Language barrier, lack of cultural awareness hurting efforts to spread coronavirus warnings, Durham officials say

County Health Director Rod Jenkins told local leaders Friday that the problem is accelerating, with 73 percent of the cases reported so far in June tied to the Latino community.

The construction industry has been hard hit, Jenkins said, and about nine out of every 10 cases there is a Latino worker.

Eric Chipp, past president of the Home Builders Association of Durham, Orange and Chatham Counties, said construction supervisors are working to promote safety at job sites in a number of ways.

"Some of those things that a lot of our contractors are doing is staggering crews," Chipp said. "I think that’s one of the biggest things that we can advocate for so that only one crew is on a job site at a time so that everyone within that crew can socially distance."

Builders also are putting up signs in Spanish at construction sites to make workers aware of social distancing and hygiene guidelines, he said, and they are telling workers who ride together to job sites to wear masks on the commute.

Jenkins said the language barrier poses a major problem with getting the safety message to the local Latino community.

"It’s one thing to be bilingual, and it’s one thing to be able to partake in conversational Spanish," he said. "What we’re finding is that individuals are saying, yes, they’re bilingual, they can speak Spanish, but they’re unable to partake in conversational Spanish.

"We need individuals who can convey the information, a conversational manner, that really gets to our community and helps them to understand," he added.

Pilar Rocha-Goldberg, chief executive of El Centro Hispano, said the problem goes beyond language.

"People need to be not only able to speak Spanish, but also to be bicultural, to understand our community and even the way we ask the questions," Rocha-Goldberg said. "[For] people with our communities, it’s more complex with the fear to share the information and everything."

She said she wants to see a more aggressive approach to testing and educating the community.

"I still think we need to think about doing some mobile testing, and probably Duke can support this," she said. "We can go to churches that people trust or community centers."