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Just according to the statistics, the chance for Mae Tso was not good. A respected tribal elder with extensive knowledge of Navajo traditions, Tso (83), lives in the remote village of Dinebitoh on the Navajo nation. She was in the most vulnerable demographic of the most vulnerable population in Arizona because she succumbed to Covid-19.
But Tso was determined not to get sick. She had no chronic health problems and still wandered around in the high desert in her home to collect herbs for medicine. She also made pigments from plants and woven the hand-dyed wool into beautiful traditional rugs that were known among art collectors. Angelina Jolie once bought one of Tso’s rugs, and Tso’s family likes to brag.
Tso was the matriarch of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren living in a sprawling family home that, like many homes on the Navajo Reservation, had no running water. “She always told us to wash our hands,” said her daughter, Juanita Tso. “My mother was not afraid of many, but of Covid.”
Tso has not set foot in a public place since February 2020, yet she developed a dry cough in mid-December that does not shake her herbal tea. She began to struggle to breathe, while everyone in the isolated family compound began to show symptoms Covid-19.
Tso was admitted to the Navajo Reserve on December 23 at the hospital in Tuba City with severe pneumonia. Juanita and other family members tried to comfort her by standing outside the window of her hospital room where they talked and sang to her through the glass.
She passed away three weeks later, on January 12. She was the fourth person in her immediate family to die from the virus, and one of more than 13,100 people now in the Covid death row for Arizona.
The uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus in Mae’s hometown of Dinebitoh came amid a severe increase in cases in the state of Arizona this winter. On January 3, the Arizona Department of Health reported 17,200 new cases of Covid-19, the highest number in one day since the pandemic began. During the month, the Grand Canyon country recorded at least 5,000 new cases almost every day. In recent weeks, it has consistently led the country to the highest number of cases and the highest number of deaths associated with Covid, according to the Covid Data Tracker of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cases declined slightly last week, but total hospital beds for the state remained at more than 90%.
Native Americans were one of the worst hit in the state. Indigenous people, 26% of the population in Coconino province where the Arizona portion of the vast Navajo reservation is located, suffered 77% of the province’s Covid-19 deaths. And nearly 70% of all Navajo Nation deaths due to the virus were among tribe members over 60, such as Tso.
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While several U.S. states have experienced record-breaking cases in Covid-19 cases after the holidays, Arizona health officials are concerned not only about the extent of the spread in all parts of the state, but also about the shameless attitude of many residents toward health safety measures.
“There is a population that can carry objects to carry for various reasons or the problem is not serious enough,” says Dr. Joshua LaBaer, director of Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute. ‘Currently in the province of Maricopa [where the Phoenix metro area is located] I have seen busy restaurants that presumably have 50% capacity, but people sit shoulder to shoulder, do not wear masks and hang out together. And we are in the midst of our worst boom ever. ”
Although the Phoenix Valley is the 10th largest metro area in the country, many Arizona residents are nostalgic for the riotous, wild west of the state with its legendary cowboys, gun fighters and prospectors. The territory of Arizona only became a state in 1912, the last in the lower 48. And only in 2000 did it become illegal to shoot a gun into the air in the cities of Arizona.
LaBaer grew up in Arizona and he attributes people who ignore health safety mandates to the “very libertarian standpoint” of the state. He sums it up as: “Do not fall in my way. I want to do what I want to do. ”
This attitude is also reflected in the state government’s handling of the crisis. When Arizona restaurants and bars reopened in August last year, Gov. Doug Ducey ordered reopening only if counties had fewer than 100 confirmed positive tests per 100,000 people. However, no similar policy was put in place to close cases when matters climb.
Last week, the Arizona Department of Health showed more than 10,000 cases per 100,000 people in Maricopa Province and similar numbers for urban areas across the state. Yet gyms are open for restaurants and bars. State universities and many school districts hold personal classes as well as interscholastic team sports.
“Governor Ducey wants to protect lives and livelihoods,” Ducey spokesman CJ Karamargin said in December when Covid affairs first increased. He said there are no plans to curb businesses, and the best hope for bringing the pandemic in Arizona under control was vaccinations.
