
Navajo Nation and Other Native American Reservations Hit Hard by Covid-19 - OrganizedChaos
https://www.cybercoastal.com/navajo-nation-and-other-native-american-reservations-hit-hard-by-covid-19/
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dghughes
About ten years ago H1N1 hit First Nations people really hard here in Canada.
About 1/3 of the hospitalizations were First Nations women.

PDF [http://www.nccah-
ccnsa.ca/Publications/Lists/Publications/At...](http://www.nccah-
ccnsa.ca/Publications/Lists/Publications/Attachments/174/NCCAH-FS-
InfluenzaEpidemiology-Part01-Halseth-EN-Web.pdf)

~~~
gpm
> About 1/3 of the hospitalizations were First Nations women.

Huh? That doesn't sound right.... and indeed looking at your source it
isn't... but in some sense it looks like it might actually be worse than that

> Indigenous people accounted for 27.8% of all hospital admissions reported to
> PHAC during the first wave, but only 6.1% of hospital admissions during the
> second wave (Helferty et al., 2010).

Less than a third of hospitalizations were indigenous _people_ (both genders),
it seems, and later

> Rolland Harris et al. (2012), for example, found that Indigenous women
> accounted for 16.2% of hospitalized cases, [... continued below]

So indigenous women are 1/6th of hospitalizations (which makes sense with
1/3rd of hospitalization being indigenous people). But

> [... direct continuation of previous quote] 18.2% of ICU cases, and 50% of
> fatalities attributed to H1N1 influenza of those reporting ethnicity across
> Canada when both waves of the pandemic were combined.

Indigenous women were half of the total deaths???

I feel like something weird must be going on with these statistics.

~~~
danharaj
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ottawa-sends-body-
ba...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ottawa-sends-body-bags-to-
manitoba-reserves-1.844427)

~~~
gruez
>[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ottawa-sends-body-
ba...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ottawa-sends-body-ba..).

How is this relevant? All it talks about is the government sending body bags
with nothing related to infection/hospitalization/death rates.

------
protomyth
The tribe where I currently work and used to live has taken action. There is a
10PM curfew, a ban of gatherings, and no official travel allowed. If you leave
the state or go to three of the more populated cities (because they have
cases), you are a required to self isolate for 14 days before returning to
work. The community college is online only for the summer.

The casino had a very limited reopen with a lot of social distancing rules,
but not a whole lot of enthusiasm from workers since most make more on
unemployment than working. Basically, opened for the fishing crowd.

I would imagine the two main causes are housing and IHS. Let's face it Indian
Health Service is not that good and actively a problem under the best of
circumstances. A politician who actually believes in government provided
health care could go a long ways to proving it by making IHS work. Search for
"don't get sick after June" for a documentary on the subject. They did two
very credible attempts to kill a couple of family members and misdiagnosing
AIDS without waiting for test results didn't help my friends marriage one bit.
I do admit to still being a might bit bitter over having to have three
operations to fix a botched root canal.

The second is housing. Housing is scarce on many reservations which means
large family groupings. Now, I understand some visitors from DC think its
great that families live together like "the old days", but its not great, or
cultural, and it sucks. Overcrowding isn't fun and not having access to the
normal (e.g. mortgage from bank) with going through the tribe or a special
program is really an issue. A former college president lived in his parents
basement until he and his wife could afford to buy a house outright (well, a
mobile that they moved). Its gotten better in recent years (better federal
program), but large crowded houses get infected fairly fast.

The National Guard has been doing mass testing in ND and did do one on the
reservation. It looked well organized and they were pushing a lot of people
through. I was told later (we had the window blinds to the parking lot closed
to avoid any privacy violations) that they had no positives.

I do wonder about the statistical differences between reservations and versus
the general population. I am not always confident on the reported statistics.

------
dmurray
The article doesn't really go into _why_ the reservations were worse hit than
other US areas. They are "sovereign" "nations" so surely they have some
autonomy to set their own lockdown, travel policies, and other responses to
the pandemic.

Did they have even worse governance than the US generally? Or dense living
conditions? Or particularly vulnerable age profiles? I get that they're not
generally wealthy, but probably wealthier than places like Vietnam and
Mongolia which contained the spread very well.

~~~
kingkawn
Reservations are prisoner of war camps from the 19th century that persist to
this day. It is more illuminating to compare them to other similarly situated
people around the world in terms of their social services and freedom to
develop self governance

~~~
sterlind
It's more complicated than that, at least now. Having land, even crummy land
away from the ancestral homeland, is better than not having land, because:

a) you can afford to live there, as an extremely economically disadvantaged
group.

b) your tribe is in one place, instead of scattered, which makes it possible
to continue to have a group identity and

c) you have at least limited autonomy.

I know people in tribes that have been shafted by the BIA and refused official
recognition or land. It hurts. See the documentary "Promised Land" [0] for
their account.

0\. [https://www.promisedlanddoc.com/](https://www.promisedlanddoc.com/)

~~~
kingkawn
A) in utter poverty created by the wars to expel and corral them into small,
infertile, resourceless areas

B) It is good to be with your folks, I agree, even when forced into captivity
together

C) their autonomy is violated essentially at whim by the fed, state, and local
governments since the reservation system was created. You can see this
happening now with Gov Noam in South Dakota and the Lakota

~~~
sterlind
Oh, I'm totally in agreement that the situation is unfair and that the US
government engaged in genocide and cultural extermination of native peoples,
and that reservations were created as ghettos for Indians so the whites could
take their desirable lands. I am merely pointing out that there are tribes
that have been denied federal recognition or reservations and want them,
because a crappy deal is still better than no deal.

~~~
kingkawn
Sure. But I was responding to the initial comment suggesting that the
overwhelming spread in their community represented a failure of governance on
their part in comparison to national governments like Vietnam

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BurningFrog
PSA:

Vitamin D deficiency is a strong factor, not for getting Covid-19, but for bad
outcomes.

It's especially common for people with dark skin, since that blocks the
ability of producing Vitamin D from sunlight.

If that's part of what's happening to the Navajo, I don't know, but you should
probably eat Vitamin D pills, especially during this indoor lockdown, and if
if you have dark skin.

~~~
crmrc114
[https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2020/05/15/bmjnph-20...](https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/early/2020/05/15/bmjnph-2020-000089)

"There is no strong scientific evidence to show that very high intakes (ie,
mega supplements) of vitamin D will be beneficial in preventing or treating
COVID-19."

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I'm not sure how you managed to pull that quote out without reading the
sentence immediately before it, saying that you should take a supplement
during this indoor lockdown.

~~~
vonmoltke
That statement has nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19. That's long been
general advice for anyone who spends significant portions of daylight hours
indoors. I have been taking a Vitamin D supplement for years for that reason.

