SweSwe Aye, Myanmar Gazette: SweSwe, the editor of and reporter for the Myanmar Gazette, an outlet that serves the 189,000 Burmese immigrants living in the United States, reported a three-part series on the health and economic impacts of the pandemic on Burmese Americans. Her first piece focused on community-led efforts to make the vaccine widely available to those living in the Los Angeles area, many of whom are deeply suspicious of the vaccine, she reported. Ironically, while many who live here hesitate, some wealthy Burmese have flown to the United States from Myanmar (formerly called Burma) to get the vaccine, she recounted. (Click here to view the original story in Burmese.) Her second story looked at the inequitable treatment of Burmese Americans when they sought medical treatment during the pandemic, as told through the eyes of YiYi Kline, 56, a well-known Burmese personality in the United States and a former registered nurse in the I.C.U. at Kindred Hospital Riverside in Los Angeles. Kline frequently offered health tips about COVID-19 to her more than 64,000 Twitter followers, but felt she was not taken seriously when she went to an emergency room repeatedly with serious COVID-19 symptoms, and her condition worsened. Her third story explored the financial impact of the pandemic on the two dozen Burmese restaurants in California, which included huge debt and some closures.
Early Impacts: Many Burmese immigrants contacted SweSwe after reading her first piece and said they felt more comfortable about getting a COVID-19 vaccination because of the information she had provided.
Genoa Barrow, a staff reporter for the Sacramento Observer, a Black-owned paper, reported "Giving Ourselves a Shot," a three-part series on how Sacramento's Black community has responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. In her first story, she reported that as of early August, the vaccination rate for Black people in Sacramento County was 35.6%, compared with 49.2% for the county as a whole. Cases and deaths from COVID have been higher among Black people in the county than their portion of the population. These disparities led Black-led community organizations to form Sacramentans Advocating for Vaccine Equity (SAVE) to push for more testing and vaccination sites in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Among the community-led interventions was a partnership between the Greater Sacramento Urban League (GSUL) and the UC Davis Medical Center to staff pop-up vaccination centers in the largely Black Oak Park community. Her second story featured conversations with Black residents of Sacramento about their reasons for getting vaccinated, despite concerns. Her third story looked at the role that Sacramento churches have played in helping Black residents get vaccinated. Several churches with predominantly Black congregations have hosted testing and vaccination sites, and several Black ministers have joined a coalition of community groups called Sacramento Alliance For Vaccine Equity to advocate for equitable distribution of vaccines. “The reason why I chose to be a part of this group and others, is because of the devastating and disproportionate impact COVID has had on the Black community economically, educationally and health wise,” Dr. Tecoy Porter of Sacramento’s Genesis Baptist Church told Genoa. Genoa also wrote an opinion piece about the importance of getting vaccinated. The Observer hosted a virtual forum on September 8 on how the faith-based community has stepped up to ensure vaccine equity.
