After having a light cough for three days last spring, Miguel Mestiza Valderrabano called his partner Ana Maria Lorenzo to say that, when she got home from work, he planned to go to the hospital. He would never make it, and the mental image of his 32-year-old lifeless body on their living room floor still haunts her.
“I couldn’t believe that had happened in minutes,” Lorenzo said. She had just arrived home from her cleaning job—her first assignment in weeks after she’d lost work during the shutdown—and a neighbor warned her that Valderrabano said he was struggling to breathe.
Paramedics arrived immediately, but there was nothing they could do. He died of COVID-19 on April 16th, inside the multifamily house he shared with Lorenzo and their three children in Orange, New Jersey. “Sometimes, I ask myself if he was waiting for me to come back to be with my kids. If he didn’t want to die alone with my kids,” Lorenzo said.
Valderrabano was one of 361 young Latino men killed by COVID-19 since the state’s first pandemic death a year ago. These men account for nearly half—43%—of the confirmed coronavirus fatalities among adults under 50 years old, even though Latino men comprise only 12% of this young adult population.
Nationwide, Latinos in total make up 44% of COVID-19 deaths among young adults, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But keep in mind that this last figure encompasses both men and women. Something about New Jersey’s pandemic is striking young Latino men in outsized droves.
Looking deeper, COVID-19 killed young Hispanic men in New Jersey at four and a half times the rate of Hispanic women, twice the rate of young Black men, and seven times that of young white men, according to an analysis by WNYC/Gothamist of confirmed deaths.
“We are losing whole generations of fathers,” said Stephanie Silvera, an epidemiologist at Montclair State University. “And there is no way of understanding the economic, as well as the emotionally traumatic impact that that's going to have on their families, their children, and generations to come.”
Men generally tend to suffer the most severe cases of COVID-19, and research suggests a large part of that could be attributed to social determinants like occupation and likelihood of exposure to the virus.
Latinos are overrepresented in essential work and are the least likely to have health insurance, experts say. Dr. Frank Dos Santos, the chief medical officer for Clara Maass Medical Center, said Latino men also tend to be more likely to suffer from diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity—so-called comorbidities that are known to increase the likelihood of dying from COVID-19.
“Many of these things either have no symptoms or they have very few symptoms that allow our Latino men to go on and work hard and be uninsured or underinsured and not recognize that they have these health conditions,” he said. The pandemic “demonstrated the disparity in our socioeconomics of our Latinos and how hard they're working and ...that the most vulnerable people were susceptible to this COVID infection.”
Undocumented and uninsured
Lorenzo, 30, said she’s not sure how the virus snuck into their home. Her partner, Valderrabano, was a seasonal painter and hadn’t worked all winter. She, too, had lost her job last March when the state shut down, and her kids—ages 5, 8, and 9—were home from school.
Looking back, she thinks he waited to seek medical help because he was worried about the cost.
“We don’t go to the doctor’s office. We don’t have routine exams,” Lorenzo said. As undocumented immigrants from Mexico, neither of them had health insurance. Lorenzo said many families like hers are used to seeking home treatments because they can’t afford professional care.
“Undocumented immigrants are excluded from almost every type of health insurance and public health insurance,” except for emergency Medicaid and Charity Care, said Sara Cullinane, executive director of Make the Road New Jersey, an immigrant advocacy group based in Elizabeth.
Like Medicaid, Charity Care reduces or cancels hospital bills for low-income patients who can’t afford them. Patients, however, still must apply and are screened at the hospital.
A report from the liberal think tank New Jersey Policy Perspective said Latino residents were three times more likely than white residents to report not having health insurance when surveyed in the middle of the pandemic. That's because a large percentage of the Hispanic population is undocumented, the report’s authors said.
While the 2010 Affordable Care Act helped reduce insurance disparities, the latest state data for people under 65 show Hispanic communities still lag behind. Only 82% of Hispanics are insured compared to 95% of white people and 91% of Black residents.
And experts say lack of insurance represents just part of the problem. The Latino community’s overall health is also about having access to healthy foods, safer working conditions, and creating a culture of self-care.
“The access issue is a big issue because if they don't have insurance, then they're not going to take money from food on the table to spend it on themselves,” Dr. Dos Santos, who grew up in Elizabeth, said. “It's almost an expectation among Latino men that you become a martyr to your family ... you don't take care of yourself. You take care of your family first.”
Christian Estevez, president of the Latino Action Network, a statewide Latino civil rights group, agreed. Barriers to access create a culture of, “I don't need it anyway.”
“So people will blame the victim and say, well, ‘it's your fault because you don't take care of yourself,’” Estevez said. “It's like, well, you conditioned me to this as a community.”
(for rest of article: https://gothamist.com/news/who...ung-latino-men-in-nj)
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