COVID-19 data on Native Americans is ‘a national disgrace.’ says scientist

COVID-19 data on Native Americans is ‘a national disgrace.’ This scientist is fighting to be counted Abigail Echo-Hawk is working around the clock to close discriminatory data gaps Science | AAAS

Abigail Echo-Hawk can’t even count how many times she’s been called a troublemaker. It’s happened at conferences, workshops, and even after she testified before Congress—all places where she has advocated for the full and ethical inclusion of American Indians and Alaska Natives in public health data. “I didn’t used to know what to say,” she says. “Now, my answer is, ‘Is calling for justice making trouble?’”

As the director of the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) and the chief research officer for the Seattle Indian Health Board, Echo-Hawk has been working for years with Indigenous people, mostly in cities, across the United States to collect data about their communities. She has also advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health, and many universities on best practices for analyzing data about American Indian and Alaska Native communities. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has given Echo-Hawk’s work even more urgency.

The virus has taken a disproportionate toll on many Indigenous communities in the United States. But its full impact is unclear because of problems Echo-Hawk has long fought to correct, including racial misclassification and the exclusion of Indigenous communities from data sets and analyses used to make health policy decisions. ...

The system of colonialism in the United States has created, and continues to increase risk factors for, poor health outcomes in Native communities,” Echo-Hawk says. The U.S. government removed many Indigenous communities from their lands and confined them to reservations. Many didn’t have access to medical care and were cut off from their traditional diets and lifestyles, including spiritual practices that were tied to their homelands. Today, American Indians and Alaska Natives have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, asthma, and heart disease than white Americans, as well as higher rates of suicide. The system of oppression in the United States, Echo-Hawk says, “has built a perfect environment to kill us in a pandemic.”

But data showing the pandemic’s full impact on Indigenous communities across the country have not been collected, and accessing the information that does exist can be an uphill battle. Citing privacy concerns, for example, CDC initially denied tribal epidemiology centers, including UIHI, access to data about testing and confirmed COVID-19 cases, even though it was making those data available to states. ...