Danielle Bergstrom and Maria Ortiz-Briones, Fresno Bee, Fresnoland and Vide en el Valle and colleagues: Danielle led a team of Fresno Bee reporters and editors, including Maria, in an exploration of transportation equity issues in Fresno County. They published a call-out in June seeking readers' opinions about whether Measure C, a 35-year-old transportation funding mechanism, was meeting the needs of a changing county. "It’s clear that we have significant equity challenges in Fresno County: workers, students, and families who take public transportation still have more than double the commute times of those who drive their own cars," they wrote. "Safety concerns abound for pedestrians, drivers, and bicyclists." In the first story in a planned series, Danielle wrote a primer on Measure C, a revenue measure proposed initially to build a highway system in Fresno County, then modified in 2006 to make it easier and safer to walk, bike, or take transit and now being re-imagined to take into account transportation trends and future transportation needs. [Click here for the Spanish version.] In a second story, "Left Out and Overlooked," Danielle and colleagues Monica Vaughn and Cassandra Garibay reported on disparities in the allocation of funding to roads that serve rural and urban residents, with rural residents being shortchanged. Measure C directs agencies to prioritize spending near urban areas, and half the roads in rural unincorporated areas are ineligible because they are not maintained by the county, they reported. Another colleague, Dympna Ugwu-Oju, editor of Fresnoland, reported a story, ‘There’s a big need.’ How a lack of public transit impacts people in rural Fresno County, which explored what it means to live in a part of town with no transit or easy access to medical appointments or groceries. Danielle reported a story questioning whether Fresno County taxpayers would continue to pay for the region's suburban sprawl as they watch their neighborhood streets and rural roads fall apart. In the weekly newsletter, Dympna Ugwu-Oju profiled Matt Gillion, a local man who has created an on-demand "micro-transit" service for people without cars. In mid-December, Danielle reported on what it's like to live without a car in Fresno County — long bus rides and barriers to economic activity. Researchers have found that having a reliable car — or a reasonable transit commute — is one of the most important factors in determining whether someone can climb the economic ladder. In its weekly newsletter, Fresnoland published summaries of interviews that reporters conducted while researching the series, including interviews with Moses Stites, head of Fresno, County Rural Transit Agency, on the agency's origins with a lawsuit; Veronica Garibay, the co-founder and co-director of Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, an environmental justice organization based in Fresno, discussing and defining "transportation justice;" and Kevin Hamilton, executive director of the Central California Asthma Collaborative, on his vision for Fresno's transit future. A related story looked at West Fresno's pollution burden, much of it related to vehicles. The landing page for the project can be found here.
Early Impacts: Since publication, Fresno City Council members have cited the project as part of their own advocacy in the Measure C campaign as they work to secure more transportation resources in older, neglected neighborhoods.
Ariel Boone reported on the rise in opioid deaths in Alameda County during the pandemic and community-based efforts to prevent them for StreetSpirit, an independent newspaper in the East Bay dedicated to covering homelessness and poverty from the perspective of those most impacted, and for KPFK, a Bay Area community radio station. In her first print story, she reported that deaths from opioid overdoses in California increased 72 percent over the previous year during the 12-month period between February 2020 and January 2021. In Alameda, visits to ERs for overdoses rose to an average of 416 a quarter in 2020 from an average of 268 per quarter in 2018, the last year before the pandemic. The major reason was the increased use of illicit fentanyl, a potent pain reliever that is cheaper than heroin and can be ingested as a pill. Ariel spent months following outreach workers in North, East and West Oakland as they distributed life-preserving supplies and services to people who use drugs. Their emphasis is on harm reduction – providing clean needles to reduce the risk of HIV and Hepatitis C transmission through dirty needles, as well as Narcan, a drug that can reverse an overdose and prevent death if administered quickly. The piece also raised questions about whether state, county and federal officials have done enough to mitigate the effects of the pandemic on drug users. During her half-hour radio show on KFPK, Ariel talked about the months she spent talking to homeless substance users in Oakland about why fentanyl has become the drug of choice, despite the risks of overdosing from even a small amount. The lure for many: no needles, since their veins are often shot from injecting heroin, and fentanyl is smoked or taken as a pill, and the low cost. Some users also like the fact that death is a possibility any time they use it. “It’s just, for fentanyl users, kind of like tiptoeing or tightrope-walking to death to get high,” one user told her. Because an overdose can be reversed if a drug called Narcan is administered quickly, community groups are distributing thousands of doses in homeless encampments.
Eli Cahan, freelancing for Medscape and WebMD, reported a two-part series on the increase in preventable amputations because of interruptions in medical care and patients' problems affording insulin as a result of COVID-19. In his first piece, he movingly reported on what he calls a classic American story: an amputation of a leg of a 35-year-old man of color who has diabetes. He had missed primary care visits because a sequence of layoffs had left his insurance status in flux; in addition, he skipped insulin doses due to unaffordable price tags. Preventable amputations are a disproportionately common problem in people of color because of barriers to routine medical care, lack of access to specialists and the high cost of life-saving drugs such as insulin. In his second piece, he documented the challenges that amputees face in securing prostheses. Anthony Sambo, one of the patients he profiled, doesn't have a prosthetic limb almost a year after his amputation, due to a combination of pandemic delays, insurance snafus and miscommunications, leaving him all but immobile.
