Miami’s diverse community challenges effort to fight COVID-19

Focusing on immigrants
Caring for immigrants was a focus. In June, the American Friends Service Committee’s Miami Immigrant Rights Program, a Quaker organization promoting immigrant rights, worked with the Florida Health Department to bring mobile testing to migrant farmworkers and their families in Homestead, an agricultural community south of Miami.

They also distributed masks, food and information. 

Migrant workers often live in tents or crowded housing units, which makes preventing the transmission of COVID-19 more difficult, Baptist Health’s Ellis said. Long working hours and a lack of transportation that prevents testing access add another layer of complexity. 

“We see them typically when they’re very sick,” Ellis said. “They shy away from healthcare because some of them are undocumented.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in early June said agricultural communities represented the state’s No. 1 outbreak, a sentiment that was met with criticism by aid groups, which said the state failed to help those communities in the early months of the pandemic. 

In one instance, a farm worker who had been working in Miami-Dade County infected at least 76 other workers when he relocated to a watermelon farm in Alachua County in the northern part of the state. 
The Florida Health Department in Miami-Dade County also works with the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust, which coordinates the homeless response in the county. 

Together, the organizations created a team early in the pandemic to coordinate testing and contact tracing among the homeless population. Before that, the Homeless Trust also started distributing hand sanitizer, masks and face coverings and trilingual informational materials to homeless people. “Because we’re so warm, we have a population at all ends of the spectrum,” Ellis said. 

In September, the Homeless Trust started offering free flu shots through Walgreens to homeless people on the streets, at quarantine and isolation sites, and in emergency shelters. The trust serves an estimated 8,000 people experiencing homelessness. 

The state health department, as well as the hospitals, disseminate information in the area’s three predominant languages: English, Spanish and Creole. 

At Baptist Hospital, the staff mirrors the community, making it easier to care for patients who speak multiple languages and have various cultural backgrounds. “Our employees are as diverse as the community we live in,” said Segarra, who fluently speaks English and Spanish. “I do not speak Creole, yet there’s always a nurse or someone who does.”