Unaccounted for

IN MID-JUNE, THE RURAL COASTAL towns in Lincoln County, Oregon, experienced a COVID-19 outbreak. In a week, the county’s cases went from five to at least 124, all of them linked to a seafood-processing warehouse in Newport. It quickly became Oregon’s second-largest outbreak since the pandemic began.

Employees at the Lincoln County Public Health Department began contact tracing: They called workers, asking about their symptoms, where they had been and who they had seen, and asked them to quarantine.

“What we found when we were calling to do our contact tracing was that either most of them were Hispanic and spoke Spanish, or didn’t speak Spanish or English,” said Susan Trachsel, a public information officer with the Health Department. Instead, they spoke Indigenous Mayan languages, primarily Mam, but the county