Virginia Herrera and her daughter Ginger, 12, with a memorial image of Jesse Ruby who died in January of COVID-19 at the age of 38, in San Jose, Calif., April 3, 2021. The father who would drop everything and drive across town if his sons needed a ride. The cousin who spent weekends helping relatives move. The partner who worked odd jobs on weekends with his girlfriend, Virginia Herrera, to help make ends meet for an extended household in San Jose, California.
“It matters how old you are when you die, because your role in society differs,” said Dr. Mary Bassett, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “It’s a tale of two cities,” said Jennifer Loving, CEO of Destination: Home, a public-private partnership aiming to end homelessness in Santa Clara County, which includes San Jose. “We literally have Teslas sitting outside homeless encampments.”
“The goal is greater transparency about what has occurred during the pandemic,” Low said. “We need to know which neighborhoods have been most impacted. We want to understand precisely where people died of COVID, so we have data and facts to guide policy.” Four San Jose ZIP codes with largely Hispanic populations — 95116, 95122, 95127 and 95020 — accounted for 1 in 5 of the COVID deaths in Santa Clara County, even though they represented only 1 in 8 of the county's residents. Households in the four ZIP codes had incomes that were lower than the median in the county.
“I told him, ‘I’m not a pen pal,’” Herrera recalled. “‘I’m not going to write you in jail. You need to be out.’” Shortly before he fell ill, Ruby had landed a steady job building walk-in coolers and freezers . The job paid well, he got to drive the company truck, and there was plenty of overtime. “COVID-19 is so overwhelming that this previously known paradox, which is also called the healthy immigrant effect, is overwhelmed,” said Erika Garcia, an assistant professor of environmental health at the University of Southern California, whose study identified the discrepancies in death rates among younger adults in California.
Deaths of wage earners add to the hardships minority communities are already experiencing during the pandemic. On Dec. 4, Ruby’s fever spiked to 104 degrees, and he, too, struggled to breathe. His job’s private insurance had not kicked in yet — he was on California’s Medicaid program, MediCal — and Herrera drove him to a hospital emergency room.
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