Update Sept. 10: This event has been postponed to a future date because of the unhealthy air quality anticipated in the region due to wildfires in California, following guidance from the Oakland Fire Department. This story will be updated once a new date has been announced.
Researchers and community organizations are launching a two-day mass testing campaign in Oakland’s Fruitvale district to better understanding how COVID-19 has spread through the heavily Latinx neighborhood, which is one of the hardest hit in the Bay Area.
For one weekend on Sept. 12 and 13, people will be able to get a free coronavirus nose-swab test as well as an antibody test that will detect past exposure to the virus. Community organizations will also interview at least 100 essential workers, provide meals to families, and give away school supplies donated by the Golden State Warriors in hopes of making the testing experience less intimidating.
This tight-knit community is a painful case study in why the Bay Area’s Latinx residents have been disproportionately affected by COVID: Many here are essential workers who live in crowded homes where it’s impossible to isolate.
“We’re trying to take care of these families as best we can,” said Chris Iglesias, CEO of The Unity Council, which helped organize the campaign. “Hopefully we’ll learn a lot and get some powerful tools to get this under control here in Fruitvale and in East Oakland.”
Iglesias said the goal is to test about 4,000 people in the census tract just north of the Fruitvale BART Station, bordered by International and Foothill boulevards and between Fruitvale Avenue and High Street, although no one will be turned away. About two-thirds of residents in the census tract are Latinx, and the median household income is less than half what it is in Alameda County as a whole, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Testing will be conducted by the University of California San Francisco at La Clinica de la Raza’s pop-up testing location in a parking lot on East 12th Street and 35th Avenue, adjacent to the BART station. Nose-swab test results will come back within four days, antibody results within two weeks. Individuals who test positive will be contacted and referred to available support programs.
The campaign is a partnership between UCSF and the Resilient Fruitvale Task Force, a group led by The Unity Council which includes La Clinica, the Native American Health Center and other community organizations. The weekend effort will focus on testing essential workers and children, and participants are encouraged but not required to register ahead of time.
“Data collected will inform advocates, public health officials, and clinicians involved in the care of the Fruitvale community,” Dr. Alicia Fernández, Director of the UCSF Latinx Center of Excellence, said in a statement.
Iglesias said he started pitching the idea after seeing a presentation from Fernández about a similar effort to test everyone in one census tract in San Francisco’s Mission District. About 44 percent of the roughly 3,000 residents tested during that campaign were Latinx, but Latinx individuals represented 95 percent of positive results. An August study that tested about 2,500 Mission District residents found that 85 percent of those who tested positive primarily spoke Spanish.
Fruitvale was chosen because the neighborhood and surrounding 94601 ZIP code has a disproportionately high number of cases. The 94601 ZIP code has 380 cases per 10,000 residents, compared to 176 cases per 10,000 in Oakland overall. Iglesias said he saw the need for more testing and support for positive coronavirus patients in Fruitvale in the early days of the pandemic when his staff members and clients started testing positive.“A lot of our clients, a lot of our head start (early childhood education) families and not just the parents, everyone in the family, would be positive or would start showing symptoms,” he said.
Health officials and community groups hope the campaign will help identify more positive cases so they can connect people to programs that might help them make up for lost income or isolate safely away from family members.
Iglesias is also hoping for lessons that can be shared with similar cities where infections have exploded among communities of color. And, he’s hoping for something tangible — “concrete plans on how we get that infection rate down,” he said.