Early Impacts: Two U.S. Congressional representatives are circulating Eli's project among their colleagues to build support for the "Amputation Reduction and Compassion" Act (H.R.8615).
Danielle Chiriguayo, KCRW: Danielle reported a two-part series on how the pandemic has affected the education and mental health of children in Los Angeles. In her first story, she reported that teachers were leaving the profession in large numbers, with profound consequences for children. A 2020 Rand Corporation study that found one in four teachers were considering leaving the profession, and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System had reported that early retirements were up by 26% in 2020 compared to the previous year. In the Long Beach Unified School District, leaves of absence increased by 35% over the previous year. In her second story, she reported an upsurge in requests for counseling from students in the Los Angeles public schools and evidence that the district was having trouble meeting the need. The district added 922 new psychiatric social worker and resource navigator positions during that school year, but by mid-October had been able to fill only a quarter of the positions. Danielle's reporting also served as the basis for Greater LA host Steve Chiotakis's 16-minute show and podcast on the issue.
Emily DeRuy, San Jose Mercury News and Bay Area News Group: People 65 and over are in the age group most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and those who lived in congregate settings like nursing homes and assisted living facilities have been the most likely to die. Emily chronicled the toll on elders and their families by reporting intimate portraits of four families with at-risk elders and the varying decisions they made to keep them safe. In a long-form piece that took up most of Page One and two inside pages of the Mercury-News, Emily wrote about three women who chose to keep their frail elders at home, at great personal (and for one, professional) cost, and a couple (one with Alzheimers) who are weathering the pandemic in an assisted living facility. "The pandemic laid bare the pitfalls of a patchwork care system, prompting conversations at kitchen tables and doctor’s offices and the halls of Sacramento about not only the future of caregiving, but the peril of aging in America," Emily wrote. "The question now on so many minds, said Mike Dark, who until recently worked as a staff attorney with the organization California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform: 'Is it time to do something different?'" More than 250 people attended the Bay Area News Group’s virtual forum at which Emily presented the results of her reporting.
Darlene Donloe, The Wave: Darlene reported a four-part series on the disproportionate effect of Alzheimer's Disease on African Americans. In her first story, she reported that the disease, which is neither preventable or curable, is the fourth leading cause of death for Black Americans and that data from a comprehensive health assessment program study indicate that 18.6% of Black people and 14% of Hispanics age 65 and older have Alzheimer’s dementia, compared with 10% of older white adults. In her second story, she explored the difficulties of quantifying the extent of the disproportionate impact on Black Americans, as well as barriers to early diagnosis and the perception by two-thirds of Black individuals surveyed that they believe it is harder for them to get excellent care for Alzheimer's and other dementias than it is for caucasian Americans. In her third piece, she reported on the controversy over the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a new drug, aducanumab (aka Aduhelm), to treat early Alzheimer’s disease. The FDA’s own advisory board voted against approval, and many experts believe it may harm desperate patients who take it. Darlene pointed out that very few Black people took part in the clinical trials that led to approval of the drug, despite the disproportionately high prevalence of Alzheimer’s within their community. For the final story, Darlene interviewed family members who care for relatives with Alzheimer’s about the heartache attached to watching a loved one lose his or her memories, as well as the capacity for speech, emotion and movement. The article also provided resources for caregivers to help them take care of themselves.
