If Tribes Were Counted As States, Then The 5 States With The Most Coronavirus Would Be Tribes

Nick Kristof interviewing Shawna Gonzalez and her children.

By Nicholas Kristof Opinion Columnist

If Native American tribes were counted as states, then the five states with the highest coronavirus infection rates would all be tribes, and New York would rank No. 6. I traveled through Navajo Nation, the largest reservation in the country, entering in Arizona and exiting in New Mexico, to report on the virus’s devastation, and here’s what I found.

The Navajo are leery that coverage of the crisis will reinforce a narrative of them as helpless and hopeless, but I am here to report that the community has handled the outbreak reasonably well. The underlying problem is longstanding neglect and discrimination that have resulted in unconscionable poverty. The United States allocates less than half as much for health care per Native American (through the Indian Health Service) as it does per prisoner (through the Bureau of Prisons). And government schools on reservations have only a 53 percent high school graduation rate.

Let’s pay attention to native communities that have the highest infection rates in the entire United States. Please do read my column, and I hope you’ll pass it on. Emergency Coronavirus Funds For American Indian Health Stalled https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/20/coronavirus-american-indian-health-138724 Did Trump's Coronavirus Action, Inaction And Ineptitude Kill 91,724 People Needlessly? https://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2020/05/korea.html

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Passing the 100,000 Milestone. Or is it the 125,000 Milestone?

There has been great attention to the United States passing the milestone of 100,000 deaths attributed to Covid-19. But remember that this is almost certainly a significant undercount because, especially early on, many people who died of pneumonia were never tested and a doctor simply wrote something like “respiratory failure” on the death certificate.

With Rafael Irizarry, a Harvard statistician, I calculated excess deaths several weeks ago from C.D.C. mortality data, and we estimated that the toll was about 25,000 greater than listed on the Covid-19 trackers. Professor Irizarry just did a follow-up using the latest C.D.C. data, and he now finds about 30,000 excess deaths — suggesting that the true toll caused directly or indirectly by Covid-19 is now about 130,000.