As COVID-19 whipped through Hazleton, making it one of Pennsylvania’s epicenters for the disease, residents and officials searched for the possible cause.
They identified several: The region’s burgeoning warehouses and food packing plants crammed hundreds of workers together on round-the-clock shifts. Those workers often lived in densely packed apartment buildings that facilitated transmission.
Many traveled regularly to hard-hit New York City, the source of a wave of new Hispanic residents who arrived in Hazleton seeking work and more affordable living over the last few decades. Latinos brought with them a cultural tradition of caring for elderly parents, grandparents and extended family members under the same roof, increasing the likelihood of spreading the disease in the household, and a language barrier may have contributed to a lack of understanding of precautionary measures to slow the spread of the disease.
“The most-spoken language in Hazleton is Spanish,” community activist Annie Mendez said. “Why not call an emergency meeting with [Hispanic leaders]?”
Lehigh Valley Health Network’s two COVID-19 testing centers in Hazleton have reported the vast majority of Luzerne County’s positive cases. Hazleton has about one-10th of the county’s population, but roughly 88% of the county’s novel coronavirus cases.
Mayor Jeff Cusat on Wednesday said the number of positive cases confirmed in Hazleton was around 1,000, when the state Department of Health had announced 1,134 for the entire county. As of Saturday, Luzerne County ranked third in the state for confirmed coronavirus cases per capita, trailing Monroe and Lehigh counties, respectively. For every 100,000 residents, Monroe County had 462 positive cases, Lehigh County had 447 and Luzerne County had 432.
Cusat imposed a curfew April 5, in effect from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., in an effort to promote social distancing and keep people at home. Officials in at least six nearby municipalities followed suit.
On April 3, Luzerne County Manager David Pedri asked Gov. Tom Wolf to deploy the Pennsylvania Army National Guard to assist in Hazleton, a request Wolf declined. Cusat said last week he didn’t think the Guard would be needed to enforce the curfew, as the city has a competent police department, but he would like the Guard to be available to set up a field hospital if Lehigh Valley Hospital-Hazleton became overwhelmed with patients.
About 10 days ago, hospital president John Fletcher said social distancing in Hazleton was only at about 18% and would need to increase to about 70% if the hospital was not to eventually be overwhelmed with coronavirus patients.
Cusat said last week he’s fairly certain that not all of the coronavirus patients live in the city proper, but Hazleton’s estimated population of about 30,000-35,000 is roughly equal to the populations of nearly all the surrounding townships and boroughs combined. The Census Bureau pegs the city’s population closer to 25,000, but local officials believe city residents were significantly undercounted in the last decennial census.
Economic factors
Teri Ooms, executive director of the Institute for Public Policy and Economic Development at Wilkes University, said she believes the continued operations in one of the Hazleton area’s major employment sectors is a large contributor to the spike in coronavirus cases there.
“I think probably a large part of the reason has to do with the business sector concentrated there that includes warehouses, manufacturers and distribution centers,” she said.
Hazle Township has some of the largest such facilities in the area, including an Amazon fulfillment center. Cargill, a meat processing plant just over the Hazle Township border in Schuylkill County, closed down last week after 164 of the plant’s 900 employees tested positive for COVID-19.
“You’ve got these large facilities with hundreds of people and they usually work three shifts, seven days a week, and the processes don’t lend themselves to social distancing, so you can’t always be 6 or more feet apart,” Ooms said.
She also said running three shifts doesn’t always allow time to follow sanitizing guidelines released by the state. Representatives of Amazon and Cargill did not respond to requests for comment.
Ooms also noted that many of the people who work at these companies are supplied by temp agencies that don’t offer sick days or other benefits.
“It could be that missing a day’s work means not being able to put food on the table to feed your family,” Ooms said, so health officials’ advice to stay home when sick can go unheeded.
Many of the companies that do offer sick leave to employees frown on employees using it, Ooms said.
“The demographics of our region don’t really allow people to have time off and be paid, and I think we have to recognize that, especially because this is a high-poverty area. Less than one in five households earn more than $25,000 a year,” she said.