Christopher Egusa produced a three-part series for KALW on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected Bay Area residents with disabilities. His first story, which also aired on Science Friday, looked at how the pandemic laid bare the ableism and discrimination that people with disabilities deal with every day. Care guidelines adopted by California left the door open for elderly and disabled people to be denied care in favor of those younger or able-bodied, and activists and advocates for the disabled successfully lobbied to have them changed. Then, when the vaccine became available, people with disabilities or chronic illness were given a lower priority than people over 65, which activists again lobbied against, moving people with certain disabilities — but not all — onto the priority list. “After 55 years of disability, I don't think I've ever felt more profoundly let down by the health care system,” Ingrid Tischer, a 55-year-old woman with muscular dystrophy, told Chris. His second story, co-produced by Hana Baba and Ellen Finn, profiled Dr. Peter Poullos, a radiologist who leads the Stanford Medical Abilities Coalition and has a disability. Poullos has helped make Stanford Medical School a hub for disability awareness and education. His final story focused on how the “shelter in place” order in March 2020 left families with disabled children in a bind, as their schools closed suddenly. To put human faces on the challenges, Chris profiled the family of Linus Guok, a 21-year-old with nonverbal autism, OCD and a seizure disorder who requires round-the-clock supervision. When his school closed, his mother, Fiona, had to quit her job as an occupational therapist to care for him, and her request for a state-paid in-home caregiver got bogged down in the bureaucratic pipeline for months. Fiona, who was exhausted, sank into depression. It took a year of intermittent caregivers to finally find one who was conscientious and tuned into Linus’s needs. The family’s story provides a window into holes in the safety net for Californians with disabilities.
Early Impacts: Following publication, the Disability Rights and Education Defense Fund (DREDF) cited Egusa’s reporting in a legal comment submitted to the Office of Management and Budget and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The comment was about disability discrimination in treatment referrals and will be used to inform changes to policies. Ingrid Tischer, director of DREDF, said that Egusa’s series served to counter the disability community’s “long history of being betrayed by journalists after working with them” and that his stories helped repair that relationship.
Carly Graf, San Francisco Examiner: Carly reported a series of five stories on how redlining, zoning and land-use planning decisions over decades set the stage for poor health outcomes among the predominantly Black and Latinx residents of San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood. The area has some of the worst air quality in the city, and its parks are among the city's least well-maintained. In her first piece, she reported on how a pandemic-related ban on vehicular traffic on John F. Kennedy Boulevard in Golden Gate Park had reduced recreation options for the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood, a park-poor area of the city, since most rely on cars to get to the park, and parking is limited. Getting there by public transit requires several transfers and takes an hour. In her second piece, she reported that the community is facing the highest surge in COVID-19 cases this summer of any San Francisco neighborhood, despite having one of the highest vaccination rates. Among the factors: many Bayview-Hunters Point residents live with multiple generations under the same roof, and many are essential workers, which means they face the possibility of exposure every time they go to work. Her third piece reported how a limited number of groceries in the area contributed to food insecurity and a reliance by some on junk food available at corner stories and gas stations. The 94124 ZIP code has consistently yielded some of the poorest health indicators compared to others citywide, she reported. Residents here are more likely to experience cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and the area has one of the highest rates of preventable emergency room visits and obesity in San Francisco. Her fourth piece documented the lack of public transportation in Bayview, which isolates it from the rest of the city and makes getting around difficult.“You really are a second-class citizen in San Francisco” if you live in the neighborhood, Monique LeSarre, executive director of the Rafiki Coalition for Health and Wellness, told her. “Transportation has improved a little bit, but overall you can’t get anywhere from out here easily and fast.” Her fifth piece explored the reasons why the Bayview neighborhood is considered one of the state’s most vulnerable to a number of environmental health hazards, including toxins such as diesel fumes, lead from house paint and hazardous waste. Exposure to these toxins is known to contribute to asthma, infant mortality and certain cancers. “We are concerned with what we’re breathing,” Kamillah Ealom, a lifelong resident who has asthma, told Graf about why she’s working as lead Bayview community organizer for Greenaction, an environmental justice organization.
