'It cost me everything': In Texas, COVID-19 exacts a deadly toll among Hispanic residents

Nationally and in parts of Texas, the coronavirus has also disproportionately sickened and killed Black residents, another group with unequal access to health care.

Leonor Quiroz's friends set up a fundraiser for her after she and her husband of nearly 10 years were hospitalized with COVID-19 in May. Leonor, 47, thinks her husband, Valentin, 52, brought the virus home from a construction site. He couldn't afford to take time off work.She was hospitalized first; Valentin, who continued going to work even as his symptoms worsened, followed her into HCA Houston Healthcare Tomball days later.

Image: Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo speaks after a tour of medical shelter in Houston, Texas, on April 11, 2020. By the end of the week, his symptoms had worsened."My uncle called and said: 'Your dad is not doing very well. He can't catch his breath,'" Cristobal said in Spanish. Among the small subset of these at-home deaths later tested and confirmed to have been the result of COVID-19, an overwhelming majority of people have been Hispanic, according to data from the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences. In the first two weeks of July, the medical examiner attributed the at-home deaths of 22 people in Harris County to the coronavirus — already surpassing the number for all of June. Sixteen of the dead, 73 percent, were Hispanic.

Although the system's Hispanic COVID-19 patients have been younger — more in their 20s, 30s and 40s than in other age groups — McCarthy said a similar percentage, about 4 percent, end up requiring admission to an intensive care unit compared with patients of other ethnicities, who tend to be older. McCarthy said that's partly due to the underlying health conditions experts have said can lead to poor outcomes even for young people in otherwise good health.

Weeks before the prayer vigil in the parking lot outside Memorial Hermann Southeast Hospital, Valery Martinez got a distressing call from her aunt. Arturo"Tudy" Valles Jr., 41, her cousin, had been sick for days before his mother noticed him straining for air in the middle of the night on June 26 and finally called 911. The ambulance rushed him from his home in Pasadena, a majority-Hispanic city southeast of Houston, to the hospital, where he was soon connected to a ventilator.

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