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Leticia Aguilar poses for a portrait holding a picture of her grandmother Betty Ann Sigala in her home in Elk Grove.
(Salgu Wissmath/USA Today)
For years, Betty Sigala spoke to her family about her death: she didn’t want to be put on a machine and she didn’t want to die alone.
When she was admitted in June to the COVID-19 care ward at her local hospital, her family refused a ventilator. One of her grandsons convinced the nurses to ignore the no visitors rule and let him in.
He set up an iPad so the family could speak with her, then held her hand as she died.
I m not interested.
“This approach is the national standard for reporting disease rates and has several advantages,” the health department wrote in a statement to The Salinas Californian. “However, it also has limitations. Any classification system will not be able to capture the complexity and richness of racial identity.”
Acknowledging the problem doesn’t change the fact that the data is wrong, experts said.
“The problem is in the data itself,” said Virginia Hedrick, executive director of the Consortium for Urban Indian Health, a California nonprofit alliance of service providers dedicated to improving American Indian healthcare. “I don’t trust the state data. I haven’t ever.