Olga Grigoryants, Los Angeles Daily News: Olga reported a four-part series about the growing interest among Black pregnant women in having midwives deliver their babies in homelike settings. In her first story, she reported that the interest is fueled both by pregnant women's concerns over becoming infected with COVID-19 during a hospital stay as well as knowledge that in Los Angeles County, mortality rates among Black mothers from perinatal complications are four times higher compared with White mothers. In addition, Black infants are three times more likely to die before reaching their first birthdays. The story also described a program offered by the Los Angeles Department of Public Health, First 5 LA and community partners to provide no-cost doula care to Black pregnant people in Antelope Valley, San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley and South L.A. as a strategy to improve birth outcomes. In her second piece, she profiled a Los Angeles County midwife, Racha Tahani Lawler, and the special touches she provides to her clients, including a peaceful garden setting for their prenatal visits, bags of produce she's grown and eggs her chickens have laid and empathy about the stressors they're under because of the pandemic and everyday encounters with racism. This story also reported on why so few licensed midwives in Southern California are Black — just seven out of 120 — not nearly enough to meet the growing demand. Her third piece reported on why there are so few midwife-operated birthing centers in the Los Angeles area, despite the unmet demand for more home-like births. The reason, she was told, was because of burdensome state licensing regulations that must be followed if the centers want to bill MediCal for births, an essential for financial survival. Her final piece reported on a surge in home births during the pandemic that was fueled both by fear of catching COVID-19 while hospitalized during childbirth as well as hospitals' initial rules barring partners from delivery rooms.
Early Impacts: Following publication of the series, leaders from The Victoria Project — a Southern California nonprofit that supports access to out-of-hospital and holistic maternity care — told Grigoryants that her story had led to a large flood of donations. And Olga has received numerous calls and emails from midwives who want to share tips and stories.
Angela Johnston, a staff reporter for KALW public radio, reported "Housing as Health Care,” a three-part series on how unhoused elderly people fared during the COVID pandemic. In her first story, she looked into how the state’s provision of “shelter in place” hotel rooms during the pandemic had improved the health of formerly unhoused people. For example, Kittrell Warren, a 65-year-old cancer survivor who had been unhoused for more than a decade, was receiving medical care for hypertension and drug addiction, and gaining weight as a result of receiving three meals a day. “I lost like 50 pounds being outside,” he told Angela. In her second story, she explained the growing consensus among experts on homelessness that housing is health care. San Francisco has been creating supportive housing for unhoused people with chronic health or mental health problems, but there is not enough capacity for the growing number of homeless people with dementia, she reported. “If we can't figure out how to find this level of care for people who are too sick to live independently, but not sick enough to need a nursing home ... it is just going to be an inordinate amount of suffering among our seniors,” Dr. Josh Bamberger told her. In her third story, she reported on a pilot project in Daly City called Home Sweet Home that is offered by the San Mateo County Health Plan that helps people with chronic health and mental problems obtain case management services, adult day care and stable independent housing and avoid going into nursing homes. While expensive, these community services cost the MediCal and Medicare systems 30-35% less than a nursing home would.
Early Impacts: Using her Fellowship project as a prototypc, Angela taught a sessions for inmates at San Quentin and Solano state prisons who produce a prison newspaper about how to report a health story.
Arcenio Lopez wrote two commentary pieces as his Fellowship project, one for the Los Angeles Times about why Californians of Mixtec origin have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and another for The Fresno Bee about the heavy toll of COVID-19 on people with diabetes. Many Indigenous immigrants from Mexico do not speak or read Spanish, and since Mixtec is an oral language, no public health advisories reached them. "How do you translate COVID-19 into Mixtec or other Indigenous tongues?" Arcenio, director of the Ventura-based Mixteco Indigenous Organizing Committee (MICOP), wrote in the Times piece. "Neither government agencies, nor the organization that I lead, could do so." In addition, he wrote, "Early in the pandemic, several of us thought that the virus was just a government conspiracy," including Eulalia Natividad Mendoza, a community organizer on Arcenio's staff. Then she got COVID, which made her seriously ill for a month, cost her her job in the fields and sent her into debt. The ability of Mixtec farmworkers to protect themselves from the virus was hampered by some growers' failure to provide personal protective equipment, such as masks and gloves, Arcenio wrote. His organization distributed more than 40,000 safety kits, mostly to farmworkers in Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. In his piece for The Fresno Bee, he wrote of losing three relatives to COVID-19, each of whom had diabetes. “For my family and community, saving lives will take more than a new Pfizer pill,” he wrote. “We need deeper solutions to entrenched problems that make up the fabric of my earliest memories.”
