“Jesus is for you, ” he said.
Musket, 52, had never noticed that his father had hair on his face; Benjamin Musket, 80, a former Marine, a retired device mechanic, a basketball coach, and a board member of his church, had no beard.
The circle of relatives had been cautious when the pandemic arrived. Four generations of muskets lived on a sheep farm in McKinley County, New Mexico, and his father was a diabetic dialysis elder. They didn’t shop at local stores, where too many other people overlooked to wear masks, driving about five circular hours to Albuquerque to do their shopping. Back home, each and every garment was cleaned and showered.
The new coronavirus came anyway. One Day in May, Benjamin Musket began coughing and, twelve hours later, gasped.
In the city, the few staff of the Gallup Indigenous Medical Center, in charge of the federal Indigenous Health Service, with many cases. When staff saw that Benjamin Musket had a downtown infection and COVID-19, he was taken to a hospital in Albuquerque, more than 100 km away. A few weeks later, he died.
In the days after Benjamin Musket’s illness, almost all members of the family circle tested positive.
Melvina Musket, hospitalized with a high fever, medical staff put bloodless compresses under her arms to refresh her.
His mother entered a hospital in Albuquerque, where he fell into a callous fog. Melvina Musket’s brother pleaded with hospital staff: “I can’t lose my mother this week; I’ve already lost my father.
On June 11, her mother died, days after her husband.
“We didn’t even know how seriously they were in health,” Melvina Musket said. “It’s too much for their bodies. “
Few positions in the world have been as affected by the coronavirus pandemic as McKinley County, New Mexico. In September, the county finished first in the state and sixth nationally in line with COVID-19 deaths.
Approximately 74% of McKinley County’s 71,367 citizens are non-Hispanic Native Americans, most commonly Navajo and Zuñis. Most of the land within the county’s borders is part of the Navajo Nation Reserve. The Navajo, called Diné, are descendants of others who survived colonization, smallpox, massacres and resettlement. They’re proud of a history of resilience.
Then came the Big Cough, or Dikos Ntsaa-19, the coronavirus is known among members of the Diné tribe.
The federal government, which oversees the physical care of Native Americans under treaty obligations, did not have a pandemic plan, and as the COVID-19 crisis began to overwhelm the community, medical experts and others say the federal government has been slow to respond, a failure that has claimed lives and fueled spread.
This failure is not an accident, experts said, it is the direct result of centuries of formulated racism that left McKinley County’s health care formula under-funded, under-staffed, poorly equipped and outdated, and all in a network suffering from multigenerational housing, pre-existing medical conditions, addiction and poverty, where many live without running water , electricity or food sufficient for your daily nutritional needs.
At the height of the pandemic, doctors at the Gallup Indian Medical Center were forced to reuse non-public equipment, an emergency room and intubation tents were set up in the car park, and working mothers were diverted to other hospitals to drop off. space for coronavirus patients. .
As the federal facility filled up, some overworked patients went to the only personal hospital in the area, which was also crowded, which led nurses and doctors to protest on the street against harmful conditions. medical services Albuquerque. La delayed medical care can, in some cases, cause headaches or death.
“I’m sure if the federal government had intervened much faster, things would have gone much better. Clearly, there is a lack of support,” said Jonathan Nez, president of the Navajo Nation.
The U. S. Civil Rights Commission, the National Indigenous Health Board, the Government Responsibility Office, Congressional committees, and tribal leaders have warned for decades that native American health care is anemic and catastrophic. However, year after year, Congress has not allocated money to meet medical requirements. Centuries after the United States exchanged land for fitness care and others with sovereign indigenous nations, federal officials spent nearly 3 times more according to the user on non-indigenous health care than on fitness for indigenous peoples.
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Deaths consisting of 10,000:
Number of deaths consisting of 10,000: 5. 6
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Deaths consisting of 10,000:
Number of deaths consisting of 10,000: 5. 6
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Select your location with the featured county, the state
McKinley County has a COVID-19 mortality rate of. The percentage of the Amerindian population is.
How’s your family? The average length of a family in McKinley County is, but it is.
Housing disorders are likely to be less severe than McKinley County, where families have severe housing disorders in relation to their area. Difficult housing means that a family has at least one of these disorders: overcrowding, higher housing burden, lack of kitchen or plumbing facilities.
