Carol Schumacher, 56, who was raised in the remote community of Chilchinbeto in the Navajo Nation, has lost 42 family members to Covid-19 over the last two years. The dead included two brothers aged 55 and 54, and cousins as young as 18 and 19. Ms. Schumacher returned to the Navajo Nation from her home in Wisconsin this summer to grieve with family. She knew what to expect, having grown up on the reservation in Arizona. But what she saw left her reeling.
The nearest hospital was a long drive away on dirt roads, she said, “and there’s no guarantee about the quality of care there even if you make it in time. Some families don’t even have transportation or running water. Imagine dealing with that.”
Now federal health researchers have put a number to the misery that Ms. Schumacher and so many other families in Native communities experienced in the first two years of the pandemic.
In 2020 and 2021, as the coronavirus swept across the United States, life expectancy for Native Americans and Alaska Natives fell by six and a half years — a decline that left the researchers aghast. The comparable figure for all Americans was about three years, itself a terrible milestone not seen in nearly a century. What could have left Native Americans and Alaska Natives so vulnerable to the pandemic? There is no simple diagnosis, nor is there an easy fix, experts say.