Diana Lau, director of the Asian Health Institute at the University of California, San Francisco, created a bilingual health program that educates Chinese community members on COVID-19 safety information.
Lau estimates that the program is the first of this kind from any major hospitals in the United States.
“When you know, you’re less fearful,” she told NBC. “What we try to do is bring a deeper level of knowledge than what they would normally get to hear.”
Bilingual health experts in the program appeared in segments on local Chinese television stations and virtual town halls. They educated residents on topics such as risk of infection, masks, testing, and available treatments.
They also accommodated the Chinese community’s interests in discussing traditional Chinese medication in treating the coronavirus and Hong Kong’s success in fighting COVID-19.
Lau told NBC that virtual town halls attracted 1,000 viewers and that the segments on television had a viewership of more than 100,000 viewership, although the impact of this wide-reaching interaction cannot be estimated.
The idea to start such program stemmed from her experience being a nurse, Lau said in an NBC LX segment. Despite being bilingual, many patients had trouble understanding medical information in English when they were in stressful situations, such as before a surgery.
In San Francisco, while Asians are only 10.5% of confirmed coronavirus cases, they are the racial and ethnic group with the most number of deaths, according to DataSF.
Because of this, community organizers believe that bilingual education is a critical tool.
“An interesting response is to just bombard the Asian community with science and facts so they can feel empowered to, when they can, speak up or raise a question because they know how you get it — and it’s not because you’re Chinese and have a higher chance of getting COVID or because you’re Asian American,” Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease physician and associate dean for regional campuses at UCSF, told NBC.
Joy Lam, a political director for Chinese Progressive Association, told NBC that her family was able to get relevant information from the television segments. The program’s approach was effective, she said, because the Chinese community consumes a lot of traditional media such as TV, radio and newspapers.
Not only does it disseminate helpful and accurate information, Lam said it helped dispel incorrect medical information that has been circulating on social media.
Lau said in an NBC LX segment that the tool is especially helpful in Chinese immigrant families, many of whom live in multigenerational households and whose level of bilingual understanding exist on a range. She said she hopes family members can watch it and help each other to prevent infections.
“The control of this pandemic is really with every one of us,” Lau said.
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