A broken system: The number of Indigenous people who died from coronavirus may never be known
From medical health privacy laws to a maze of siloed information systems, the true impact of COVID-19 on American Indian and Alaska Natives is impossible to calculate.
In May of 2020, the Navajo Nation reported one of the highest per-capita COVID-19 infection rates in the United States. Since that milestone, official data reveal that the Navajo Nation has been one of the hardest-hit populations since the pandemic began. The Navajo Nation boasts the largest population of any Indigenous nation in the United States, and thousands of Navajos live outside the nation, in towns along the border, cities across the country, and in other parts of the world, making it difficult to tally the virus’ impacts on Navajo citizens.
It’s made worse by a labyrinthian system of local, state, federal and tribal data-reporting systems that often do not communicate with each other or share information. In an effort to come up with a more reliable fatality count, reporters with the Indigenous Investigative Collective (IIC) made multiple public-records requests for death records held by state medical examiners of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. Those requests focused on the counties on or adjacent to the Navajo Nation where many Navajo families live. The states rejected those requests, citing privacy concerns, preventing independent analysis of those records to determine death rates. Experts also cite pervasive misidentification of race and ethnicity of victims at critical data collection points, making the true toll of the pandemic on the Navajo Nation impossible to ever know.
The Indigenous Investigative Collective has found that those data problems extend nationwide. As of June 2, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 6,585 American Indian and Alaska Natives have died from COVID-19 — the highest rate of any ethnic group in the United States. That estimate likely falls far short of the actual death toll.
“Even though right now we’re showing as having some of the highest death rates, it’s a gross undercount,” said Abigail Echo-Hawk, Pawnee, director of the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) based in Seattle, Washington, one of 12 nationally recognized tribal epidemiology centers in the country.
That undercount leaves researchers and epidemiologists completely in the dark when creating practices and policies to deal with future pandemics.