Abraham Marquez and Zaydee Sanchez, freelancing for Palabra, jointly reported "Unheard, Overlooked and Exposed," a beautifully illustrated magazine-length piece for the online publication of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Abraham, a reporter, and Zaydee, a photojournalist, journeyed to the Central Valley to talk with Indigenous farmworkers about the barriers they face getting health care in general, as well as their experiences with COVID-19. Structural inequalities in the U.S. health care and economic systems increase the risk of exposure to COVID-19 and mortality for farmworkers, and since as many as 165,000 California farmworkers speak only nonwritten Indigenous languages, public health information often hasn’t reached them. A recent study of California’s farm hands revealed that very few Indigenous migrants are covered by medical insurance; six of every 10 indigenous migrant women have not visited a doctor in the U.S.
Laura Place, a staff reporter for the Santa Maria Times, reported a four-part series, "COVID Hot Spot: An at-risk city," about why Santa Maria, a largely Hispanic community in northern Santa Barbara County, became a COVID-19 hot spot. Read Laura's introduction to her project here. In her first story, she reported that as of June 30, 2021, Latino and Hispanic residents, who comprise 48% of the county population, made up 59% of cases, 67% of hospitalizations and 50% of deaths. Santa Maria accounted for 32% of the county's cases and 35% of the deaths, while comprising only 24% of the population. City and public health officials attribute the disparity to lack of health information in Spanish or Mixteco, the languages spoken by the area's many farmworkers, and the fact that over one-third of Santa Maria residents ages 18 to 64 lack health insurance, which means they are unlikely to have relationships with health care providers who could have advised them about precautions and the importance of vaccination. In the second story, Laura raised questions about whether the high COVID-19 case rate among Spanish- and Mixtec-speaking residents was due to the failure of officials in Santa Maria to understand that public health information needed to be distributed in Spanish and Mixteco not just English, and that translators needed to be made available at City Council meetings as well. Sixty-two percent of Santa Maria residents speak Spanish at home and about 25,000 of the county’s farmworkers speak only Mixteco, an oral (not written) language. In August, federal officials threatened to fine Santa Maria $400,000 unless the city reexamines language access and cultural competency in its communications.
In the third story, Laura reported that Santa Barbara County had had 39 COVID-19 outbreaks in the agricultural business sector and at least 2,143 COVID-19 cases among agricultural workers, making it one of the top four occupations in the county with high COVID-19 spread. (The total number of agricultural workers infected is likely to have been much higher, since 44% of county residents infected with COVID-19 could not be reached to provide their occupations.) Because many farmworkers are in the United States temporarily and don’t know their rights, state officials and farmworker advocates have been working to inform them of their rights to state-paid sick pay and quarantining in a hotel. The reasons for the high incidence: fear of deportation, misinformation about the vaccine and crowded housing and the inability to socially distance at home, on buses that take them to and from work and in fields and packing houses. In her final piece, Laura delved further into the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Latinos living in northern Santa Barbara County. Laura's project also ran in the Santa Ynez Valley News and the Lompoc Record.
Early Impacts: Laura’s reporting spurred community conversations about the dearth of Spanish- and Indigenous-language resources, including during a meeting about the Santa Maria Police Department’s goals for upcoming years. “There were residents who cited data from my stories about the population of Spanish-speaking residents and the historic lack of resources provided in Spanish in the city, and they confronted police leaders about their failure to provide key documents and surveys in Spanish, to which officers said they would do better and provide translated materials,” Laura told us.
