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Covid-19 Is Hitting the Navajo Nation Hard
And the problems were decades in the making
The Navajo Nation is facing a major toll from the coronavirus. As Max Ufberg reports for GEN, the problems facing Native American communities during this pandemic were decades in the making.
Health care is probably the biggest hurdle Indigenous communities now face, and little surprise: Even with outside aid from volunteer groups like Doctors Without Borders, medical services are still sorely lacking. Meanwhile, Native Americans suffer from a higher rate of preexisting conditions; for example, they are twice as likely as white Americans to have diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (It’s hard to know exactly how poorly they’re faring, given that half of U.S. states didn’t include Native Americans in their demographic data on the impact of the coronavirus, according to a Guardian analysis.)
“People have preexisting conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure, sleep disorder, or all these different factors that can impact somebody’s ability to come back from the virus,” said Annjeanette Belcourt, an assistant professor in the University of Montana’s Health Sciences Department and an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes. “We just have a lack of access to advanced medical care and real hospitals. In our rural areas, there just hasn’t been good access to testing.”
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