Customers trickle into the Calipatria Queen Market as cashier Terry Aguilera and her regulars talk about how the coronavirus pandemic is ravaging their sleepy town 40 miles north of the Mexican border.
Speaking through a face mask, Aguilera shares updates about who has gotten sick, who’s been moved to the intensive care unit and who they’ve buried in the last week.
She says it’s hard to understand why a small farming community like Calipatria and the rest of Imperial County have been hit so hard. The county, in the far southeast corner of California, has the state’s highest infection rate, by far.
Aguilera said three of her friends have died, and much of her extended family has been infected. She said people in the town of 7,114 now wear their masks religiously, and that many are suffering from anxiety and panic attacks.
“Somehow everybody is still getting sick,” Aguilera said from behind a Plexiglas barrier. “As soon as we get sick, we get the virus.”
Imperial County, an impoverished rural area along the Arizona and Mexico borders, has drawn statewide attention over the last week as Gov. Gavin Newsom called on officials here to fully reinstate a stay-at-home order. The county proposed a plan to do that Monday.
Imperial County at a glance
Population: 181,215
By race/ethnicity: 85% Hispanic, 10% non-Hispanic white, 3.3% Black
Per capita income: $17,590
People in poverty: 21.4%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
But Imperial’s situation was alarming long before its leaders came under Newsom’s scrutiny.
Since the outset of the pandemic, the county’s infection rate has been about six times higher than California’s as a whole, with at least 2,835 cases per 100,000 people. Statewide, the average is 491 cases per 100,000 people.
The percentage of people tested in the county who are confirmed to have the virus has soared to nearly 23%, about four times the state total.
Longtime residents and community activists say Imperial County epitomizes the pandemic’s worst inequities. It’s a microcosm of the racial and economic disparities that exacerbate the disease’s uneven toll.
Almost a quarter of the county’s 181,215 residents live in poverty, and its population is 85% Latino, including many migrant farm workers and recent immigrants.
The county has high rates of asthma, diabetes and obesity. It ranks lowest out of California’s 58 counties on a wide range of public health indicators, according to a report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Luis Flores, an activist with the Imperial Valley Equity and Justice Coalition who lives in Calexico, on the border with Mexico, started a petition in June to oppose county leaders who asked the state to let Imperial reopen more quickly.
The petition drew more than 2,000 signatures, but Flores said the debate was about more than reopening malls and churches. He said residents want to address disparities fueling the outbreak.
“We want to point attention to what feels like the crisis underneath this crisis,” Flores said. “The valley is sort of an extreme version of that, in part because a lot of the agricultural labor does reside in Mexico.”
Flores said migrant farm workers who cross the border every day to pick vegetables and work in meatpacking plants are often transported in crowded shuttle buses and aren’t given masks.
Local officials agree their shared borders with Mexico and Arizona — where infection rates have spiked amid loosened statewide restrictions on public life — could be fueling the county’s higher numbers. They note that no other California county faces that challenge.
“We aren’t the same,” said Jason Jackson, mayor pro tem of El Centro, the county’s largest city, with 44,000 residents. “We’ve got a state (Arizona) with different rules, and a country with different rules.”
Imperial County officials responded to Newsom’s demand on Monday by proposing to once again close retail stores and indoor church services, though a county spokeswoman said they won’t proceed until they hear back from the governor’s office.
The county was already moving slower than much of the state in reopening its economy.
On Monday, dozens of shoppers strolled through the Imperial Valley Mall in El Centro, where about half the stores were open.
Among the people there was Arthur Rodriguez, who works in a clothing store. He said he was alarmed by the county’s decision to allow retail businesses to reopen several weeks ago. He worries about carrying the virus home to his father and sister, who have health problems.
“It’s good for the economy, but it’s not good for us as humans,” Rodriguez said. “I don’t want to be exposed just because I have to work.”
Luis Olmedo, director of Comité Cívico del Valle, an environmental justice advocacy group, said the pandemic has laid bare the region’s inequities.
“We have been in endemic mode for a very long time,” he said. “If we ignore those (social) determinants, it’s like sending soldiers to war without the right equipment.”
The Imperial Valley is also medically underserved, with a ratio of about 4,250 people for every primary care doctor. Since the start of the pandemic, more than 500 patients have been transferred to other counties.
Environmental crises are rampant. Air quality is poor, in part because of dust and pesticides from agriculture. And toxic dust from the nearby Salton Sea is blowing through the region as the lake evaporates due to a warming climate.
Olmedo said the fight over shutdown orders speaks to a broader disconnect between the region’s largely low-income and disadvantaged population and much of its political leadership.
“The historical political influence here has been industry,” he said. “This push to reopen I call tell you is a corporate move.”
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