Are you below the poverty line?In McKinley County, the population is below the poverty line relative to.
Is English your mother tongue? In McKinley County, citizens speak English as the language of the moment.
Consider the status of your fitness insurance. In McKinley County, the population is insured, while the population does not.
A key comorability of COVID-19 is diabetes, and there are likely to be fewer diabetic citizens than McKinley County. The percentage of adults over the age of 20 diagnosed with diabetes is in McKinley County while he is there.
Sources: COVID-19 Community Explorer of the Milken Institute Research Department, COVID-19 Data Repository through johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE), and the U. S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. USA 2018 Updated Data: September 1, 2020.
More recently, when Congress approved a $2. 2 trillion economic stimulus package to help the country through the start of the pandemic, only $714 million allocated to the Navajo Nation, which equates to $4,552 consistent with dinner in the reserve, compared to $6,703 consistent with the capita. in national stimulus funding. And most of the cash didn’t come until months later.
“It’s an incredible chain of oppression – it still catches us, it still has its control,” said Anna Marie Rondon, executive director of the New Mexico Institute of Equity and Social Justice in McKinley County.
“And it kills us. “
Jamie Barboan can hear his mother lightly in the sounds of an oxygen machine.
Whoosh-gush. Whoosh-gush. Whoosh-gush.
The noise dominated his phone calls, overwhelming his mother’s slight murmur.
Barboan, 44, knew the device that helped his mother stay alive, but he was afraid to hear the sound for the rest of his life.
Barboan’s mother, a qualified practical nurse, was the first in the family circle to be hospitalized by COVID-19. The virus then spread to Barboan’s father and younger brother, sending all three to Gallup Indian Medical Center. However, they gained specialized attention. The facility was temporarily filled with cases of COVID-19. Barboan’s mother and brother were transferred to hospitals in Albuquerque. Officials quarantined his father at a local motel.
His brother, Andreas Tolth, was 39. She thinks he’d be fine. He never drank or smoked. He enjoyed the horror videos and looked after his family.
But I had heard others warn, “Once you’re in the hospital, you’ll see them again. “
For Tolth, it’s a heartbreaking truth. After a month-long battle, he died of coronavirus in July.
“Our hopes were so great,” Barboan said, then suddenly one day you get a phone call to say they’re gone, and it hurts.
He recovered from the disease but lost a son.
“They’re crying, ” he said. “They’re fighting. “
Navajo Reserve is the largest in the country with 27,000 miles. It extends through Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, from the Grand Canyon to Monument Valley. It is a vast and arid interior of red plateaus, occasional villages and heartbreaking dirt roads leading to sheep. Farms.
COVID-19 has spread like a strong desert wind in McKinley County, one of the poorest and most poorly ill-conditioned communities in the country, with the highest rates of deaths related to alcohol, diabetes and food insecurity, and where many tribe members live with 3 or 4 generations in a circle of family members at home.
These underlying medical situations combine to increase the threat of severe COVID-19 disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This is a constant cycle of poverty that we have to deal with. Every day we have to fight to survive,” said Krystal Curley, a diné who is executive director of Ind Indian Lifeways, a collaboration of nonprofits that support Aboriginal communities.
Nowhere are the disparities more visual than in Gallup, the headquarters of McKinley County and the incorporated city. The city, almost surrounded by tribal lands, is known as ”the Indian capital of the world”. Here is celebrated the powwow of the gallery of nations. as well as the intertribal Indian rite and several primary rodeos.
While COVID-19 flourished in McKinley County in mid-April, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham ordered the closure of bars.
The resolution would possibly have paved the way for the instances to erupt, according to Kevin Foley, who runs the city’s rehabilitation center. Surrounding reserves prohibit alcohol. With the closing of the bars, Foley said, tribe members came here to drink in Gallup, which houses more liquor outlets in line with capital than anywhere else in the country.
Foley, executive director of the Na’Nizhoozhi Center, a 30,000-square-foot concrete block building, said another 98 people had arrived in the middle that night to sleep without drinking. They were given steel-framed beds in giant, non-unusual rooms. Although fever detection has already begun, the disease has infiltrated.
