Coronavirus surging in Oklahoma City’s Hispanic community

Jess Olivo survived cancer twice.

But it still didn’t prepare her for her family’s struggle with COVID-19.

Olivo, 34, and five of her family members contracted the highly contagious virus.

“It’s hard to deal with one person being sick,” she said. “Imagine all of us — there’s six of us.”

Her husband and father were hospitalized due to complications from COVID-19. Olivo, her 16-year-old daughter, mother and brother also contracted the virus.

In recent weeks, COVID-19 has surged among the Hispanic community in south Oklahoma City.

Olivo, who lives on the border between Oklahoma City and Warr Acres, knows firsthand that COVID-19 can hit harder in communities of color.

'If you've been through cancer, you can beat this'

At age 9, Olivo was diagnosed with Stage 4 Hodgkin's lymphoma after she discovered two lumps in her neck.

For the next year, she was in and out of the hospital, often for weeks on end. Her life was a blur of surgeries, radiation and chemotherapy treatments until she was deemed cancer free.

In 2011, Olivo was diagnosed with thyroid cancer just weeks after the birth of her son. She had to undergo surgery to have her thyroid removed when her youngest child was just 3 months old.

The recovery was difficult because even a minuscule move of her head would result in excruciating neck pain.

COVID-19 was similar, except Olivo had agonizing headaches and was mostly confined to her bed for about a week.

“When I dealt with COVID, it was like my brain and skull were tearing apart because I had severe headaches,” she said. “But I would always tell myself, ‘if you’ve been through cancer, you can beat this.’”

Olivo’s husband spent a week at Mercy Hospital after developing a severe cough and pneumonia. He was released on July 17, but is expected to be on oxygen for at least a month.

The supplemental oxygen is the only thing that helps minimize the severe cough that would otherwise keep him up all night, Olivo said.

A waiter at a Mexican restaurant, Olivo’s husband has been out of work for about a month. He’s the sole provider for the household because Olivo, afraid of catching COVID-19, quit her job as a prekindergarten teacher in March.

Now, Olivo has a nearly full-time job getting updates on her father’s medical condition, juggling bills and trying to get her landlord and other bill collectors to grant her some leniency.

Olivo applied for medical assistance from Mercy, but she still dreads the day her family starts receiving medical bills for her husband’s care.

“Bills and rent don’t wait,” she said.

Since the pandemic first emerged in the state, Oklahoma City Councilwoman JoBeth Hamon has worried COVID-19 would disproportionately affect working class parts of the city.

Hamon represents Oklahoma City’s Ward 6, which includes a large swath of the south part of the city.

Many residents who earn minimum wage or less aren’t able to work from home, she said.

“I’ve been saying for months that the people that are going to be most affected are the folks that don’t have that option to stay home,” she said.

Seeing is believing

Manuel Sauceda will celebrate his 55th birthday this week from a hospital bed in Norman.

Sauceda, who has diabetes, was hospitalized on July 3 due to complications from COVID-19. He spent weeks on a ventilator and developed heart complications while hospitalized.

Olivo, his daughter, calls twice a day to talk, but Sauceda doesn’t respond because saying very little hurts too much — a side effect of the lifesaving, but invasive ventilator.

He’s progressing slowly and will need physical and speech therapy to help him recover.

With visitors expressly prohibited from seeing COVID-19 patients at the hospital, birthday plans are up in the air, Olivo said. Family can wish him a happy birthday from outside his hospital room, but Olivo’s worried that might make her father too sad.

Sauceda, who immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1980s, believed he picked up COVID-19 at one of his two jobs as a waiter.

Olivo believes that’s how the virus spread to her mother, Maria Sauceda, and younger brother who lives with her parents.

Sauceda wasn’t a believer in COVID-19 before he got sick, Olivo said. He resisted wearing a mask and thought the news about the virus was overblown because he didn’t know anyone who’d gotten sick.

“Hispanics are more hard-headed,” she said. “They’re really not believers until they see it or until someone from their family gets sick with COVID. That’s how my father was.”

Now, Olivo’s family has become an example of the realities of COVID-19.

When friends, extended family and neighbors call to check up on Sauceda, Olivo is quick to remind them not to dismiss the virus.

Olivo is close with her parents, who live about four minutes away and visit several times a week.

One of those visits resulted in Olivo, her husband and later, her eldest of three children contracting COVID-19 and having to be quarantined away from her siblings for two weeks.

Hispanics often live in multigenerational households, said Brenda Lozano, executive director of Dream Action Oklahoma.

That’s become a challenge in the age of COVID-19 when health officials are encouraging people to forgo most in-person social gatherings and keep their distance from one another.

“It’s very well ingrained in our culture, as Latinx people, that we keep our family close,” Lozano said. “We keep our loved ones close, so social distancing in and of itself has not been the easiest thing to do.”

Building trust to improve prevention

COVID-19 is surging in predominantly Hispanic communities in south Oklahoma City.

But tackling the problem is complicated, and requires addressing some cultural norms and trying to restore faith in government.

The location of Oklahoma City-area coronavirus hotspots can vary from week to week. But one of the near-consistent hotspots in south Oklahoma City last month was in ZIP code 73119, where roughly 60% of the residents are Hispanic. Several neighboring ZIP codes have also seen surges of new COVID-19 cases.

Dream Action Oklahoma, which seeks to empower the local immigrant community, has shifted much of its social justice work into helping Oklahoma City’s Hispanic community survive the pandemic, Lozano said.

At the beginning of the pandemic, many in the community viewed the coronavirus and face masks as a controversial political issue, she said. There’s also a deep pride among many Hispanics that can keep them from asking for help when they get sick.

Government skepticism runs deep, especially among those who are undocumented, Lozano said. That can play into whether a person feels comfortable getting tested for COVID-19 or seeking treatment when they get sick.

“There’s definitely a fear in getting asked a question about where you come from,” she said.

A spokeswoman for the Oklahoma City-County Health Department said COVID-19 testers do not ask a person’s citizenship status. They only ask basic biographical information in order to contact people about their test results.

Lozano said Dream Action has focused on taking the politics out of the coronavirus conversation. A big part of that means amplifying the voices of Hispanic families who have suffered from COVID-19 and talking about the financial toll that can come from being hospitalized or missing work due to being sick.

“What we’ve been doing now is talking with families that are directly impacted, so we can take the narrative away from the political, and focus on the lives that are being lost in the global pandemic and focus on how our people are having to go to the hospital and they don’t have the resources to pay for those visits,” she said.

Of those who tested positive for COVID-19 in Oklahoma County and voluntarily gave their demographic information, 32% were white, said Oklahoma City-County Health Department spokeswoman LToya Knighten. And 30% were Hispanic, although Hispanics and Latinos make up about 18% of the county’s population.

“We’re definitely seeing a large proportion of the Hispanic community being impacted by this virus,” Knighten said.

Connecting with the city’s Spanish-speaking residents in their language is just part of the COVID-19 prevention equation, she said. The health department is running Spanish-language ads on Telemundo and Spanish radio stations and hosting weekly Facebook live sessions in Spanish.

The department also is working to build up trust in the Hispanic community so people are more likely to adopt COVID-19 prevention measures of wearing a mask, social distancing and frequent hand washing.

That includes reaching out to some of the larger churches in south Oklahoma City to talk to church leaders about the best way to communicate prevention measures to members of their congregation. The City-County Health Department also launched a COVID-19 newsletter designed for Spanish speakers that goes out to the faith-based community and some Hispanic organizations, Knighten said.

“In terms of messaging, trust is probably our biggest challenge,” she said.