Immigrants are likeliest to be frontline workers amid coronavirus pandemic

Bodega manager Rafael Perez wears a homemade face protector, fashioned from a water bottle, as he works in the Chinese Hispanic Grocery during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in New York City, New York, April 2, 2020.
Andrew Kelly/Reuters
Hassan Akkad is a BAFTA award-winning documentary filmmaker who filmed his journey as a Syrian refugee traversing Europe. But when the coronavirus hit London, where he lives, he decided to take on a new role: hospital cleaner. And in Mexico, radio stations in Indigenous communities are trying to fill critical coronavirus information gaps. In New York, bodega workers say they face shortages of face masks, gloves and hand sanitizers even as they work on the front lines of serving their communities. And scientists have found the coronavirus in human sewage, which means that the virus can multiply in the human gut. Host Marco Werman speaks with Gertjan Medema, a professor at the KWR Water Research Institute in the Netherlands, about the implications of this finding.
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