Some staff members became ill or quit smoking, forcing the drug rehab center to close the third week of April. At least 21 clients tested positive and were transferred to Rehoboth McKinley Christian Health Care Services, Gallup’s other medical center. More consumers who had been exposed to the coronavirus were sent to motels or onto the streets. Homelessness is also a threat to COVID-19, according to the CDC.
Gallup’s two medical services were filled as the virus spread. The hospitals are in front of each other. The 99-bed Indian Medical Center serves Native American patients under the federal government’s legal responsibility to the tribes. Rehoboth McKinley operates a private non-profit facility with 60 beds.
“We were hit hard at the same time,” Gallup Mayor Louis Bonaguidi said. “I myself have lost some friends. “
At Rehoboth McKinley Hospital, terminally ill patients were connected to several intravenous patients with several drip lines. Hospital chaplain Kris Pikaart said he saw 50 patients die in the first six months of the pandemic, most commonly symptoms related to coronavirus. lines that were given to Pikaart became tangled in him.
As the crisis grew, Pikaart organized the latest phone calls and video calls with families, a vector of human tragedy.
The first death, in March, is etched into: a young woman with several children, serious and alone, refused for days to talk to her family. Then, towards the end, the woman cried and said, “I need to communicate with my children. “
“She started saying goodbye to everyone and gave them orders on how to live without her,” Pikaart said. “He unrolled this beautiful, beautiful farewell. “
It was, Pikaart says, the bravest thing I’ve ever witnessed.
When spring turned to summer, death came more in McKinley County.
For Gabriella Lee’s family circle in Gallup, she started with four days of coughing and sneezing, then the pains and discomfort came.
Lee’s uncle got sick until he can barely breathe. At Gallup Indian Medical Center, staff put him on a fan and took him to a hospital in Albuquerque for additional treatment.
There he talked about an imminent recovery and a departure with his wife and son to a “big old steak dinner” once he felt better. It lasted four days.
The family circle was given in combination to say goodbye via video via Facebook Live. He’s unconscious. A nurse held the phone in front of her ear as her relatives said her last words.
“We said we enjoyed it and everything, how we were going to miss it,” Lee said. “And he came home after that.
After the Civil War, when the United States started New Mexico and California from Mexico and miners and ranchers continued to move westward, the ancestral homeland of the Diné besagered through a new crusade of violence.
Under an order from U. S. Army Major General James H.
Prisoners were forced to participate in a 450-mile death march known as The Long Walk; along the way, two hundred succumbed to exhaustion and died; an estimated 1,500 more died in the internment camp as a result of disease and hunger. .
Four years later, the federal government proposed an agreement: the United States would provide basic services such as health care, housing, and education, if they can retain much of Diné’s land. The tribe allowed the Diné to return only part of their ancestral lands. This exchange was one of many treaties with Amerindians that have been ratified since 1778.
From the beginning, the government refused to honor him.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government passed a law to end its legal obligations to the tribes and implement a policy of assimilation with Aboriginal peoples who are moving away from reserves and a loss is perceived. tribal lands.
Two decades later, Congress changed course, abandoning the model of assimilation. The Indian Education and Self-Determination Act identified tribal sovereignty and allowed indigenous nations to manage their own hospitals, schools, police services, and other federally funded systems. Today, a portion of the fitness care systems in Indian countries are managed through tribes. But still, the cash came.
“The lack of funds has been particularly in spaces that would have helped the Navajo Nation cope with the pandemic,” said U. S. Senator Tom Udall, Democrat for New Mexico, vice chairman of the Indigenous Affairs Committee.
Ramah Chapter, one of the Navajo Nation’s 110 sub-governments in mcKinley County, sued the federal government in 1990 for inadequate investment for tribal services. The litigation and dozens of parallel lawsuits lasted for nearly 3 decades before the end last year. The plaintiffs won a series of Supreme Court decisions. In total, the federal government has provided about $2 billion to U. S. tribes and their organizations.
That’s not enough to make up for the decades of decades that left Indian fitness services without hospitals, materials and staff, said Lloyd Miller, who represented the co-plaintiffs in the Ramah case.
“One of the terrible and persistent consequences of the disproportionate effect of the pandemic on Navajo is the old lack of funding for the entire Indian fitness system,” he said.
Today, the Indigenous Health Service serves 2. 56 million American Indians and Alaska Natives in 574 federal tribes in 37 states.
