Seeking COVID vaccine, Coast’s Vietnamese seniors battle language, tech barriers
Elderly Vietnamese people on the Coast are battling a language barrier and technology challenges as they scramble to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
The UMMC sign-up page is not available in Vietnamese (though it is in Spanish), and the hotline for making appointments doesn’t offer Vietnamese interpretation. Daniel Le, the head of the Biloxi office of Boat People SOS, a national nonprofit serving the Vietnamese community, said many elderly Vietnamese don’t use computers. That means they’re reliant on friends, family or social workers to help get appointments.
But when people come to Le’s office for assistance signing up, they’re rushing to get one of a limited number of appointments during a small window of time. Le said that when appointments open up online, they’re typically all taken within 15 minutes.
So far, Boat People SOS has been able to help about 70 people get vaccinated, just a small fraction of the Coast’s Vietnamese population, which Le estimates to be 10,000 people. (The 2010 census recorded about 5,000 Vietnamese people across Hancock, Harrison and Jackson counties, but Le believes that was a major undercount.)
“They want to be protected,” Le said. “They’ve been living in fear. Most of them are older. They have underlying medical conditions. … There’s a lot of frustration among community members that the vaccines are here but they’re not available to those who are in need at this point.”
A batch of vaccines for Coast Vietnamese?
Getting appointments has proven so difficult that Coi Nguyen, an outreach coordinator with the Mississippi State Department of Health based in Biloxi, is hoping the health department will allocate a certain number of doses for the Coast’s Vietnamese community. She’s lobbying the health department’s Office of Health Equity for such a move.
Then, Nguyen and others who serve the community directly could coordinate distribution. They speak Vietnamese, they know which seniors are in need, and they have already won their trust.
“When we have the vaccine, I can call the people, and I will handle the rest,” she said. “I know a lot of people are waiting, frustrated.”
Nguyen said that some community members, who fled Vietnam as refugees after a war that killed as many as 2 million civilians, are not able to read Vietnamese, so in-person contact is critical.
Nguyen has worked for MSDH since 2017. Her job is grassroots and hands-on. She keeps a list of community members who need help accessing health care, and she typically checks in with at least 10 people every day. Though the pandemic has raised the stakes, language has long been a barrier to Coast Vietnamese seeking health care, she said, with sometimes serious consequences. Some community members put off going to the doctor at all.
Nguyen described some of her clients’ thinking: “Maybe I’ll just stay home. It’s too much hassle, they ask me too much, and I don’t know how to say.”
Health department working to boost access, address anxieties
The challenges facing elderly Vietnamese people on the Coast as they seek the vaccine are not entirely unique. Across the country, many elderly Americans have relied on more tech-savvy children and grandchildren to secure appointments. And the language barrier and technology access issues that create hurdles for Vietnamese Americans affect other Mississippians, too.
Nguyen spoke with the Sun Herald at a free COVID-19 testing event held Sunday at Chua Van Duc, the Buddhist temple in Biloxi. There were several Vietnamese-speaking volunteers on hand in addition to Nguyen, and reams of pamphlets and posters about COVID-19 in Vietnamese.
The event was coordinated by the health department’s Health Equity Response Team, which was set up in March to identify and address disparities in the pandemic. The team has been organizing regular COVID-19 testing events to reach minority groups across the state, and several members traveled from Jackson to work at Sunday’s event.
Chigozie Udemgba, director of the office for health equity at the health department, said that at first the office was heavily focused on Black Mississippians, who were infected with COVID-19 and dying from the virus at dramatically disproportionate rates early in the pandemic.
“Then we started to see other disparities — Choctaw, African American, Hispanic,” he said. “We’ve seen some of those gaps close.”
Asian Mississippians have not been disproportionately harmed by the pandemic, according to state statistics. As of Jan. 30, 37,318 cases in the six southernmost counties of Mississippi, 427 of which affected Asians, or a little more than 1%. In Harrison County, where about 3% of the population is Asian, Asian people comprise just 1.5% of the county’s positive tests.
