A small clinic at the Waiapi Indigenous reserve in Ámapa state in Brazil. A lack of medical care could worsen the toll of COVID-19 among Indigenous communities.
By Ignacio AmigoScience’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Pulitzer Center.To the older generation of the Paiter Surui, the COVID-19 pandemic looks familiar.The Indigenous people who inhabit the border of the Brazilian states of Rondônia and Mato Grosso suffered hundreds of deaths from measles and other infectious diseases in the decades after they first made contact with non-Indigenous people in 1969.
The survivors “already experienced what is happening in the world today with the coronavirus,” says Rubens Naraikoe Surui, a young Indigenous leader.Now, as the number of