Last March, Congress passed the CareS (Aid, Relief, and Economic Security by Coronavirus) Act, which designated $8 billion for tribes, adding $714 million to the Navajo Nation.
Most of this has been delayed and all this is accompanied by red tape and restrictions.
Cash under the CARES Act, for example, can be used to cover expenses “committed due to the public fitness emergency”. Tribes have until December 30 to spend it, and even today, Navajo Nation activists point out that cash still doesn’t have the communities they want most.
The National Council of Indigenous Health and tribal leaders argue that limitations are unrealistic. It is about providing effective relief as opposed to COVID-19 without addressing the overall infrastructure, they said, and you cannot build a hospital, water pipes or housing through the end of December.
They also stated that addressing health care disparities within the Navajo Nation would charge more than $714 million, with a planned replacement from the Gallup Indian Medical Center that would charge a maximum of that amount, $550 million. would charge another $700 million, according to the Indigenous Health Service.
“Is it something we’re in the area we’re in now?”said Dr. Mary Owen, President of the Association of American Indian Physicians and a member of the Alaska Tlingit Band. “Everyone says, “You have to settle for what you have,” really?Well, give us back this land.
Gregory Smithers, a history professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied the coronavirus attack opposed to the tribes, said infection rates, suffering, and death were in the end the result of systemic racism, from ancient subjugation to new poverty.
“They weren’t in a position for this type of storm . . . and the explanation why they weren’t is through neglect generation after generation,” Smithers said. “The virus is not waiting for governments to prepare their medical facilities. “
Joseph Kalt, co-director of Harvard’s assignment on U. S. local economic development, said that while the public believes Indians live off the public premium, the opposite is true: Aboriginal peoples get fewer federal dollars than other Americans because they lack Native Americans who account for less than 2% of the U. S. population, tribe members have little force at the ballot boxes He said, and more than a dozen states have no reservations.
“If you’re a member of Congress in one of those states, ” said Kalt, “what do you care?”
When the county’s coronavirus outbreak peaked in April and May, the federal government switched the gymnasium from Miyamura High School to a patient cash hospital.
Patients had trouble getting to the bathroom in the locker room. Volunteers placed chairs along the way as resting spaces and published encouraging symptoms in English and diné: “Grandpa, you understand. “
Two older patients spent a lot of time on the football field with their oxygen tanks, made a decision and returned home to their families, said Sanjay Choudhrie, the incident commander at the gym.
The gym has never accommodated more than 10 patients at a time, as almost all doctors and nurses have been assigned to the two hospitals in the area.
“From the beginning, our challenge was the shortage of medical staff,” Choudhrie said.
Gallup Indian Medical Center also lacked resources. At one point, patients’ flights to Albuquerque took off for as much an hour as both, and the Indian fitness service paid for expensive medical care.
Doctors said they were offering the most productive care imaginable. Families they have enjoyed at local hospitals have been regularly called to inform them of updates. And more than 1,000 outpatients with COVID-19 positives have been quarantined at hotels and motels in the domain since March. where they have gained complex physical and intellectual fitness care, according to Dr. Jennie Wei and Dr. Mia Lozada of Gallup Indian Medical Center.
“I can’t say we were perfectly prepared, but we were building our formula and learning as we went along,” said Dr Jonathan Iralu, epidemiologist at Indian Medical Center and a leading clinical representative for infectious diseases at the Indian Health Service. “People have done a job . . . We have been able to deal with this enormous risk to public health. And I think they’re encouraged people.
The hospital is the largest controlled through the Indigenous Health Service for the Navajo region, and treats 5,800 Native American patients and 250,000 outpatients a year, but the facility is replaced and undersized. Local officials said construction of a replacement medical center had been reported for two decades.
Even in older times, an essential physical fitness was not available. For example, the 50-year-old median doctor does not have an intermediate dialysis stage despite the fact that adult tribe members have diabetes nearly 3 times the diabetes rate. Non-Hispanic whites Diabetics are among the patients at increased risk of coronavirus.
Michael Weahkee, director of the Indigenous Health Service and registered member of the Zuni tribe, responded to interview requests, and a company spokesperson provided answers to questions about IHS investment and services.
In 2018, Gallup’s accreditation threatened due to disorders in various categories that posed a “threat to patients. “These include transfusion errors, medical labelling, use of protective alarms on medical equipment, threat of hospital infections and hygiene. disorders and accreditation granted.
