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ACEP Now: Vol 40 – No 06 – June 2021Illinois Unidos provides COVID-19 information sheets in Spanish and English on its website, IllinoisUnidos.com.
Illinois Unidos
At that point, the City of Chicago and the State of Illinois were mostly providing overall rates of COVID-19 illness, with a recognition that the Black population in the state was being disproportionately affected. In Latino communities, however, there was also a high rate of illness and mortality, but it was not yet being discussed. The community’s fear, she said, was that there was undercounting and underreporting related to the way the state and the city were looking at the data.
“We have some data-savvy people that are community members who started looking at COVID-19 rates by ZIP code, and there was a recognition that there were predominantly Latino ZIP codes that had high rates of infection and high rates of mortality,” she said. She thought the first meeting of Illinois Unidos would be like a think tank to discuss what to do next. But it grew into weekly meetings to discuss ongoing issues like how to garner media attention, gather resources, and have conversations with Latino government officials in the state and City of Chicago.
“From that, we’ve learned we all have different expertise, and different leadership roles have arisen throughout the time of the pandemic,” she said.
The coalition has focused not only on getting bilingual and bicultural information on COVID-19 into the Latino community but also providing testing and personal protective equipment and advocating for resources to take care of COVID-19 survivors and their families, some of whom are of mixed status and include undocumented people who don’t typically qualify for resources.
Beyond COVID-19, Dr. Del Rios Rivera said the Latino community confronts problems of structural racism similar to those faced by Black and Native American communities, including redlining, food/pharmacy/health and hospital deserts, and people being left out of worker protections due to discrimination. “The additional piece with the Latino community, though, is the language component,” she said, “and the fact that many are not citizens, so they are treated worse because there’s no protections in place for people that don’t have the U.S. citizen badge.”
The silver lining, she said, is that the pandemic shined a light on existing problems and issues with infrastructure that needed to be fixed anyway. She is hoping the same model can be used not just for another possible pandemic but also to point to hot spots in all communities to improve conditions like heart disease, asthma, and diabetes. “I know that sometimes the community reaches out to us for expertise, but I actually find that I’ve learned a lot in this process,” Dr. Del Rios Rivera said. “I am certainly not an expert in community affairs, so a lot of this has been listening so you can be a voice to speak alongside other people rather than imposing your thoughts and beliefs on the community.”
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