IMMOKALEE, Fla. – When much of the world was staying at home to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, Elbin Sales Perez continued to rise at 4:30 a.m.
to report to his landscaping job in a rural Florida town.Now, a couple of months later, as state-imposed restrictions are lifted and Floridians begin to venture out, the Guatemalan immigrant is ill and isolated at home with his wife and children in Immokalee, a poverty-stricken town in the throes of one of the sharpest COVID-19 upticks in the state.“We had to work.
If we don’t, then who does it?” said Sales Perez, 31, who noted that his job was deemed essential. “We had to battle every day with the threat of the virus looming, until we caught it.”Immokalee is among several immigrant.