Laura Hammit, director of infectious disease prevention at Johns Hopkins University’s American Indigenous Health Center, said workers at the Navajo Nation and Indigenous Health Service bought materials with their own money, manufactured PPE on days off, and delivered materials to tribe members in remote areas. the virus peaked in May.
“It is unfair to say your reaction as more than heroic,” said Hammit, who was founded in Gallup and helped fight the Navajo Nation epidemic. “
Dr. Phillip Smith, 70, spent most of his career as national administrator of the Indigenous Health Service before retiring to run the Monument Valley Health Clinic in Utah, which also suffered from COVID-19. It lacked support, inputs, maintenance and generation in the laboratory.
Smith, who is Diné, said his diabetic sister, Florence Dick, tested positive for COVID-19 while in a Gallup retirement home. Indian Medical Center quarantined her at a motel until her condition deteriorated and she was sent to a hospital in Albuquerque. where she died within days.
“We grew up together, ” Smith quietly recounting his death.
Elder Navajo lay on his deathbed in the hospital and looked at the phone. Approximately 20 members of his circle of relatives covered the thee in front of his hogan, a classic house, to pay his respects through the screen.
When the last relative goodbye, the guy died.
It’s a “miraculous moment,” said Pikaart, the chaplain at Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital, who arranged the call.
For more than six months, Pikaart has been surrounded by serious illnesses and deaths.
High-speed oxygen pumps prevented patients from hearing weakly, even when they were screaming. Pikaart knew she would have to stay two metres away for herself, but she couldn’t resist bending two inches of patients’ faces to master her last words.
“It’s the only way I can hear them,” he said, “and they have things to say. “
While helping patients and their families, others at Rehoboth McKinley Hospital were hit by the patient surge, according to Dr. Rajiv Patel, who oversaw the hospital’s eight-bed intensive care unit.
Patel said 17 nurses had been fired in March before the outbreak, which was not a pleasure to deal with the pandemic. The hospital has about 520 employees, according to David Conejo, former general manager of the medical center.
One night in early May, a fan alarm came out of the cemetery’s shift. The staff, who are not familiar with the plane, may simply not notice what was wrong, Patel said. When Patel arrived the next morning, he said he discovered that the patient’s traffic the tube had moved and did not supply oxygen to the lungs.
The tube has been re-inserted. Two days later, the alarm reappeared, as did the confusion.
“That’s when we had to move people. That this happened twice was simply unacceptable,” Patel said. “We were above our heads. “
The ICU is practically closed. So far, one of the unit’s patients was flown to Albuquerque hospitals.
The guy with the ventilation disorders stayed too to travel.
Given the patient’s poor health, Patel said it was unclear whether poor medical care contributed to his disappearance, “but it didn’t help. “
A “declaration of deficiencies” report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, received through USA TODAY, describes repeated disorders with a “poorly adjusted” ventilation tube that slid out of the patient’s traffic “by hours. The patient died within days.
Patel, whose wife is Diné, resigned for security reasons. Other workers voted in favor of censoring Rabbit, who then fired, according to court records.
Ina Burmeister, spokesman for Rehoboth McKinley, said 15 hired nurses were fired after hospitals suspended elective surgeries and other non-essential procedures due to the outbreak. “we have strengthened internal controls and implemented new administrative policies to ensure clinical quality. “
In a federal lawsuit opposed to the hospital and some workers challenging his dismissal, Rabbit alleges that Rehoboth McKinley’s board of administrators led the dismissals of the nurses and blamed his subordinates, adding Patel, for accepting an overload of COVID-19 patients from the rehabilitation center.
In an interview, Rabbit reiterated these issues and presented himself as a victim of a “mutiny” of interested employees.
The medical government has not received clarity from the federal government when the pandemic arrived in Gallup in March, Rabbit said. Training presented at a command center, he said, but after the consultation was over, an instructor told him, “You realize I’m making all this up, don’t you?Isn’t it?”
Rabbit said some 20 key hospital workers were infected, quarantined or resigned, aggravating the crisis.
At that moment, Rabbit said, he’s the guy of the fall: As soon as he hits the fan, everyone says: The CEO did it. “
Randy Chatto walked the long dirt roads until he discovered it: a red design that resembles a cell home in the middle of an open desert. He jumped out of his truck and yelled a Navajo salute: “Y’t’eth!”
