"Lives cut short: COVID-19's heavy burden on older Latinos"
U.S. News & World Report interviewed Dr. Michael Rodriguez about how the pandemic has eaten away at the Latino edge in life expectancy.
June 1, 2022U.S. News & World Report
In December 2020, about 10 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Javier Perez-Torres boarded a bus from Los Angeles to Tijuana, Mexico, to buy a bracelet for the upcoming birthday of one of the five granddaughters who lived with him and his wife. Perez-Torres, 68, a Mexican immigrant, liked the selection of inexpensive jewelry available in the city just south of the U.S. border, so he made the trek, which lasted more than four hours round-trip.
Perez-Torres wore a mask on the bus. But shortly after he returned to his family’s apartment in the working-class neighborhood of Boyle Heights, just east of downtown Los Angeles, he fell ill with COVID-19. He suffered from a high fever, a hacking cough and body aches. His wife, Alicia Miron, and their five granddaughters also contracted COVID-19, but none became as ill as the patriarch, who ended up at nearby White Memorial hospital.
For more than a month, Miron went to the hospital to see her husband, who’d been intubated. But nurses – following COVID-19 safety protocols – wouldn’t let her in. She’d sit on a bench outside the hospital for hours, then go home, and repeat the process.
UCLA Fielding students selected for prestigious ASPPH This Is Public Health Ambassador program
Sarah Stigers, UCLA Fielding MPH student in the Department of Health Policy and Management, and Lauren Morales, UCLA Fielding MPH student in the Department of Community Health Sciences, have been selected to be part of the prestigious This is Public Health Ambassador program, led by the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health.
