Native Americans being left out of US coronavirus data and labelled as 'other' | US new... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...cans-left-out-coronavirus-data
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shared by Ed Webb on 25 Apr 20
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Native Americans are being left out of demographic data on the impact of the coronavirus across the US, raising fears of hidden health emergencies in one of the country’s most vulnerable populations.
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about 80% of state health departments have released some racial demographic data, which has already revealed stark disparities in the impact of Covid-19 in black and Latinx communities. But of those states, almost half did not explicitly include Native Americans in their breakdowns and instead categorized them under the label “other”.
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In states that do categorize Native Americans in the demographic results, early data indicates dramatically disproportionate rates of infection and death
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Communities of color are not more susceptible to coronavirus, but because of years of unequal access to healthcare, clean water and nutritious food, they are at greater risk of developing complications. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Native Americans experience diabetes three times more than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States, and have the highest rates of asthma. Before the pandemic, the federal health system serving Native Americans was already chronically underfunded.
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“We are a small population of people because of genocide. No other reason,” said Echo-Hawk. “If you eliminate us in the data, we don’t exist. We don’t exist for the allocation of resources.”
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in January, the CDC released its most comprehensive study to date on race and maternal mortality rates, but American Indians and Alaskan Natives were not included. When the Urban Indian Health Institute did its own research, it found Native women living in cities were 4.5 times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than white women.
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According to some studies, Native Americans have a 50% chance of being listed as the wrong race on medical records, as well as birth and death certificates.
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The Indian Health Services (IHS), a chronically underfunded federal healthcare system that serves 2.5 million tribal citizens in 37 states, has been publishing testing results daily during the coronavirus outbreak.
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“Health disparities are nice words for systematic racism … it’s the residual effects of the founding of this country,” social demographer Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear (Cheyenne) told the Guardian. But Rodriguez-Lonebear said it was not enough to just include Native Americans in demographic data; the data also needs to include tribal affiliation. For tribal governments, she said, “being able to identify who your citizens are in these big data sets is so vital to being able to understand the impact of the virus on your tribe”.
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Unlike states and counties, tribes cannot rely on healthcare systems to tell them when their citizens are sick or dying and must collect the data themselves
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The only public national coronavirus database reporting tribal affiliation is being run by the independent Native newspaper, Indian Country Today, whose team of 16 people has been adding the positive Covid-19 cases and deaths they can verify to a daily report on their website.
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“With what we’re seeing right now, there will absolutely be a gross undercount of the effects of Covid on American Indian and Alaska Native peoples,” she said. “We have an opportunity to prepare for the next wave.”