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Communities of color have been especially hard-hit by this pandemic. In California, Latinos have been infected at a higher rate than other groups. Many are essential workers, and many also live in multigenerational households, as Elly Yu of member station KPCC reports.
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ELLY YU, BYLINE: Maria Hernandez shares a four-bedroom house with her husband, three daughters and her 85-year-old mother.
MARIA HERNANDEZ: (Laughter).
YU: Her 3-year-old granddaughter is often there, too. You can hear her in the background.
HERNANDEZ: It's a full house, yes. It's a full house, yes.
YU: To Hernandez, family is everything. They're close. So when the pandemic hit, she was really worried, especially about her older mom. Hernandez works night shifts at a grocery store. Although she'd been careful while at work and at home, one day in late May, she felt this wave of exhaustion just hit her.
HERNANDEZ: My husband took me to emergency room because my fever was up to 102. I had trouble breathing. I felt dizzy. I felt nauseous.
YU: Hernandez tested positive for the coronavirus. She isolated in the master bedroom upstairs while her family brought her food outside the door. In total, she shut herself in for about seven weeks.
HERNANDEZ: It was an experience that I don't wish upon anybody because this thing, instead of getting you guys closer to your family, was getting us far apart. It's very hard.
YU: Her family members, including her mom, didn't get COVID-19, but Hernandez still worries about bringing the virus back home since she's going back to work. It's one transmission pattern experts have seen across the state. Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo is the chair of the epidemiology department at the University of California, San Francisco.
KIRSTEN BIBBINS-DOMINGO: We have throughout the pandemic just seen in the hospitals how devastating this is for our Latinx community, that people who are front-line workers in areas in construction and in the restaurant industry, in particular, are oftentimes being infected in the workplace.
YU: And then bringing the virus back home. In multigenerational households with essential workers, it can be hard to limit the spread. Bibbins-Domingo acknowledges there are benefits to living with extended family. She does it herself and is part of a growing trend across the country.
BIBBINS-DOMINGO: Our seniors are often isolated. Multigenerational households offer that built-in way of making sure that people are still living in community.
YU: But it does pose an additional challenge, especially when people are living in tighter quarters. That's something Dr. Don Garcia has been seeing among his patients. He's the medical director at Clinica Romero, a community health center in Los Angeles. One of his patients was a woman in her 20s who shared a one-bedroom with her family when she got exposed.
DON GARCIA: So now she was bringing infection to her sister, of course to her parents and her young infant and young child.
YU: Garcia says in tough housing markets like Southern California, many of his patients do live in closer, confined spaces.
GARCIA: They have - are put in a housing situation or living space situation that causes the transmission of infection to progress forward.
YU: For Maria Hernandez, she has space in her house, but her day-to-day interactions with her mother have changed.
HERNANDEZ: I had to stop doing what I did, giving her a hug. We Latinos are used to that, giving them a hug, a kiss on the cheek - you know, letting them know we are back, we're secure, we're home.
YU: Despite the challenge of keeping her family safe, she says she wouldn't have it any other way.
For NPR News, I'm Elly Yu in Los Angeles.
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