Srishti Prabha, managing editor of India Currents, an online outlet serving the South Asia diaspora, reported a multi-part series, "Masala Heroes," that reported on how Santa Clara County’s South Asian (Desi) grocery contribute to health of immigrants from India. Her first story, “Chasing Memories Inside of Santa Clara County's Desi Grocery Stories,” reported on the role that the 24 Desi grocery stores in Santa Clara County have played during the pandemic as lifelines to familial memories and home. It included a map of all the Desi grocery stores and restaurants in the county. In her second story, she reported on why many South Asians develop health problems when they abandon their ancestral diets in favor of Western food. Their gut biomes -- the microorganisms living in their digestive tracts -- developed based on the food they ate as a child and rebel when they switch to highly processed food. Desi grocery stories in Silicon Valley play an important role in providing South Asian families with a variety of fresh produce, spices, dals and ancestral grains. Her third piece looked at the challenges faced by the stores’ owners and workers during the pandemic.
Kelly Puente, a staff reporter for the Long Beach Post, reported a two-part series on how the pandemic has affected different ethnic populations in Long Beach, a highly diverse city, and another story on how air pollution disproportionately affects Long Beach's lowest income neighborhoods. In her first story, published in English and Spanish and co-reported by Sebastian Echeverry, she reported on the important role that community groups are playing in developing messaging that helps persuade vaccine skeptics to get vaccinated. Many residents say they are more concerned about side effects from a vaccine than they are of getting COVID-19. Vaccination rates for Latinos, Cambodians and Blacks still lag that of Whites. As a result of door to door canvassing, phone calls, texting, social media posts -- in English, Spanish, Khmer, Samoan and Tongan -- new doses for Latino residents grew the most, followed by Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Black residents, according to a June city memo.
In Long Beach, a community of immigrants and their descendants, one immigrant group has suffered more from the COVID-19 than any other, Kelly reported in her second story: Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. Overall, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders in Long Beach are seven times more likely to die and nine times more likely to be hospitalized for COVID compared to white residents. Among the reasons are that many live in crowded, multigenerational homes that make it more difficult to socially distance or to quarantine, and as a group they have a higher poverty rate, less access to quality health care and higher rates of underlying health conditions such as heart and lung disease, diabetes, asthma and obesity. In her final article, she reported on how emissions from the Western Hemisphere's busiest port have led many residents of Long Beach's lowest income neighborhoods to refer to them as “diesel death zone” and “asthma alley.” The pollution has gotten worse recently because the ports have ramped up operations to deal with a massive global shipping bottleneck, she reported.
Early Impacts: Several community groups circulated Puente’s article on high COVID-19 rates among Pacific Islanders and pressed public health officials to do more to mitigate them.
Sonja Sharp, a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times, applied for the Fellowship to report on an issue personal to her: the lack of research and support for pregnant people who are disabled. When she got pregnant with her second child, Sharp began looking for resources for disabled mothers like herself and found nothing. She spent nine months, while pregnant herself, reporting on the invisibility and sometimes callous treatment women like her face. In her long-form story, which ran on the Front Page of the Times, she reported on the indignities and barriers that disabled women face when they look for medical care, through the experience of four women with disabilities who are either pregnant or have given birth as well as Frida Kahlo, the late Mexican artist. She found that disabled women get pregnant and give birth at the same rate as nondisabled ones, but most obstetricians know little about the challenges they face, and there's virtually no research on their outcomes. In a 9-minute video that accompanied her story, she and Dr. Marie Flores, one of the pregnant women she interviewed, had a frank discussion about the challenges they faced. The day after the initial story ran, the Times published a newsletter in which Sonja shared more of her story, as well as lessons she hoped readers would take away from her project. Her project also included a 23-minute podcast.
Early Impacts: Her work has given rise to discussions in the Los Angeles Times newsroom about creating a beat focused solely on disabilities, which would cast overdue attention on the topic in one of America’s largest newsrooms, which reaches more than 30 million people monthly online alone.
Dana Ullman, freelancing for The Mendocino Voice, an online outlet, reported a multi-part multimedia series on health care disparities in rural Mendocino County. With a supplemental community engagement grant and mentoring from the Center's engagement editor, she conducted an information needs assessment of diverse communities in the county via Spanish-language texts, online surveys and tabling, which helped her identify the topics of the stories she reported.
