With Immigrants Imperiled, Covid Tracers Confront Language Gap

When workers at Pacific Seafood in Newport, Oregon, started testing positive for coronavirus, health officials knew what to do: They went searching for the Mam pastor.

He speaks only a few words of English and a little Spanish, but he’s fluent in Mam, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala that doesn’t even have a written form. He’s the main link to Oregon’s Mam-speaking community, many of whose members work at Pacific Seafood and were caught up in the state’s second-largest workplace outbreak.

The pastor explained to the workers that Covid-19 contact tracers would ask them questions, “just to make sure ...