Amazon: Spread to the Indigenous

(I found this news article super interesting. Always good to learn new things, the interactive site is worth visiting as it is done so well~~Tabitha)

Amazon: Spread to Indigenous communities

Date: Sat 25 Jul 2020 

Source: NY Times [abridged, edited]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/25/world/americas/coronavirus-brazil-amazon.html

The Amazon River is South America's essential life source, a

glittering superhighway that cuts through the continent. It is the

central artery in a vast network of tributaries that sustains some 30

million people across 8 countries, moving supplies, people and

industry deep into forested regions often untouched by road.

But once again, in a painful echo of history, it is also bringing

disease. The virus swept through the region like past plagues that

have traveled the river with colonizers and corporations.

It spread with the dugout canoes carrying families from town to town,

the fishing dinghies with rattling engines, the ferries moving goods

for hundreds of miles, packed with passengers sleeping in hammocks,

side by side, for days at a time.

As the pandemic assails Brazil, overwhelming it with more than 2

million infections and more than 84 000 deaths -- 2nd only to the

United States -- the virus is taking an exceptionally high toll on the

Amazon region and the people who have depended on its abundance for

generations.

In Brazil, the 6 cities with the highest coronavirus exposure are all

on the Amazon River, according to an expansive new study from

Brazilian researchers that measured antibodies in the population.

The epidemic has spread so quickly and thoroughly along the river that

in remote fishing and farming communities like Tefe, people have been

as likely to get the virus as in New York City, home to one of the

world's worst outbreaks.

In the past 4 months, as the epidemic traveled from the biggest city

in the Brazilian Amazon, Manaus, with its high-rises and factories, to

tiny, seemingly isolated villages deep in the interior, the fragile

health care system has buckled under the onslaught.

Cities and towns along the river have some of the highest deaths per

capita in the country, often several times the national average. In

Manaus, there were periods when every Covid ward was full and 100

people were dying a day, pushing the city to cut new burial grounds

out of thick forest. Grave diggers lay rows of coffins in long

trenches carved in the freshly turned earth.

The virus is exacting an especially high toll on Indigenous people, a

parallel to the past. Since the 1500s, waves of explorers have

traveled the river, seeking gold, land and converts, and later,

rubber, a resource that helped fuel the Industrial Revolution,

changing the world. But with them, these outsiders brought violence

and diseases like smallpox and measles, killing millions and wiping

out entire communities.

Indigenous people have been roughly 6 times as likely to be infected

with the coronavirus as white people, according to the Brazilian

study, and are dying in far-flung river villages untouched by

electricity.

The crisis in the Brazilian Amazon began in Manaus, a city of 2.2

million that has risen out of the forest in a jarring eruption of

concrete and glass, tapering at its edges to clusters of wooden homes

perched on stilts, high above the water.

Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state, is now an industrial

powerhouse, a major producer of motorcycles, with many foreign

businesses. It is intimately connected to the rest of the world -- its

international airport sees about 250 000 passengers a month -- and,

through the river, to much of the Amazon region.

Manaus's 1st documented case, confirmed on 13 Mar 2020, came from

England. The patient had mild symptoms and quarantined at home, in a

wealthier part of town, according to city health officials. Soon,

though, the virus seemed to be everywhere. 

"We didn't have any more beds, or even armchairs," Dr. Alvaro Queiroz,

26, said of the days when his public hospital in Manaus was completely

full. "People never stopped coming."

In Manacapuru, more than an hour from the capital, Messias Nascimento

Farias, 40, carried his ailing wife to their car and sped down one of

the region's few country roads to meet the ambulance that could carry

her to a hospital.

But for most people living along the river, hundreds of boat miles

from Manaus, the fastest way to a major hospital is by plane.

Even before the virus arrived, people in far-flung communities with a

life-threatening emergency could make a frantic call for an airplane

ambulance that would take them to a hospital in the capital. But the

small planes turned out to be dangerous for people with Covid-19,

sometimes causing blood oxygen levels to plummet as the aircraft rose.

Very few of the airlift patients seemed to be surviving, doctors

said.

When the coronavirus arrived in the Americas, there was widespread

fear that it would take a devastating toll on Indigenous communities

across the region. In many places along the Amazon River, those fears

appear to be coming true.

At least 570 Indigenous people in Brazil have died of the disease

since March 2020, according to an association that represents the

country's Indigenous people. The vast majority of those deaths were in

places connected to the river.

More than 18 000 Indigenous people have been infected. Community

leaders have reported entire villages confined to their hammocks,

struggling to rise even to feed their children.

In many instances, the very health workers sent to help them have

inadvertently spread the virus.

The pandemic has been brutal on medical workers around the world, and

it has been particularly difficult for the doctors and nurses

navigating the vast distances, frequent communication cuts, and deep

supply scarcity along the Amazon. Without proper training or

equipment, many nurses and doctors along the river have died. Others

have infected their families.

[Byline: Julie Turkewitz and Manuela Andreoni]

--

[Travel along the waterways is a known route for transporting

emerging, re-emerging, and exotic pathogens to populations that are

traditionally isolated from the more developed regions, and the spread

of COVID-19 along the Amazon river is a clear example of this. Take

note that spread through this route may already be underway in Africa,

as major rivers such as the Nile traverse many countries in that

continent. ]

******

No different than giving smallpox contaminated blankets to the Incas,and Mayans .........

we've come such along way in 400 years😏