The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is having a devastating impact on Latino immigrants, whose members include day laborers. In Texas, addressing COVID-19 is increasingly urgent given the dramatic rise in cases in July 2020. At the time of the initial project application, the state had exceeded its base ICU beds capacity and 65% of COVID-19 hospitalizations were Latino patients. And in Harris county, the site of this study, Latinos represented the ethnic group with the highest COVID-19 positivity rate (30%) and lived in the top 10 zip codes with the highest infection rates.

Latino day laborers (LDL) are immigrant men from Mexico and Central America who work primarily in the construction and service sectors and are routinely exposed to multiple personal and job-related stressors, where the latter occur in a working context that is dangerous, temporary, poorly paid, and exploitive. During the current pandemic these stressors have become more acute and have compelled LDL to continue to seek work daily, live in crowded conditions to afford the rent, and work without needed protections for maintaining social distancing or securing personal protective equipment (PPE). COVID-19 is likely to severely impact LDL unless action is taken to address their stressors and support their efforts to prevent it.

Based on a readily available and portable injury risk-reduction program Vales+Tu (You Are Worth More) that has been successfully tested among LDL, the Vale+Tu Salud (Your Health is Worth More) study will adapt its evidence-based participant recruitment, engagement, and intervention strategies to promote group problem solving and a plan to implement together COVID-19 mitigation strategies. Guided by a Community Advisory Board (CAB) and led by LDL promotores, this corner-based program will be tested in a randomized trial to answer this question: Can an adapted Latino day laborer program increase adherence to mitigation practices that reduce the risk of COVID 19?