Several of the 15 teams conducting random coronavirus testing around the state said they encountered threatening and hostile residents, some of whom repeatedly used racial slurs. The survey effort was a partnership between the Minnesota Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to understand more about how the coronavirus has spread.
Survey teams were accosted when they approached homes selected for random, voluntary testing and by neighbors and dog walkers, state health officials said. It’s unclear whether any laws were broken, but state officials said the way survey teams were treated was “untoward.”
“Over the past week there was clear pattern that the (survey) teams that contained people of color reported more incidents than the teams that had only Caucasian people,” Yendell said. “We had a Latina team member who said she’d been called a particular epithet more times in the last week than in her entire life.”
The testing teams were working in southern and northeastern Minnesota as well as the Twin Cities metro when the threatening encounters occurred. Most of the hostile interactions occurred in smaller communities in the southern part of the state, none happened in the metro.
After it became clear they were not isolated incidents or simple misunderstandings, CDC officials decided to pull their workers from the state. None of the workers were physically harmed, but they described the hostility as mentally and emotionally disturbing.
“The teams were really traumatized by some of these experiences,” Yendell said. “Given the uncertainty of the situation and the impact of the incidents on team members, CDC decided to demobilize the entire team.”
