Chicago – At 24, Francy Sandoval has unconsciously become the sole breadwinner for her family, after her mother, father, and brother — a babysitter, a painter, and a waiter — lost their jobs to the new coronavirus pandemic .
Her family needs the money, so the aspiring nurse feels she has no choice but to keep her high-risk job as a receptionist for a community clinic in a Chicago suburb that cares for many COVID-19 patients. However, their home doesn’t seem like a shelter either.
“Having to work right now is not as stressful as going home,” he said. “One was surrounded by patients who could have tested positive or who are positive and perhaps infect my parents just by opening the door.”
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Sandoval, a Colombian immigrant, is among the tens of millions of Americans living in multigenerational homes in which one of the main strategies to avoid contagions – respecting social distancing protocols – is practically impossible.
The problem is exacerbated in black communities, where families made up of members of different generations live together at much higher rates, in some cases almost twice as many as white families. Joint living also often intersects with factors such as poverty, health problems, and jobs that can’t be done from home, offering another glimpse of what fuels COVID-19’s troubling racial disparities.
“When several generations live in a single home, some of them have to work, especially if they are in the service sector or retail or grocery stores. They have to go in and out of that home,” said the Rev. Willie Briscoe. , who runs a church for a black community in northern Milwaukee, where the pandemic has caused many infections among the population. “You cannot be quarantined.”
Families live together for various reasons — to save money, add resources, child or senior care, or simply cultural issues. It’s a practice that has been on the rise since the 1980s, particularly since the recession, according to experts.