Gilbert Martinez, a former Navajo, has lived alone in this space for years. It has no running water and the nearest store, a gas station market, is miles away. Newly arrived from raising his sheep, he was pleased to see Chatto, basically because he ran out of food and water that day.
Since February, Chatto and his team have worked with local nonprofit organizations such as the NAVAjo and Hopi Families COVID-19 Help Fund and McKinley Mutual Aid to bring materials to others living in Ramah Navajo country, where Chatto is from, in spaces so remote that some die on their way to the hospital.
Diné’s prophecies have been telling the story of a devastating disease for generations that would force the network to unite. Many tribe members said they predicted COVID-19.
After the pandemic began, the youth packed packages of medication for their elders, while Diné in other states sent medical supplies and food to the reserve’s relatives, and as for network leaders like Chatto, he said he knew more than expecting federal aid.
“We said, “We’ll have to start helping our people, ” said Chatto. “Time is very important and lives are at stake. “
Ira Vandever, operations commander of the Baca-Prewitt segment of the Navajo Nation, said it was the reaction of the community, not the assistance of the government, that stored lives.
“It’s just resilience, it’s just a reaction from our own culture to succeed over that,” he said. “We have been dealing with disease and [injustice] since 1492, when Columbus arrived. And we’re still here. “
Diné activists such as Crystal Lee, CEO and founder of United Natives, a nonprofit organization that supports Native American youth, emphasize the power of turning to the web for culturally competent answers while detecting the lingering desire.
“Many of our responses are within us, within our communities,” Lee said, noting, for example, a United Natives intertribal quarantine site co-created in COVID-19. “But what if we have wisdom without resources?”
Other U. S. volunteers intervened to compensate for a lack of physical care.
Doctors and nurses at the University of California, San Francisco, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the New Mexico Medical Reserve Corps, the State National Guard, and elsewhere rushed to McKinley County to care for the workers’ medical staff and deliver supplies.
Gary Morsch, an emergency physician from Olathe, Kansas, identified pandemic risk early on and founded a nonprofit known as COVID Care Force. After bringing volunteer medical personnel to New York in early April, the former army doctor moved to Gallup and Shiprock later that month. Morsch said his groups replaced Gallup Indian Medical Center doctors and nurses who were in poor health or quarantined, helped exhausted members, and monitored patients in motels and nursing homes.
“It’s complicated: busy, busy, busy,” Morsch said, referring to situations at Indian Medical Center. “Every room full”.
As cash and resources arrived, the Navajo Nation and New Mexico followed difficult policies to enforce lockouts and pandemic protections. Gallup closed on May 1, with roads leading to the city closed and non-essential department stores closed for 10 days. In the first two weeks of May, Navajo police issued nearly 500 citations of curfew offenders, according to The Arizona Republic.
But in weeks, cases have multiplied in and around the lands of the Navajo Nation.
“Our formula for health care in the Navajo Nation cannot handle any other acute accumulation in cases,” Nez said in a press release on October 3.
And for many families, the Big Cough already has its destruction.
After the death of Melvina Musket’s parents, it was not easy for members of the family circle to hold a double funeral. There were so many deaths in McKinley County that cemetery staff may not promptly provide a date for burial. there would be no service.
“None of the other people at the funeral home tried to touch him,” Musket said of his father.
When the time came, the circle of relatives accumulated in Rehoboth Cemetery, a sterile set of white and artemisic crosses on the outskirts of Gallup. Only 10 mourners were allowed; another circle of relatives and friends was at the front of the cemetery, two metres to one side and dressed in masks.
In Navajo culture, when someone dies, there is a long vigil where other people gather, tell stories, eat, pray and donate, but in the gentleness of COVID-19, this is not possible. Mosquet placed on the coffin a small Bible that his grandmother had given his parents at his wedding. The coffin covered in dirt. The flowers were piled on top.
Contribution: Mark Nichols, Jasper Colt
Racist means that many black, Latino, Asian, and indigenous Americans are poorer and sicker than white Americans. COVID-19 makes these inequalities fatal.
This six-part USA TODAY survey shows how beyond and provision policies have made others the main goals of COVID-19. Journalists traveled to five counties that include the effects of systemic racism to highlight those stories.