Ald. Julia Ramirez stood late Sunday evening on the top level of a Lower West Side migrant shelter, megaphone in hand as she helped deliver the news that another child had contracted measles.
Three hours later, around midnight, the 12th Ward alderman finished visiting all six floors of the warehouse-turned-shelter, where residents who were unvaccinated when the outbreak occurred are now under 21-day quarantine due to the measles outbreak. Ramirez stressed to its nearly 1,900 residents the importance of being vaccinated against the highly contagious disease.
“We were there for 30 minutes (per floor), which was a good amount of time,” said Ramirez, who was invited to speak by the shelter’s presiding alderman, Byron Sigcho-Lopez, 25th. “But we also felt rushed, considering the amount of conversation that we could have still been having on one floor alone.”
Ramirez is one of several Spanish-speaking aldermen taking shifts this week at the shelters to urge asylum-seekers to get vaccinated amid a measles outbreak at the Lower West Side facility. Some of her colleagues were asked by Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration to pitch in on educating the asylum-seekers, while others responded to a call from Latino Caucus chair Ald. Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez.
As of Tuesday, seven cases had been reported at the shelter at Cermak Avenue and Halsted Street, according to the Chicago Department of Public Health. That’s three new cases from Monday. Meanwhile, a team from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention touched down in Chicago to assist with the screening and vaccination response.
The pitch for Spanish-speaking elected officials to directly assist with speaking to migrants wasn’t received enthusiastically by all recipients, as some balked at the administration and allies resorting to aldermen instead of trained public health workers to contain an infectious disease outbreak. Some also questioned why outside city contractors that have driven up the migrant response costs can’t help more.
“Look, we’re the legislative branch,” said Ald. Gilbert Villegas, 36th. “My staff is not trained to do that. And quite frankly, that’s why we fund the Department of Family and Support Services and the Department of Public Health.”
CDPH Commissioner Dr. Olusimbo Ige told the Tribune in an interview Tuesday night that the presence of City Council members was only one piece of the outreach strategy at migrant shelters.
“This was a collaborative effort, and we also, of course, had the shelter staff and DFSS colleagues there,” Ige said, noting she had Spanish-speaking deputies and nurses flanking her during a weekend visit to the quarantined shelter. “So this was not left to alders to do. This was alders reinforcing the message that we had.”
She also touted that not a single vaccine-eligible resident of the Lower West Side shelter refused the measles shot, bringing coverage inside to nearly 100%. Some residents are ineligible because they are pregnant or below the age of 1.
Ige also stressed that CDPH believes the first child to catch measles in the shelter caught the disease in Chicago, which “is really important to note so that people are not stigmatizing people.”
“Things pop up every now and again, so having a robust surveillance system is what allows us to quickly detect and then start mobilizing a response,” Ige said. “This is not a scramble, this is just an outbreak response that is similar to outbreak responses for other diseases.”
Rodriguez-Sanchez, 33rd, added that pitching in on essential health care work such as convincing asylum-seekers to get the vaccine is nothing new for many Latino aldermen and ward staff. Eight of her colleagues have made shelter visits or planned to do so soon, she said.
The urgency does show the city Health Department is understaffed, Rodriguez-Sanchez said, citing historic funding cuts and sprawling vacancies.
“It is a crisis and we need to make sure that as many people as possible get vaccinated. That is not always easy,” said Rodriguez-Sanchez, who also serves as Johnson’s Health Committee chair. “The reality is our safety net is very, very thin. In moments like this, it’s really important we step up.”
Ramirez noted that a large contingent of Lower West SIde shelter residents said they got vaccinated but do not have immunization records. One woman told her the papers slipped into a river she was crossing on the trek to America.
The CDC and local teams at the shelter will be focused on “working very closely to tease out who is immune and who is not,” said Dr. Manisha Patel, chief medical officer for the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
“I will say that both the local and state authorities have been really aggressive in managing this response on the field,” Patel said. “And so, based on what we know, they’re really following the tried-and-true standards and guidance around measles.”
Patel added measles cases are exploding globally, and the majority of infections brought into the country come from unvaccinated U.S. residents returning from international travel — not immigrants crossing the border. Around 90% of unvaccinated people who come in contact with measles will contract it, but the risk to the inoculated is quite low.
It remains unclear what Chicago’s progress has been in vaccinating its cumulative asylum-seeker population. Cook County Health — the lead medical provider in Chicago’s migrant response — has cared for 27,057 migrants with over 77,800 visits, spokeswoman Alexandra Normington said Tuesday.
The county hospital system has administered more than 73,400 vaccinations to new arrival patients to protect against measles, influenza, COVID-19, varicella and more, Normington said, though she did not have specifics on how many were measles vaccines.
Sigcho-Lopez, a Johnson ally whose ward contains the quarantined shelter, said fears among residents persist over how the outbreak could stigmatize Chicago’s asylum-seekers. He also blamed vaccine misinformation as well as historic mistrust in the medical system from Black and Latino communities after past U.S. government experimentation.
CDPH’s budget and full-time-equivalent positions have actually grown over the past decade, but Ige noted that was more a reflection of funding “ebbs and flows” due to emergency grants during COVID.
CDPH officials said teams worked to vaccinate about 900 residents inside the Lower West Side shelter this past weekend and will move residents not subject to the 21-day quarantine because of existing immunity to hotels and other locations to create more space. Vaccination teams are visiting the other shelters too.
Latino Caucus members Ald. Peter Chico, 10th, and Ald. Ruth Cruz, 30th, said they planned to help at shelters, but the need for the services of Spanish-speaking aldermen raises questions about local public health staffing levels.
“The faster we get there, the faster we’re able to translate it and really deliver the message of what is happening, it’s better for us,” Cruz said. “Us staying back and not doing as much is not going to solve the problem.”
Tuesday afternoon outside the shelter on lockdown, Eglis Rodriguez, 40, looked over at her son Matias Torres as he sat on a cardboard box on the sidewalk. She and the 9-year-old were under quarantine, and he was missing school as a result.
Rodriguez said she arrived in Chicago from Maracaibo, Venezuela, with her four kids in late November. She has struggled to find work, she said, and fears it will be even harder now because of the outbreak: “People are more wary to hire migrants.”
Nearby, Yaritza Gonzalez, from Caracas, Venezuela, was selling traditional fried breaded cheese sticks in brown paper bags for shelter residents who were allowed to leave, shouting, “Tequeños, tequeños.” She lamented the vaccination hurdles from her home country.
“The health system in Venezuela is absolutely chaotic. It’s in disarray,” she said.
