text: In the early months of the pandemic, Cora Mojica learned a lot about feeling terror. Mojica immigrated to Canada from the Philippines in 1987, leaving behind both her training as a secretary and most of her extended family. For the first two years, she was employed as a nanny. After she was granted permanent residency, she moved over to shipping and receiving, working at the same company for thirteen years before being laid off. In 2004, she applied for a job at the company that staffs hospitality workers at Vancouver General Hospital. Mojica got the job and has been there ever since. Her hospital is the city's biggest, and on any given day she and her co-workers may have to prepare specialized meals for over one thousand patients. They're not a team of superwomen, and sometimes they have to talk to their supervisor about whether they can make all those meals, fill all those trays. But, on a good shift, there's a certain kind of regularity to the job—a coordinated dance to the clinking of cutlery, the fast-paced knock-clunk of dishes. Each day, there are about sixty food staff working, including cooks, bakers, and those prepping and placing food in the tray line. For each meal, Mojica's team has two tray lines running at the same time, with ten people working each one. Some people fill the tray and the others move the food around the hospital, chugging metal wagons. Mojica is responsible for placing the milk and juice. Another person ladles the soup, snatches the crackers, chooses the dessert. One grabs the right pieces of each entrée. A symphony of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
  
  When we think of healthcare workers, we often imagine physicians, nurses, technicians, specialists, surgeons—people who've dedicated their lives to helping the sick, the injured, and the dying. We think of clipboards and scalpels, scrubs and prestige. For the vast hospital enterprise to work, however, it also needs an army of cleaners and sanitizers, people to feed all those patients trying to get better, security guards to make people feel safe. In the uncomfortable hierarchy of health care, these key workers are often near the forgotten bottom and they are often, uncoincidentally, members of vulnerable populations. Many of them make not much more than minimum wage. Mojica estimates that 90 per cent of her co-workers are women of colour, and that the vast majority are from the Philippines, like her. In fact, across the system, immigrants play a vital role in Canadian health care, accounting for one out of four workers. A virus doesn't have feelings; it doesn't make a distinction between the person who intubates a rapidly declining patient and the person who wipes down their room after that last-ditch effort fails. Its one goal is to invade, replicate, take over. In those early months, every single person who walked into a hospital was also trekking into the virus's hostile breeding grounds. All of them could get sick. And disproportionately, they did.
  
  By mid-May, in Ontario, healthcare workers comprised 17 per cent of all COVID-19 cases in the province, up from 10 per cent the month before. The vast majority of them were workers like Mojica: non-medical staff who showed up every day for their shifts, many of them because they couldn't afford not to. (The first healthcare worker who died in the province was a hospital cleaner.) Mojica herself told me, more than once, that as scared as she was—as scared as she knew everyone on her shift was—she was also grateful to still have a job during the pandemic. This gratitude kept her going through the fear; not having an income was worse. "Even though it's hard," she said, "we still have to be grateful we have a job because others don't." Even those on CERB, she added, could be suffering more than those on the precarious front lines. "They have a family, they have a mortgage, they have to put food on the table," she added. "Just do the job," she told herself and her worried colleagues, not unkindly. "Just do the job."
  
  Elsewhere in the world, a Lancet study published in late July confirmed that healthcare workers in the U.S. and the U.K. were at a far higher risk of contracting the virus than the generalized population. More alarmingly, it also showed that Black, Asian, and other people of colour in the healthcare field were at an even higher risk—five times more so than the (white) generalized population. A joint Guardian and Kaiser Health News project, Lost on the Frontline, identifies healthcare workers who died from COVID-19. In August, it estimated 62 per cent of the healthcare workers it catalogued were people of colour. The cause of the jaw-dropping disparity, the Lancet authors found, is multi-pronged failure. Many racialized healthcare workers were more likely to work in settings with greater exposure to patients with COVID-19, whether it be a designated ward, a busier hospital, or a long-term care centre. They were also more likely to receive inadequate PPE, or none at all, or to be asked to reuse what they did have. More research into the inequality, added the authors, was "urgently needed."
  
  Mojica didn't need a study to know the risks. She felt them in her own fluttering fear, saw them etched in the faces of her scared colleagues. It wasn't only the hospital setting itself that could seem like a losing gamble. Mojica doesn't have a car and so rides the bus every morning for her 10:30 shift. Before Vancouver declared a state of emergency, it would take her about an hour to get to work. During the lockdown, it took at least two hours. Sometimes, she'd watch one, two, three crowded buses go by before it was safe enough for her to board. Other times, she'd have to call a taxi. The worst was when she found a seat on the bus only to face racist vitriol. Twice, with her mask on Mojica was mistaken for a Chinese woman. One Canadian poll, released in June by Angus Reid and the University of Alberta, showed that half of those within Asian communities had experienced racial slurs or insults because of the pandemic's geographic origin. Another 43 per cent said they had faced threats or intimidation. Racist graffiti blared from tunnels and underpasses, boarded-up shops, street signs. It filled our social media feeds and escaped the mouths of world leaders. Strangers blamed Mojica for bringing the virus to the city; they told her to go back home. Normally, she's an outspoken person, but this time she bit her tongue, asking the Lord to forgive the racists. "Even though I'm not Chinese, it hurts," she said. "Because why, why, why would anyone say that to people?"
  
  At work, her manager updated the team on the increasing COVID-19 case counts before every shift. Workers who were dropping off food had to wear full PPE. In COVID-19 wards, they were no longer allowed to enter the patients' rooms. Once they arrived outside the ward that separated them from hopeful safety and definite danger, they had to phone a nurse who would don their own PPE and enter the room. The tray, plates, cups, and cutlery were all now paper or plastic, completely disposable. But the food cart would have to go back down, sanitized once before it travelled through the corridors and on the elevators, and then again when it arrived back in the kitchens. During her breaks, she ate alone, following the new protocol. Even with all the extra cleaning and precautions, even with all her gratitude, Mojica still felt afraid sometimes. Her routine became work–home, work–home, work–groceries–home, repeat. Mojica is a widow and lives by herself, and during those wiped-out nights at home she would often FaceTime her mother and siblings in the Philippines, who were fifteen hours ahead. She'd tell them to wear a mask, not to socialize, and to keep the required six feet of distance. It was impossible to tell who could be a carrier, she told them. You could be walking around with no symptoms, never even knowing you were orchestrating death. She worried about them, constantly.