Latinos still scrambling due to Covid-19 in New Jersey are on high alert over Omicron

As she knocked on doors across New Jersey talking about Covid-19, Nayeli Salazar de Noguera couldn't forget about how the virus nearly killed her grandmother last year. She knew firsthand the toll the virus took on Latinos before the Omicron variant hit the state.

"She only had a 5% chance of surviving her second intubation. We didn't sleep for months," said Salazar de Noguera, a 35-year-old who leads an outreach program of the New Jersey Department of Health that provides Covid-19 vaccination information to underserved communities.

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the virus has battered the Latino community in New Jersey, disproportionally killing men under 50 and amplifying existing financial challenges. Now with state health officials reporting the highest number of Covid-19 positive cases in nearly a year, advocates and some Latinos are on high alert as the latest Covid-19 variant is now the country's most dominant strain less than three weeks after the first case was reported in the US.