Summit County is now getting data that shows COVID cases are higher in Hispanic communities. Beginning Wednesday, Park City will hold a weekly panel discussion to address COVID communication with the Latinx community.
The new Spanish outreach event will be a collaborative, virtual event titled: Messages to the Hispanic Community at Park City. Community Engagement Director Linda Jager explains:
“It’s an hour of conversation in Spanish to communicate with representatives from the community organizations of Park City. The focus of this discussion is to learn about available services, food distribution, health, financial assistance, Internet access. We want folks to be informed about protective measures against COVID-19. It's an opportunity for folks to ask questions, [raise] doubts, fears, insecurities as we're responding to the COVID pandemic, and also a forum to share positive stories and resources about survival and success during this crisis.”
The panel includes Spanish outreach coordinators from the school district, the Community Foundation, the Park City Police Department, Holy Cross Ministries, the People’s Health Clinic, and the Peace House. Park City Community Liaison Lynn Ware Peek will moderate the discussion.
Council member Steve Joyce says the data is showing a disproportionate number of COVID cases in the Latinx community. He says one reason has to do with communication challenges. Joyce says starting this week, IHC will send mobile testing labs to four different locations throughout the county. He says they’ll put aside the testing threshold requiring that symptoms be present before a test is done.
“They’ve now been able to take the cases and basically do GIS hotspots. In other words, to map everything out to figure out where the cases are and find communities where there's concentrations of COVID cases right now. When they go into these communities this is going to be one of the first places where we're really going to try to do a much broader outreach of people who are asymptomatic but may have connections to people who have it, and really try to expand testing and knock it down in those neighborhoods.”
Council member Tim Henney says he is disappointed the city hasn’t yet been able to include universal Spanish translation for signage and information sharing. He says it is on their radar.
Henny says since the Stay-at-Home orders went into place, $1.3 million in resources have been funneled into communities that need it most.
“The way that this community has reacted in such a supportive and overwhelmingly generous and wonderful way to show the true values of the community, our inclusive nature our priority on diversity and giving support to those who need it so I am still looking at that as something that's wonderful. And I'm looking at our messaging on our signs as something that needs great improvement.”
The virtual meeting is Wednesday at 3. You can participate via Zoom access. The code can be found on parkcity.org under the events tab. You can also livestream the meeting on the Solomon Fund Facebookpage. The link can be found on KPCW.org
