did not need to be hospitalized and was able to return to work almost a month later.
During a phone interview, Arévalo, a parishioner of Church of the Visitacion, said his strong faith and the remote resources offered online by the Catholic Church locally and from Rome – especially during Holy Week – were the spiritual nourishment essential for his recovery.
When asked why so many Latinos in the Mission District in San Francisco were testing positive for COVID-19, he did not rule out the possibility that, like him, so many of them have jobs labeled “essential” and cannot work from home.
Irene Márquez, has also recovered and is back at work, but the experience has left her frightened.
She does not believe she was exposed at the apartment building that she cleans – and where she also lives – since there weren’t any reported cases at the time. She believes she caught the coronavirus while riding on public transportation on her way to St. Kevin Church to venerate the Blessed Sacrament.
Since her recovery, Márquez ventures outside only for urgent needs, donning a face mask and gloves. “I tell the people I see in the Mission to protect themselves, and some tell me it is ‘nonsense,’” she said.
“I’m already afraid of the Mission because many cases have come from here,” she said. “
Now, I love my life. I take care of myself because the Lord gave me a warning. The Lord held me in his hands, he was by my side and I will never forget that,” she said between sobs.
The relatively high incidence of COVID-19 exposure in the Latino community has been a topic of study by community and public health leaders.
In late April, Unidos en Salud – a partnership of UC San Francisco, the Latino Task Force for COVID-19 and the San Francisco Public Health Department – conducted COVID-19 screening of more than 4,000 volunteers who live in a densely populated neighborhood in the Mission.
The majority of the 62 people who tested positive in the initial screening of 3,000 were Latino men who reported having been financially affected by economic fallout of the pandemic, and only 10% reported being able to work from home.
Many of those infected in the Mission are likely to be asymptomatic and “project leaders estimate that infection rates are considerably higher in this area, due to the long-standing legacy of socioeconomic inequities that contribute to the continued spread of the virus,” UCSF said in a press release.
When the initial results were published in early May, Dr. Diane Havlir, principal investigator of the study said in a KCBS interview that “90% percent of the people who were … positive had no capability of working from home” and the majority of those were “frontline workers … furloughed or unemployed.”
Another UCSF researcher who participated in the study, Dr. Carina Márquez, highlighted how the pandemic has affected the Latino community in San Francisco “disproportionately… both in terms of infection rates and economic hardship.”
Those identifying as Hispanic or Latino accounted for nearly 43% of positive COVID-19 cases in San Francisco as of May 17, according to city data.
The unequal impact of COVID-19 on minority and low-income communities has also been studied statewide by the California Department of Public Health and in Los Angeles.
“Health outcomes are affected by forces including structural racism, poverty and the disproportionate prevalence of underlying conditions such as asthma and heart disease among Latinos and African American Californians,” a report by the state health department notes.
As relative income decreases, rates of confirmed cases and deaths increase, according to a Los Angeles Public Health Department report.
“However, the data on COVID-19 testing indicate a social gradient in the opposite direction,” the report states. “As relative income increases, the rate of testing increases. These trends are of great concern and suggest that more affluent residents have better access to COVID-19 testing and treatment services, even as the rates of infection appear to be higher in lower income communities.”