‘Their defiance is fear’
Last week, Covid became the leading cause of death for Arizonans in all age groups, more so than cancer or heart disease or accidents.
“If there was a bomb by a terrorist that killed only a fraction of so many people, Arizonans would be furious,” LaBaer of ASU said. “But here we are just to see how this virus kills people.”
Many of the Covid-19 rebels in Arizona may not understand the ‘abstract concept’ of the way Covid-19 spreads, often asymptomatically, from person to person, leaving some completely intact and others dead, LaBaer said. .
Brandy Carothers’ husband came down with flu-like symptoms, including a loss of smell, during the New Year holidays. Carothers, a senior clinical research coordinator for the University of Arizona Medical College in Phoenix, knew that her husband had coronavirus, although he was reluctant to seek medical care. Days later, she became ill and insisted that the whole family be tested for the virus. Carothers and her husband tested positive, along with their two young children who remained asymptomatic.
Carothers had asthma and her infection progressed to double pneumonia. She was admitted to a Banner Health facility in Phoenix, where she spent a week undergoing sophisticated treatments.
Carothers’ husband did not believe in wearing masks. “My husband usually doesn’t wear a mask because he rebels and he doesn’t like the way it feels on his face,” she said. “And he thinks using masks in the long run is bad for your health because you inhale bacteria.”
Carothers is fully aware that such allegations about masks are untrue and has regularly encouraged her husband to wear masks, even wearing a double-layer mask, she said. ‘My husband knows that the virus is serious for some populations, but he does not fit into the population. “He said he did not want to stop leading his life,” she said.
Carothers does not know if her family’s Covid-19 experience changed her husband’s attitude about masks, she said.
Dr. Tommy Begay, a cultural psychologist at the University of Arizona’s Medical College in Tucson, sees that some Arizona people are reluctant to wear masks in public places, as more than just proof of turbulent independence. “Some people are obviously going to go to great lengths to defy health mandates,” Begay said. “And for many, it’s a political statement in support of what Donald Trump stands for, which is white nationalism and a contempt for science.”
Begay grew up on the Navajo reservation and he regards the nostalgia of the wild west mythologized in Arizona as a time when everyone knew their place.
He believes that despite the high death rate from the state of Covid-19, many Trump supporters follow the example of the masks set by the former president as a way to hold on to the past. “Their defiance is really fear,” he said. “They are afraid that the new majority in our country will be colored.”
Data from the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that this transition will occur in Arizona by 2030, 15 years before it happens for the entire United States. An early indication of the demographic shift comes with the November 2020 election when the red Arizona, barely, turned blue. Even though Biden transported Arizona, Trump received 1.6 million votes, which was about 400,000 more votes than he received in 2016. According to Begay, the fact that he is not wearing a mask keeps people connected to Trump and conspiracy theories.
According to a recent study by the University of Southern California, white Americans are the least likely group to wear a mask if they have people from other households. While only 46% of white people regularly wear masks, the study found that 67% of black people wear masks, along with 63% of Latinos and 65% of people of other races.
However, like many other regions in the US, coloreds in Arizona have borne the brunt of the pandemic. The provinces with the most cases are those with mainly Latino or Indian population. In Yuma province, which leads the state for cases per capita, one in six people tested positive for the virus. Many are immigrants who work in the winter salad, live in communal housing and drive overcrowded buses to work. On many Arizona reservations, tribal members adhere to strict indications and health instructions, but poor, multi-generational households with a lack of infrastructure make it difficult to stop the virus from spreading.
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When Mae Tso’s condition in the hospital worsened in mid-January, her daughter Juanita gave her a teddy bear “to have something to hug” while she was alone in the sterile hospital room.
Juanita began to worry about carrying out Navajo funeral practices under the strict Covid-19 security measures if her mother were to succeed. “My mother was very traditional. She had to put at least red paint on her face for safe access to the world, ”Juanita recalls.
When Tso died, Juanita could not dress her mother in the moccasins and turquoise jewels as she had hoped – Mae is considered a bio-hazard. But a nurse puts the red paint on Mae’s face after her last breath. Then she was put in a suitcase with her teddy bear.