COVID’s ‘untold story’: Texas Blacks and Latinos are dying in the prime of their lives

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Claudio Sanchez is facing his first Christmas without his fiancée, Blanca Leon; his mother, Cecilia; and Blanca’s father, Jose. All three died of COVID-19.

Now Claudio, 33, a machine operator at a paper company, cares for his and Blanca’s two sons, his sister and three young cousins who used to live with his mom and aunt. His aunt is hospitalized with COVID-19 and on a ventilator. The Sanchezes are two motherless generations, grieving together.

“I feel like I’ve been robbed, just beaten up,” said Claudio, who lives in Lancaster. “It’s ripped apart everything.”

Conventional wisdom says COVID-19 threatens only the very old. That’s not true in Texas’ Latino and Black communities, where working-age adults are dying at rates many times higher than those of whites.

“That discussion of ‘Oh, it’s all the really old people’ — that’s a white people’s story,” said Sarah Reber, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles and a fellow at the nonprofit Brookings Institution.

In Texas, among those ages 25 to 64, the COVID death rate for Hispanics is more than four times as high as that of non-Hispanic whites, a Dallas Morning News analysis of state health data found. Blacks in that age group are dying at more than twice the rate of whites. Similar trends hold true for Dallas County.

While losing a person of any age to COVID is tragic, the virus has been disproportionately cutting down Blacks and Latinos during their most productive years, when they’re working, raising children and saving money for homes, retirement and their children’s college educations.

“That has been the untold story of all the injustices that COVID has highlighted,” said Erin Carlson, director of graduate public health programs at the University of Texas at Arlington. “The pandemic is taking people of color during the prime of their lives.”

The deaths have sweeping implications for Texas’ economy, for its higher education system and for a rapidly unfolding mental health crisis fueled by trauma and grief.

More than 4,200 Hispanics between ages 25 and 64 have died of COVID in Texas. That works out to 74 deaths per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, more than 1,100 whites in that age group have died, which works out to 17 deaths per 100,000. The death rate for Blacks fell in between, at 40 for every 100,000.

The age disparities have gone underreported, Carlson said, because health experts were not initially focused on them. “We were aggregating all of the ages together,” she said. “We were not delineating the data by age when it came to race and ethnicity. When you separate it out by age, now we see a significant and unjust disparity that demands attention.”

End of the ‘Latino Paradox’?

The impact of these losses will reverberate long after the pandemic recedes, experts say. Latinos have been by far the hardest hit of Texas’ ethnic and racial groups, and losses threaten to reverse the so-called “Latino Paradox.”

The term describes a seeming contradiction: Latinos have a lower socioeconomic status than whites but a longer life expectancy. Support from extended family and friends is thought to be at least partly behind Latinos’ traditionally low mortality rates.

That was before COVID-19 weaponized family togetherness. Rogelio Sáenz, a demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio, says the paradox has already vanished among Latinos ages 65 to 74 and will soon fade among those ages 55 to 64. “The longer the pandemic continues, we’re going to see other age categories follow suit,” Sáenz said.

At The News’ request, Sáenz calculated the total number of years of life lost to COVID-19 by racial and ethnic group in Texas. The number represents the difference between a person’s age at death from COVID-19 and that person’s life expectancy in Texas based on their age, race or ethnicity. Latinos have lost more than twice as many life years as whites — a total of 241,446. The figure reflects Texas’ large Latino population, its relative youth, Latinos’ long life expectancy and the heavy toll that COVID has taken on the community.

These staggering losses have several implications. First, they are likely to damage the Texas economy, Sáenz said. Young Latinos have fueled Texas’ economic growth, driving higher-education enrollment, expanding demand for housing, launching new businesses and filling essential jobs in health care, transportation and manufacturing.

The pandemic will also create new cycles of poverty and reinforce the old, said Dr. Sharon Davis, chief medical officer at the nonprofit Los Barrios Unidos Community Clinic. Children who had hoped to go to college may feel compelled to stay home and work to support widowed parents and younger siblings, she said. Families face the financial devastation of unemployment combined with medical and funeral bills.

The pandemic is already leaving a legacy of mental illness. Davis’ clinic employs five bilingual counselors, has an opening for a sixth and may need to add more staff to meet growing demand. Many of Davis’ patients escaped violence and persecution to come to the U.S. The isolation and loss associated with COVID “adds an excruciating layer of emotional pain,” she said.

