Latina moms more likely to get COVID, suffer financial setbacks in pandemic, studies show
Pregnant Hispanic women are more than twice as likely as their non-Hispanic white peers to get a COVID-19 infection, according to a Sutter Health study of 4,500 patients who delivered babies at its hospitals in November and December 2020.
Taken together with new research from the University of California, Davis, the two reports reveal the heavy toll that the COVID-19 pandemic is taking on Latina mothers. The UCD study found that more than half of Latina moms, many of whom are essential workers, cut back on food purchases and missed rent payments as they struggled to make ends meet.
“Latino families are fighting the pandemic on multiple fronts, as systemic oppression has increased their likelihood of contracting the virus, having complications from the virus and having significant economic hardship due to the virus,” said Leah C. Hibel, associate professor of human development and family studies at UC Davis and lead author of the university’s study. “These factors are likely to have a significant psychological toll on these families.”
For their study, published in the journal Traumatology, Hibel and her colleagues surveyed 70 Latinas who lived in Yolo and Sacramento counties, asking them questions from Mar. 18,2020, through June 5 of that year. The women lived in low-income households that had at least one essential worker.
While some political leaders posited that stimulus checks kept some Americans from working and others from falling below the poverty level, the UC Davis researchers said they found that the women they surveyed were still facing significant financial hardship that brought on stress, depression, and anxiety.
Stimulus received from the the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act did not result in differences in the respondents’ behavioral health.
“Without additional local, state or federal aid, the pandemic is likely to cause severe hardship marked by homelessness, hunger and mental illness,” the researchers wrote. “Additional recurring monthly stimulus payments could be a lifeline for families who are struggling to make ends meet.”
In the study on expectant Latinas, Dr. Alice Pressman, the research director of the Sutter Institute for Advancing Health Equity, said her team found antibodies in many of their Hispanic patients that indicated they had been infected in their third trimester as a surge of the delta variant of COVID-19 gripped California and the nation. The Sutter researchers were able to use the antibody tests to make this determination because no vaccines had been administered to the public at large when they took blood samples from the patients.
While the Sutter study did not examine reasons why Latinas were 2.4 times more likely to get COVID-19 infections than non-Hispanic white women, Pressman said the researchers had since done deeper research into a subset of the expectant moms and had found that Latinas were more likely to live in households with five or more people. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has noted that individuals living in large households are at greater risk of exposure to COVID-19.
Dr. Jorge Siopack, an obstetrician-gynecologist, said the Sutter study results validate what he and his colleagues have been seeing in their work in women’s services at La Clinica de la Raza in Alameda County.
“We’ve seen and helped manage the overwhelming impact of COVID-19 on our community,” said Siopack, who also practices at Sutter’s Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland. “In a sense, it (the study) gives us additional data that we can now share with our patients in helping them make that really important decision to get fully vaccinated in pregnancy, so we can protect them and their babies.”
Although some women have qualms about the adverse effect of vaccinations for moms and babies, Siopack said, research actually is showing the vaccines are safe. Meanwhile, he said, expectant mothers who have contracted COVID-19 have been shown to suffer some serious health consequences.
“If you are vaccinated, you are less likely to develop severe progression of COVID disease,” Siopack said. “That is where we’re getting trouble. Once it compromises the lower respiratory system, especially is when we have an uphill battle in order to combat the disease.”
The goal of Sutter’s Institute for Advancing Health Equity, founded just one year ago, is to not only identify and describe inequities but also to develop effective interventions and demonstrate the impact of those solutions, said Kristen Azar, the institute’s scientific medical director. Her team is working within Sutter and with other agencies such as La Clinica to dispel misinformation on COVID-19 and ensue all patients benefit from research-driven drugs or information.
“At Sutter Health, we have a unique opportunity to do this on a very large scale,” Azar said. “We have a very diverse patient population. We touch 3 million patient lives. We span over 20 counties in Northern California, over 20 hospitals, and also have medical foundations. And so really leveraging the power of our system to make change and impact on a large scale is something that we hope to achieve in the work that the institute is undertaking.”
The Sutter institute got a boost of more than $1 million to jump-start a Health Equity Innovation Lab for Maternal Health, Azar said, and they are using some of those funds to target expectant Latinas with a digital program that will guide them through making a vaccination decision and signing up for it. They can opt to receive information in Spanish or English, she said.
“The campaign and effort is not just targeted to the individual patient,” Siopack said, “but really is for the whole family unit, everyone that touches the lives of the new newborn babies, that will care for moms. In our Hispanic population, they tend to sometimes be in large households, in confined settings. And therefore, it is even more important in those cases, to get the commitment for everyone to get vaccinated in that unit.”
This story was originally published January 11, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to reflect the year in a which a UC Davis survey of Latino moms was done. The data was collected in 2020.
