Silicon Valley Leaders Launch Equity Task Force to Address Public Health Disparities

After data from the Santa Clara County Public Health Department showed how Latino neighborhoods in East San Jose are among the hardest hit by COVID-19, local leaders have formed a health and racial equity task force to address the disparity.

As of Thursday, five East San Jose ZIP codes—95127, 95122, 95111, 95112 and 95148—comprised more than 26 percent of the 2,701 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the county. A recent analysis from the Mercury News also found that more than a third of the county's first 100 deaths from COVID-19 lived in those same neighborhoods.

The newly formed task force, which is being spearheaded by San Jose Councilwoman Magdalena Carrasco, will focus on formulating policy ideas that address health disparities in Santa Clara County.

“The pandemic didn’t produce these disparities, it just simply has highlighted the issues that we’ve been working on, and those that have been, woefully, still unattended [to],” Carrasco said at virtual press conference Thursday. “We need to target our scarce resources to these impacted communities who are struggling to meet their basic needs.”

The East Side councilwoman added that the task force will cover topics such as multi-lingual COVID-19 messaging, culturally appropriate contract tracing, community engagement and disaggregated data analysis, to name just a few.

Assemblyman Kansen Chu (D-San Jose), whose district includes two of the hardest-hit ZIP codes in the county, will serve as vice chair of the task force. During the news conference Thursday, Chu said that he already put in a budget request with the state to aid Santa Clara County in “culturally appropriate outreach.”

“This is really the time that we start to addressing the issues so when the ... second wave of COVID-19 hits us, we are prepared,” he told reporters at the event. “We need to do better and we should do better.”

The task force held its first meeting Thursday afternoon and included participants from Destination: Home, the African American Community Service Agency, Gardner Health Services and the Indian Health Center.

Health and Equity Task Force Hearing

Posted by Magdalena Carrasco on Thursday, May 28, 2020

15 Comments

  1. https://sjoutsidethebubble.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/factcheckrequiredsm.jpg

    > After data from the Santa Clara County Public Health Department showed how Latino neighborhoods in East San Jose are among the hardest hit by COVID-19, local leaders have formed a health and racial equity task force to address the disparity.

    https://sjoutsidethebubble.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/factcheckrequiredsm.jpg

    There IS a disparity in coronavirus outcomes and it is related to age and existing “co-morbidities”,

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/05/26/high-covid-19-mortality-rate-linked-to-us-care-facilities-infographic/#7baf8e007352

    “Ethnicity” or “tribal identity” is NOT a significant dimension of inequity for coronavirus patients — except in the twisted, biased minds of tribal demagogues like political climber Magdalena Carrasco.

    If Carrasco’s politicized “task force” had any actual integrity, it will likely find that “health care equity” demands that health card funds be transferred FROM younger — and healthier — “minority” districts TO older and sicker “white” districts.

    Carrasco is just a scammer trading in social venom and division. She should pack in her vicious tribal war mongering circus and just go to h,,, ummm … just go away.

    • Totally agree. The same is true of the entire George Floyd issue, and the vast majority of police brutality cases. The entire narrative is the height of hypocrisy when African American males commit 52% of homicides in America annually, and roughly 50% of all other violent crime (rapes, robberies, kidnappings, assaults, etc.); Somewhere close to 80% of them against other African Americans. That does not even address the issue of black on white crime, or black on Asian crime, or black on Latino crime where in the case of Caucasians the rate of homicides and other violent crimes committed against them is roughly 10+ to 1 (the reverse). And for the other races it’s also orders of magnitude higher.

      Real racism is quite rare. And in my estimation/ observations nowadays, white people are more likely to be the victims of racism or discrimination (as routine and commonplace – part of the leftist narrative of the “white patriarchy” or ‘white privilege” etc.). I have seen it time and time again. And the bizarre part is that much of the time, it’s coming from other white people.
      The point of all this, is that Black Lives Matter to BLM and these other groups, only when a black person dies at the hands of a white person.

  2. They don’t need a task force. They need mask and gloves depots. They need cooling centers.

    If you want a task force to focus on this, contact United Way or one of the other hundred organizations equipped to address these issues.

    But reinventing the wheel means Magdalena gets her name printed on the side of it and that’s all she cares about.

  3. The biggest medifraud guy was Carrssco virtual reality hubby, Kevin deLeon, prince of drug companies.

  4. I agree with PHStevenson. Recent activity celebrating Cinco de Mayo illustrates how important it is to educate the community on the importance of social distancing and wearing masks.

  5. Why did Carrasco’s part time husband, Kevin deLeon solicit money from the Ogilvy Group, a lobbyist connected to big time Republicans, and lobbyist for people who deny medical services to the poor?

  6. Oh, FPPC fined Victor Gomez, Carrasco lieutenant and part time boyfriend, for hiding cannabis money.

  7. Carrasco has lived on the public role all her life. From washing deleon’s dirty political laundry to finding a job for a loser like Torres. She has been fined by everyone, everywhere.

    • ohhh Trini, don’t you love talking to yourself, oh wait…James Rowen, hello hello, seems like you are back as trini lol. Loser

      • Steve, you just can’t handle the truth. These people are aspiring Marxist welfare recipients (treasonous racist career politicians destroying America one damaging bill/ law/ regulation/ social justice initiative at a time).

  8. And if you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don’t know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don’t actually mean anything at all. — Joel Spolsky

  9. I will always vote what I have promised, and always vote the Constitution, as well as I will not vote for one single penny that isn’t paid for, because debt is the monster, debt is what’s going to eat us up and that is why our economy is on the brink. — Ron Paul

  10. I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. “A lot of them seem smart,” he said. “What I can’t tell is whether they have any kind of taste.” — Paul Graham

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