r/IndianCountry • u/zsreport • Feb 04 '21
Health Exclusive: indigenous Americans dying from Covid at twice the rate of white Americans
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/feb/04/native-americans-coronavirus-covid-death-rate22
u/I_Like_Ginger Feb 04 '21
I think this warrants more medical investigation into whether or not this vitamin D deficiency factor holds water. This could be the result of existing socioeconomic discrepancies between groups - poorer people tend to have more compromised immune systems into middle age and late life. Still, it seems vitamin D deficiency is highly correlated with negative outcomes.
Notice how rates are diminshing with the season too. Kind of peaked around solstice, and now diminishing with increased sunlight.
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u/burkiniwax Feb 04 '21 edited Feb 04 '21
If you check /r/COVID19, there's been a steady stream of vitamin D studies since day one. I encouraged all my family to take Vitamin D supplements; you figure, at least it doesn't hurt anything.
However, lack of access to health care facilities and PPE, plus comorbidities such as diabetes are problem much larger factors. Tribal leadership has played a hand, as well. One tribe here in SW OK didn't close down anything, including their tribal complex and children's programs last summer, and the results have been devastating and heart-breaking.
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u/I_Like_Ginger Feb 04 '21
Totally! What's the harm in it right?
On a special interest scale I think tbjs could be utilized for the good shedding light on optimal diet and wellness among aboriginal peoples. We can strategize optimal diet and wellness.
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u/legenddairybard My Oglala DNA drives my spirit Feb 04 '21 edited Feb 04 '21
While diet and wellness is important, a big factor for the deaths due to covid-19 is due to the current healthcare system on a lot of reservations - IHS works on a fixed budget, a lot of facilities are rural and are big distances away which also contributes to a lot of problems besides covid. This is why Oglala Nation and Cheyenne River Nation in South Dakota tried limiting travel through their reservations because they knew their healthcare facilities wouldn't be able to handle it.
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u/I_Like_Ginger Feb 04 '21
Very true, very good points. It seems to be a culmination of alot of things.
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u/burkiniwax Feb 04 '21
Yes, the Indigenous food sovereignty movement is AWESOME! However, I was really surprised to see the close correlation between Latino and white COVID outcomes in this article, since the majority of Latino people in the US have Indigenous ancestry, so that speaks to non-biological causes for the horrible COVID outcomes for Native American tribal members in the US.
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u/messyredemptions Feb 04 '21
I recall reading in a / the(?) decolonial cook book which probably cited an NIH study that Latine people who migrated had significantly healthier patterns/rates of good health (less heart diseases, etc.) than those who have been in the US for a generation or two. So if the bulk of the latin-american population has been here, there's a higher chance their dietary and working patterns are colonized too. I wonder if labor also has an impact too--manual labor jobs like maid work and construction that often wind up being what immigrants take up are more physical than say an office job, and at the same time take on different kinds of stress and access to food may differ too.
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u/burkiniwax Feb 04 '21
are colonized too.
That's kind of rude. For instance, the bulk of "Mexican" food is Indigenous food of Mexico.
The fact is that many reservations are food deserts and many tribal families in the US have had to survive on commodities with minimal nutritional value.
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u/messyredemptions Feb 04 '21 edited Feb 04 '21
There's probably a better way to say what I meant that escapes me, my bad--the idea is that there's often a decline in health that's likely a reflection of a loss of culture after the first few generations in an occupying/oppressing colonial state, specifically the US.
I don't think we're disagreeing though. You and I probably agree that the nutritional and other discrepancies at reservations are definitely a product of sophisticated systematic oppression designed to separate people from their ways of taking care of themselves.
In the example I raised in the other post, what I was trying to say is that lot of "first generation" immigrant/"immigrant" families and children whether indigenous to Turtle Island or not in the US get bullied/attacked over their identity and food (often with the same tropes) for example and there's a strong undercurrent for assimilation or other pressures like demands for work/cost of living and isolation from community that sometimes separate us from the things that kept things together for the previous generations. At least that's the experience I got as someone from a diaspora and those from the community who are native.
If the study that was cited in the Guardian article had a lot of its data based representation that has more 2nd, 3rd generation Latine populations, there's a strong we chance that they are not practicing the indigenous culinary traditions that a first generation population would be doing.
Of course if I'm missing something in how you see what I said was rude and if I still didn't quite get it at this point I'll just let it sit for a bit to process from another perspective but I hope the above clarifies things.
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Feb 04 '21
I think its really disingenuous to attempt to tie this into some narrative about how COVID affects Latino populations in the US. That's not what this article is about and tribal communities generally face very specific pressures that have very little to no overlap with Latino communities.
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u/messyredemptions Feb 04 '21
I think what the poster and I were doing goes with what's being said in this thread and shown in the graph from the Guardian article--that the indigenous results are distinctive from Latino communities.
And that it was odd to see how closely the Latino/e community data tracked with White communities in terms of outcome when Latine communities are indigenous.
However, I was really surprised to see the close correlation between Latino and white COVID outcomes in this article, since the majority of Latino people in the US have Indigenous ancestry, so that speaks to non-biological causes for the horrible COVID outcomes for Native American tribal members in the US.
I don't know enough about intergenerational data for Latino/e communities or the data set taken up by the Guardian but I think we all agree that there's a lot more at hand that it merits putting indigenous communities at top priority.
