Sixty-Five New Bilingual, BICULTURAL Contact Tracers Ready to Serve!
PSU Social Work Students Trained as Contact Tracers to Serve the Latino Community
Story by Katy Swordfisk, PSU
While Oregon continues to battle rising COVID-19 cases, Roberto Orellana has been tracking some unsettling, yet familiar, statistics. Despite only making up 13% of the state’s population, late in the summer, Latinos represented 39% of all coronavirus cases.
Orellana, a professor with Portland State University’s School of Social Work, found Latinos in Oregon were more than 5 times as likely to get COVID-19 than the white population.
The burden of COVID-19 carried by Latinos in Oregon inspired Orellana to design a program where bicultural and bilingual students are trained to serve as contact tracers and respond to the Latino community.
“Throughout the pandemic, Latinos have been one of the most impacted populations by COVID-19,” Orellana said. “There's been a great disparity, and so they have carried a great burden of COVID-19 in Oregon. Some of the reasons are due to the nature of the jobs that many of them have as essential workers working in stores and farms and food processing plants.”
Further, Orellana said COVID-19 is poised to impact the Latino population, as well as other communities of color, more than others because of Oregon’s longstanding social structures.
“The history of receiving poor medical care is now affecting the community when people feel sick. People are less likely to seek care because in the past it didn't work so well, so why do it now?” he said.
With funding from Oregon Latino Leadership Network (OLLN) — via the Oregon Health Authority and federal dollars from the CARES Act — Orellana was able to design and implement a training program for PSU students to better respond to the Latino community.
Sixty-five students in the School of Social Work received contact tracing training from Johns Hopkins University, supplemented with culturally-tailored, bilingual training from PSU. Nearly all the students are Latino and bilingual — vital to the support they offer to the struggling community because students can use their lived experience to better inform their responses allowing for culturally tailored contact tracing. These students can also provide community education and work on COVID-19 prevention strategies, including COVID-19 vaccine dissemination.