Residents of Calexico, part of Imperial County on the southeastern tip of California, have long suffered from a variety of ailments attributed in large part to high concentrations of agricultural and industrial pollutants present in the soil and air.
While the area saw some of the highest rates of infections and deaths in the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic, state leaders downplayed the critical need for effective health measures given its largely migrant rural population.
Imperial County – with about 197,000 residents – is one of the poorest regions in the United States. More than 86 percent of the area’s total population is Latino.
“There are a lot of people with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases,” says Dr. Tien Vo of the Vo Medical Center clinic in Calexico, who says the nearby Salton Sea — which is rapidly drying amid historic drought, exposing decades of built-up agricultural pesticides on the sea bed — also “contributed to the high mortality rate from COVID.”
Calexico Vice Mayor Raul Ureña is the youngest and first openly transgender elected official in Imperial County. “It was evident that the first allocations that the state of California makes… disproportionately favor (counties) with higher populations,” says Unreña. “I don’t know what the thinking was in Sacramento, but the Imperial Valley during almost the entire pandemic had the highest mortality rate in the country,” Ureña said.
This story was produced by Peninsula 360 Press. You can read the rest of the story at Beyond Borders Gazette