Her first story, published in both English and Spanish, reported on the important role that promatoras played in meeting the needs of Latino families affected by COVID, including delivering food and clothing, imparting public health information and helping them navigate the system of testing and vaccines. Dana's next story reported on how Mendocino County was addressing the opioid epidemic during the pandemic and beyond. Preliminary data suggest that Mendocino County ranked fourth in the state in fatal opioid overdoses in 2020, the pandemic’s first year. At MCAVHN, the only syringe exchange site in Mendocino County, she interviewed staff members and clients about how physical isolation imposed by the pandemic negatively impacted drug users and those in recovery who could not access in-person services or support groups as they had previously. This year, an infusion of both new federal and state funds has enabled the center to meet the demand for clean syringes and provide medication-assisted treatment.
In a story published September 17, [Spanish version] she reported that Mendocino County experienced a big increase in suicides last year – 70 percent higher than the year before — which public health officials attribute to the loneliness, isolation and depression triggered by the pandemic. Although data on suicides by Indigenous people in the county are incomplete, tribal officials are stepping up prevention efforts, especially among youth, since suicide is the second leading cause of death for Native youth, and Native youth have the highest youth suicide rate of all races ad ethnicities in the United States, 2.5 times the overall national average. On September 25, she reported on the lack of childbirth options for coastal residents of the county since the shuttering of the coast’s only labor and delivery center. Then came her report on an innovation in drug withdrawal and treatment services for inmates in the Mendocino County Jail [Spanish version]. The jail provides detox and withdrawal support to drug users while they’re in custody, but until recently, no referrals to drug treatment were made once they left, which often led to overdoses because they had lost their tolerance.
In her final piece September 30, the day that California's moratorium on evictions ended, Dana reported that a critical lack of affordable housing in Mendocino County means that residents who are evicted will have trouble finding someone else to live. The relocation of many tech workers from the Bay Area to attractive rural areas like Mendocino has made a longtime housing shortage even worse, she reported. [Click here for the Spanish version of the story.]
Taylor Walker, assistant editor of WitnessLA, an online publication that reports on criminal justice issues, reported a five-part series on an innovative program operated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department that enables pregnant and parenting women to maintain relationships with their children while awaiting trial or service sentences. In her first piece, she provided readers with their first look at the Office of Diversion and Reentry's three-year-old Maternal Health Diversion Program, which aims to offer pregnant or parenting women awaiting trial hope and pathway into supportive housing. In her second piece, she reported on how the program had led to a substantial reduction in the incarceration of pregnant women in three years. In her third piece, she reported on how entering the Maternal Health Diversion Program can go wrong for some women. In her fourth piece, several moms talk about their lives before being jailed, what the diversion program has meant to them and their hopes for the future. Her fifth piece explored the pressing need for LA’s Office of Diversion and Reentry to scale up its diversion capacity, and why, thus far, the money to do so hasn’t been there. In August 2019, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors made an historic commitment to reducing the county’s reliance on incarceration by canceling a $1.7 billion contract to build a new men’s jail and agreeing to implement a “care-first, jail-last” system. But the Los Angeles County’s Office of Diversion and Reentry (ODR) is operating at a financial deficit and against a population cap for its supportive housing programs, including the life-altering Maternal Health Diversion Program.
Early Impacts: Taylor’s series was widely read and referenced by decision makers. LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl’s communications director emailed Walker to thank her for shining a light on the issue of incarcerated people who are pregnant and mothers with young children, Barbara Osborn, Kuehl’s communications director, wrote her: “Women are invisible in the system, and every time we make them visible, they sink below the surface again. It’s a constant battle and I really appreciate what this series is doing to combat it.” Kuehl’s office also referenced Walker’s series in an invitation to a press briefing about a motion to accelerate the decarceration of women and LGBTQ+ individuals in LA County. During the same briefing, Judge Peter Espinoza, director of the Office of Diversion and Reentry, referenced Walker’s series and thanked her for writing about the mothers in the Maternal Health Diversion Program.