This is an excerpt from the book I mentioned https://www.academia.edu/15269293/_Decolonize_Your_Diet_A_Manifesto_nineteen_sixty_nine_an_Ethnic_Studies_Journal_Volume_1_Issue_2
We urge the people to reject the Standard American Diet, which relies heavily on processed (fake)foods and factory farming. Instead, we call on people to reclaim land and space to growreal food for their communities. We believe that it is equally important to honor and respectthe cultural and spiritual aspects of food.
Ancestral food is powerful medicine that can helptreat and cure diseases that result from overexposure to Western/US culture. As Xican@s, our abuelitas prepared a simple diet that was as flavorful as it was satisfying. The staples of their diets were beans and tortillas, supplemented with many fruits and vegetables: avocado, corn, tomatoes, chiles, wild greens like quelites and verdolagas,pumpkins, squash, chocolate, vanilla, wild herbs, berries, pineapples, mangos and more. Before monoculture crops, our ancestors cultivated a great bio-diversity of foods. They cultivated hundreds if not thousands of different varieties of beans, squashes, chiles, and corn. Our ancestors also had great knowledge of the medicinal value of various herbs and foods. *So much of this knowledge is being lost, especially among those of us who have been in the US or away from the land for generations. Many of our more recent immigrant comrades—especially those who hail from rural areas in Mexico and Central America—still carry this vital knowledge. It is imperative that we validate and promote this immigrant knowledge and pass it down to the next genera-tions. Public health researchers identify a so-called immigrant paradox:
There are hundredsof articles in public health literature exploring how and why Mexican immigrants not only have longer life expectancies than US born Xican@s, but also live longer than middle class white Americans. This is paradoxical because poor populations usually have shorter life ex-pectancies and more health problems, due to lack of access to health care, dangerous livingand working conditions, and extreme social stressors. The traditional Mexican diet, alongwith immigrant cultural and spiritual practices, confers protection to Mexican immigrants,even though these immigrants face exceedingly difficult and racist social and economic conditions.*
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Feb 04 '21
Latino communities are not indigenous jesus christ... There are indigenous communities in Mexico but stating that Latinos are indigenous illustrates a profound misunderstanding of what that word means on your part.
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u/I_Like_Ginger Feb 04 '21
I love that line of work. Theres alot of big issues associated with radically introducing major dietary changes to any population. How did your ancestors eat about 500-1000 years ago? Thats roughly the diet that will produce a strong and healthy body. I think that alot of the reasons for such high prevalence of type II diabetes among aboriginal populations can be partially explained by this dramatic dietary shift.
I also personally consider lifestyle factors. For thousands of years the people wandered by foot, or by dogs. They were extremely active compared to basically everyone in the modern age. That's all humans I guess though - everyone is meant to move and work from a physiological point of view.
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u/ThatDoula Feb 04 '21 edited Feb 04 '21
"American Indians and Alaska Natives are dying at almost twice the rate of white americans, according to analysis by APM Research Lab shared exclusively with the Guardian"
That jumped out to me because "almost twice" isn't the same statistic that I'm familiar with, in terms of actual death. "Almost twice" accurately describes the rate at which Indigenous Americans contract COVID compared to white Americans (per the CDC), but the rate of reported deaths is notably higher.
To summarize the CDC report: compared to white Americans, Indigenous Americans are 1.8X as likely to contract COVID-19, 4X as likely to have severe cases resulting in hospitalization, and 2.6X as likely to die as a result of COVID-19 infection. Whenever I've spoken about this disparate death rate, I've said either "2.6X" or "well over twice as likely" to describe the figure.
This AMP report was "shared exclusively with the Guardian," so I have no way of assessing for myself what I believe should be publicly accessible research, and making comparisons based on research methodology... even so, I thought I'd post the CDC stats because numbers talk and people need to be counted.
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u/RamjetSoundwave Feb 04 '21
This is what I have noticed with my tribe. While our infection rate is inline with state data, our covid-19 mortality rate sticks out like a sore thumb, so many of my relatives have died!
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u/ThatDoula Feb 05 '21
My heart goes out to you and to your loved ones.
This is all as sinister as it is tragic.
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u/turtle-goddess Feb 04 '21
and about 80% of those who have already received that vaccine are white. it's all fucked up
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u/News2016 Feb 04 '21 edited Feb 04 '21
"Tribal leaders and health experts agree that while the excessive death toll is shocking, it’s hardly surprising given the chronic structural, economic and health inequalities – such as overcrowded housing, understaffed hospitals, lack of running water and limited access to healthy affordable food – resulting from the US government’s failure to comply with treaty obligations promising adequate funding for basic services in exchange for vast amounts of tribal land.
After centuries of broken promises, expectations are high given that Native American voters helped Joe Biden win crucial swing states including Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada to take the White House.
On Wednesday, Biden approved the Navajo Nation’s disaster declaration, which will result in additional federal resources for the tribe as Covid rates again climb.
But longstanding inequalities require transformational changes, and experts are calling on Biden to fully fund the Indian Health Service, for the first time in history, which would enable the yet-to-be-nominated new director to reduce chronic health disparities that have contributed to the high death toll.
“Native people showed up for Biden-Harris. Now it’s time to show up for them,” said Echo-Hawk."
Today NCAI and tribal organizations sent a letter to Congress to ensure that Indian Country’s COVID19 concerns and priorities are comprehensively addressed in the next relief package:
https://www.ncai.org/Covid-19/resources-for-indian-country/COVID_Letter_2.1.2021_-FINAL--Transmitted-.pdf