Worse than New York

Investigation in a makeshift tent on the Navajo Nation reservation
Image: AFP

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Almost 100,000 people have died as a result of Covid-19 in North America. The natives are particularly hard hit. The largest Native American reservation in the Navajo Nation has more people infected per capita than the country as a whole.

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“Doctors Without Borders” mostly go where everything is missing, to countries with huge refugee camps, famines and diseases that have long been eradicated in the global north. But recently nine of the organization’s medical professionals traveled to the United States, which by most calculations is the richest country in the world. Their destination was the Navajo Nation, the largest self-governing Native American reservation. Nowhere in America should that be Coronavirus, measured by the population, infected more people – not even in New York. And in the south-west of the country a health system was encountered that was even less prepared than elsewhere.

350,000 members of the Navajo Nation live where tourists admire the unique shapes of Antelope Canyon or search for film myths in Monument Valley. The area includes parts of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. Even under normal circumstances, people here struggle with adverse living conditions and a weak infrastructure every day. And like in New York and elsewhere, the coronavirus has the problems that come through poverty and racism had emerged, exacerbated. Over half of the Navajo live below the poverty line. The average annual income is just under $ 12,000 a year, a third of the national average. Around 40 percent of people are unemployed. Anyone who has a job lives from cattle breeding, mining or tourism.

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