Statewide, 17 Asian people have died of COVID-19, including four each in Harrison and Jackson counties. (The state does not collect information on national origin, so it’s not clear how many COVID-19 cases affected Vietnamese people.)
Because the Coast has a relatively high Asian population, it has seen the largest number of COVID-19 cases affecting Asian people. More Asian Mississippians — 251 — have been infected with COVID-19 in Harrison County than any other county in the state. In Jackson County, records show 148 Asian people have gotten COVID-19, the second-highest figure in the state.
Disparities in vaccine access
Although disparities in health care access haven’t seemed to worsen outcomes during the pandemic for Asian Mississippians, they’re now creating big problems for vaccine distribution.
Technology is an issue that affects all of the state’s minority populations, said Udemgba, but especially people with limited English, such as some elderly Vietnamese on the Coast.
The language barrier is also a challenge for Hispanic Mississippians, said Selma Alford. For Hispanic people, trust is another major issue, especially because in August 2019, ICE arrested 680 Latino poultry plant employees in Mississippi in the largest single-site workplace raid in the country’s history.
“We had to realize the fear around uniforms and ICE,” Alford said.
For Black Mississippians, the health department is trying to promote access as well as respond to skepticism of the vaccine, borne in part of centuries of mistreatment by the medical establishment. Udemgba said that when it’s hard to get an appointment because you don’t have a computer or can’t drive to a vaccination site miles away, skepticism can grow.
“Not being able to get access adds to the mistrust,” Udemgba said. “People are less interested. It’s not necessarily mistrust of the vaccine at that point, but of the government providing the vaccine, especially if they see other groups getting vaccinated.”
So far, state health department data shows Black Mississippians have received only 17% of vaccines administered in the state. Hispanics, representing about 3.5% of the state population, have gotten just 1% of all vaccines.
It’s hard to say exactly how these statistics compare to disparities in the country at large: Many states don’t release the demographics of vaccine recipients at all. But so far, most states that report demographic data have seen that Black residents have gotten disproportionately few vaccines, especially as compared to the share of COVID-19 cases and deaths they have suffered.
According to the state health department’s data, as of Feb. 1, Asian Mississippians had received 1% of all vaccine doses administered in the state. That’s in line with the share of the state population that is Asian.
But the state doesn’t collect information on national origin or language use for people who get a vaccine, so it’s impossible to say precisely how many Vietnamese Mississippians and how many people who don’t speak English have been able to get the vaccine.
The state’s demographic information is also not available at the county level, so it’s not clear how many Asian people on the Coast have gotten the vaccine.
‘I don’t know if I can hang on’
One person relying on Coi Nguyen to get access to the vaccine is her brother-in-law, 75-year-old Lang Nguyen.
When Coi Nguyen checked her phone during the COVID-19 testing event, she saw the last message he had sent her: “Em hen cho anh.” Did you make an appointment for me?
She had tried to get him an appointment by calling Coastal Family, which has its own allocation of vaccines in addition to the state vaccination sites. But she never got through to talk to anyone.
“I said, ‘Just wait for us,’” she said, referring to the batch of vaccines she hopes will be set aside for elderly Coast Vietnamese. “He said, ‘I am 75, I don’t know if I can hang on.’”
In an interview with the Sun Herald, with Coi Nguyen interpreting, Lang Nguyen said he was wondering how long he would have to wait. Though everyone in the country is “waiting for his turn,” he said, all of the Vietnamese people he knows are especially frustrated because they’ve had so little luck securing appointments.
He worked for years as a janitor at the Keesler Air Force Base and speaks and understands some English, but not enough to navigate the UMMC site or a phone hotline with a stranger.
“I’m counting on Coi,” he said.
This story was originally published February 2, 2021 at 5:50 AM.