Trauma and grief

In July, COVID-19 took the life of Metchell Dixon-Cameron’s mother. A month later, the disease returned to claim Metchell’s husband’s life.

The husband, Andrew Cameron, spent his final days in the hospital, and Metchell wasn’t allowed to visit him. She wonders whether being there might have helped Andrew through his illness. “We had been together 25 years, and we’d hardly ever been apart,” said Metchell, 54, who is Black.

The hospital allowed her to see him only when he was dying. “If you can suit me up for when he’s getting ready to pass, why can’t I do that when he’s still alive so he can see me and talk to me?” she said.

Metchell, a home health aide, couldn’t face returning to the apartment she’d shared with Andrew, so she moved in temporarily with her son, Cortney, his wife and their six children.

Claudio Sanchez also relives painful memories of being separated from his fiancée the moment he dropped her off in the emergency room. He argued with the guard, trying to persuade him to let him inside.

Now, Claudio wishes he’d spent that time talking with Blanca instead. “That was the last time I saw her,” he said.

Claudio hasn’t had time to process his feelings. Instead, he keeps busy. He works at least five days a week from 7 a.m. until 3 p.m. His sister, a high school senior, cares for her cousins during the day. After work, Claudio stops at Walmart for groceries, fixes dinner, cleans the kitchen, cleans the bathrooms, runs the laundry, plans and organizes lunches for the next day, and finally goes to bed.

Then he wakes at 5 a.m. and does it all over again.

When Claudio isn’t preoccupied with the children, his mind churns over finances. There are food bills for a family of seven, winter clothes, Wi-Fi bills for online school, truck payments, the mortgage, insurance, medical and funeral costs.

Blanca had helped support the family as a medical assistant and had been striving for more. On top of her full-time job, she’d been working toward an associate’s degree to become an MRI technologist.

The worst moments for Claudio come when his children cry. Both his sons, Daniel, 6, and Jose, 14, have days when they break down and want their mother.

“It’s hard to comfort them because I’m not the comforting type,” Claudio said. “I’m more of the strict parent. It’s something I’ve had to try to do.”

What makes a household?

Behind the high mortality rates among young Blacks and Latinos are a host of factors, including lower rates of health coverage and employment in front-line jobs like health care and food production that expose workers to many other people. Black and Latino families are also more likely than white families to live in larger, multigenerational households, where the virus can spread more easily.

Blacks and Latinos also have higher rates of diabetes, obesity and other conditions that can make COVID-19 more severe. The conditions also affect many Blacks and Latinos at younger ages than whites, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

Claudio’s fiancée and his mother both had diabetes. But so does Claudio, and he wonders why the virus took both their lives but triggered relatively mild symptoms in him.

While Latinos have higher COVID mortality rates in Texas than in the U.S. as a whole, white and Black people in Texas have had lower COVID-19 mortality rates than they do nationally, said Sáenz of UT-San Antonio.

That may be because Blacks have a relatively higher socioeconomic status in the state than Blacks in the U.S. do, he said. In contrast, Texas Latinos fare worse socioeconomically than Latinos across the nation do.

That does not excuse the disparities, however.

“The numbers are too high for both groups,” said Dr. Jewel Mullen, associate dean for health equity and an assistant professor of population health at the University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School.

Misinformation has also contributed to the deaths. Benjamin, of the American Public Health Association, said Blacks, at the start of the pandemic, were exposed to false social media messages telling them they were immune to COVID-19.

Davis, of Los Barrios Unidos, said Texas’ patchwork of COVID restrictions proved confusing. Many people thought that, once the state reopened, it was safe to see people outside their household again.

Many people also interpreted the term “household” differently. Some believed it applied to close relatives they didn’t live with but saw regularly. Only in November did the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention define a household member as someone who has lived in the home for the past 14 days, Davis said.

“We are spreading the stuff personally within our families,” said Lupe Garcia, who has run Calvario Funeral Homes for nearly four decades. He said he’s never seen such a sobering chain of death — not even during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. When he hears that someone died of COVID-19, the cause of infection usually comes up.

“It’s not ‘I got it at Target or Sam’s,’ no. It’s ‘We got it at a birthday party.’ “

That is how the chain of infection started in Claudio’s family. His fiancée Blanca’s parents invited close family to their house to celebrate her mother’s birthday in early July. There was hand sanitizer but no masks.

“We felt there was no need to wear a mask, because we were all being safe,” Claudio said.