Hundreds of at-risk California Filipinos not tested for COVID-19, UC Davis study finds

A new survey conducted by Filipino American researchers at the University of California, Davis shows that hundreds of California’s Filipino Americans are at risk for contracting the coronavirus, but have yet to be tested.

More than 800 people in the Filipino community statewide answered the survey over 10 weeks. Despite the fact that 41 percent of the respondents reported they or other members of their household were health care workers, 93 percent said they still had not been tested.

Additionally, 56 percent of the respondents said they were living with people with pre-existing health conditions that would put them at greater risk for contracting COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus. Yet 41 percent said they did not know where the nearest testing facility was.

“This shows me how information is being sent out there,” said Roy “RJ” Taggueg, a UC Davis doctoral student and the survey’s lead researcher. “Is that information easily accessible for Filipinos? … It’s not.

“What I think it suggests is that we have a considerable number of people who are working in health care, or care-related work, that is outside of institutional settings,” said Dr. Robyn Rodriguez, chair of the UC Davis Asian American studies department and director of the Carlos Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies. “My hunch is … (Filipino) home health care workers are providing care in sites that have gotten very little attention and are often highly unregulated.”

Rodriguez described one respondent’s answer that stuck with her from a nursing home worker, who said his Filipino colleagues in other care facilities were being pushed to work more hours with COVID-19 patients. That “alarms” her, she said.

Many Filipino migrant workers are willing to put themselves at great risk, Rodriguez said, because of their debt bondage or legal status. Workers who immigrated through labor recruitment programs, Rodriguez said, often owe their recruiters thousands of dollars in fees. There’s also been an increase in the number of undocumented Filipino workers in the last 10 years as the U.S. scaled back guest worker programs, she added.

This tenuous legal status, combined with COVID-19, Rodriguez said, could make them more vulnerable to labor violations or inadequate employee protections.

Research on the Filipino American community has historically been thin on the ground, Taggueg said — the last comprehensive study of the community was conducted in the late 1990s.

That’s why the Bulosan Center decided to partner with about 100 Filipino American community organizers statewide to create the survey. It was originally meant to gather data about broader issues like migration patterns, labor practices, health care access and housing security, supplemented by personal stories recorded in person. But after the coronavirus pandemic began, researchers shifted the survey’s focus to questions about COVID-19 and set up Zoom calls in place of in-person interviews.

The team is on track to finish parsing all the data by the end of summer, Taggueg said, and aiming to expand the survey’s scope. His team has recently completed a Tagalog translation of the survey, he said, but there are many more languages spoken in the Filipino community.

Taggueg said he is also worried by the lack of data on how large the community’s undocumented population is, a population who may not feel comfortable taking part in the survey and whose issues may subsequently be unheard.

For Taggueg and Rodriguez, this survey is the first step in their goal to build a comprehensive database that can back up anecdotal knowledge of the community’s issues for Filipino scholars and organizers.

“There’s always been a need for this research,” Rodriguez said. “It confirms what many of us had already been documenting or projected, but didn’t have data for on this scale.”

This story was originally published June 22, 2020 at 5:00 AM.