Language barrier
The fact that Latinos make up close to 60% of Hazleton’s population also throws a language barrier into the mix. More than half of the households in Hazleton speak Spanish, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Mendez thinks local elected officials should have reached out to and coordinated with the Hispanic community sooner and to a greater extent to make sure people with limited English proficiency understood all of the safeguards they should take in connection with the virus.
Culturally, the Latino population is “very familial oriented, with several generations living under one roof. Children take care of their parents and grandparents,” Ooms said. Larger numbers of people in the same household can make it more difficult to socially distance oneself, she said.
Cusat agreed with Ooms and also noted that most properties in the city are residential multifamily dwellings, meaning apartment houses and double-block homes.
“Even if they don’t share the interior, they still share hallways, porches, screen doors,” Cusat said.
He also said many of Hazleton’s residents have family in New York and New Jersey, where the disease swelled earlier.
Cusat negotiated with two van companies that agreed to halt shuttle service to New York and New Jersey and has since asked companies that shuttle employees to local industrial parks to limit the number of passengers to four.
Cusat also said he believes the messages he and health officials are disseminating to the general public are quickly finding their way to the Hispanic community. He said a bilingual city employee translates all of his social media messages during working hours, and local Hispanic journalists translate news from federal, state and local officials and post it online. They stopped publishing paper editions of their newspapers after Wolf ordered many of the businesses where they distributed the newspapers to close.
A call for more cleaning
Mendez said she knows scores of people who work in the Hazleton area industrial parks. She maintained that agencies that provide the industries with temporary workers bring in workers from Allentown, Reading, Harrisburg, New York, New Jersey and other places when they can’t fill requests for workers with local residents.
Mendez also said workers had been telling her that management at many of the sites had not been following proper sanitization or social distancing until recently, nor had they been providing employees with adequate personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves. At some companies, she said, workers used to having fresh masks and gloves after breaks and bathroom trips have been provided with only one mask or pair of gloves daily and not instructed on any new usage guidelines. She said management initially tried to keep it quiet when an employee tested positive for the virus to prevent panic and having healthy employees calling off out of fear of catching the disease.
All of these things, Mendez said, contributed to the further spread of the virus at the plants. She believes plant management bears more blame than the temp agencies because “they’re responsible for what goes on under their roofs.” They also should have foreseen outbreaks connected to their facilities because of the working conditions there and taken action sooner, she said.
Mendez also noted that a majority of plants in the area have “point systems” in which employees are assigned a point each time they call off or are late for work. When they reach a certain number of points, they are terminated, she said. These same plants don’t offer even their full-time employees sick days, only personal days that, like vacation days, must be scheduled in advance.
Hazle Township Supervisor Jim Montone took issue with several of Mendez’s claims related to management’s not providing personal protective gear or enforcing social distancing protocols, as well as her claims that elected officials didn’t respond fast enough or appropriately.
After receiving complaints about working conditions over the past couple weeks, Montone said, he dispatched a code enforcement officer to the plants. He said the officer found that plant safety protocols established by the state were being followed, and if they weren’t, it’s because management was unaware of them. Montone said “not closing the borders to New York and New Jersey [was] a big problem” in slowing the spread of the virus.
He pointed a finger at Wolf for refusing to do so, although some legal scholars have said governors are limited in border action and that only Congress can regulate interstate commerce. Montone dismissed the notion that local officials could have done more earlier to protect the well-being of workers at industrial parks.
“I believe we acted as soon as we could,” he said.
Brian Downs, spokesman for LVHN, said of all the COVID-19 positive patients who are being treated in the five hospitals throughout the LVHN network, 16% were being treated at LVH-Hazleton as of Saturday. Of all coronavirus patients in the network on ventilators, 13% were being treated at LVH-Hazleton, he said. And at LVH-Hazleton, 23% of the in-hospital positive patients are in the intensive care unit.
“So we clearly have more in-hospital positive cases at [sites other than Hazleton],” Downs said.
But people should not take this as an indication it’s not a problem in Hazleton and Luzerne County and let their guard down, Downs said.
“The social distancing, staying home unless absolutely necessary to go out and not gathering in large groups, even if you think no one is sick, must continue to get this under control and to start bringing the cases and greater threat down,” he said.
(c)2020 the Standard-Speaker (Hazleton, Pa.)
Visit the Standard-Speaker (Hazleton, Pa.) at standardspeaker.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
