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KAWC’s Andrea Perez Balderrama reports on how this essential workforce is handling the ongoing pandemic…
Known as the lettuce capital of the world, Yuma County continues to produce and harvest the crop despite cases of the coronavirus on the rise and threatening hundreds of workers who balance the health, personal lives and possibility of contagion on and off the field every day.
But the essential workforce is handling the ongoing pandemic.
Everyday agriculture workers cross from the Mexican state of Sonora to San Luis, Ariz. to harvest lettuce fields in Yuma County.
The city of San Luis is more alive at 4 a.m. than any other time of the day. The food trucks play music as workers eat their breakfast on the go, and large white buses fill the parking lots on Main Street.
FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
‘A lot of people are scared’: Groups work to educate California farmworkers about COVID-19 vaccine [The Record, Stockton, Calif]
Maria Isabel Ventura rushed her husband from Blythe to Palm Springs several weeks ago, watching with despair as he struggled to breathe along the 120-mile journey through the desert. Infected with COVID-19, he was so weak by the time they arrived that he needed a wheelchair to travel from the car to the doors of Desert Regional Medical Center’s emergency department.
After receiving oxygen over a 10-day stay at Desert Regional Medical Center, her husband is home and isolating. She, meanwhile, is effectively quarantining. She was diagnosed with breast cancer four years ago, leaving her vulnerable to the virus.
Maria Isabel Ventura rushed her husband from Blythe to Palm Springs several weeks ago, watching with despair as he struggled to breathe along the 120-mile journey through the desert. Infected with COVID-19, he was so weak by the time they arrived that he needed a wheelchair to travel from the car to the doors of Desert Regional Medical Center’s emergency department.
After receiving oxygen over a 10-day stay at Desert Regional Medical Center, her husband is home and isolating. She, meanwhile, is effectively quarantining. She was diagnosed with breast cancer four years ago, leaving her vulnerable to the virus.