On this segment of North Star Journey, MPR’s Peter Cox looks at how a growing class of young Hmong doctors, nurses, and public health leaders recognized COVID’s threat and worked to guide people toward science-based answers.

When it first hit in 2020, COVID-19 tore through Minnesota’s Hmong community, sickening and killing people as it reached into family get-togethers, cultural celebrations, and other gatherings favorable to its spread. By early 2021, researchers estimated Hmong people accounted for about 50 percent of deaths among Minnesotans of Asian descent though they made up only about 25 percent of that population. The disease claimed several high-profile leaders, including Marny Xiong, St. Paul School Board chair; Choua Yang, founder of a Hmong cultural language charter school in Brooklyn Park; Tou-Fu Vang, who’d fought in the Secret War and helped refugees resettle in the United States; and Kao Ly Ilean Her, executive director of the council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans and the first Hmong person to serve on the University of Minnesota Board of Regents.