To make ends meet, Martha Tapia works 64 hours a week at two different Orange County nursing homes. She is one of the thousands of certified nursing assistants who perform the intimate and physical work of bathing, dressing and feeding the nation’s fragile elderly.
“We do everything for them. Everything you do for yourself, you have to do for the residents,” Tapia said.
And she’s also one of many in that relatively low-paid field, predominantly women of color, who move between facilities.
In March, when the coronavirus began racing through nursing homes the federal government banned visitors. But infections kept spreading. UCLA professors Keith Chen and Elisa Long decided to examine the people still entering nursing homes — the workers.
“The people who we can infer work in this nursing home, what other nursing homes do they work at?” Chen said.

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