Native American Tribes Sue US Treasury Over Distribution of Stimulus Aid

Native American tribes are among the communities who have been suffering the most from the coronavirus, and receiving the least amount of aid. Native Americans are a high-risk population for COVID-19. According to Health Affairs—a peer-reviewed healthcare journal—heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, and diabetes are the leading causes of death among Native American populations, which means that life expectancy is 5.5 years less than the rest of the US population.

The coronavirus has highlighted the disparities that Native American communities face, even under “normal” circumstances. According to the American Bar Association, “health care for Native Americans lags behind other groups, despite a legal obligation on the part of the United States to provide health care to American Indians and Alaska Natives.”

In mid-March, the Seattle Indian Health Board reported that instead of receiving the medical supplies they asked for, they received a box of body bags. Though it was determined to be a mistake, the mix-up echoes the pressing lack of resources and funding that the Native American communities need. As the coronavirus continues to devastate vulnerable communities in the US, it is of the utmost importance that stimulus aid goes directly to individuals, not corporations.

The Navajo Nation, the second largest Native American tribe, now has the highest per-capita COVID-19 infection rate after New York and New Jersey. As of May 9, there were 2,973 confirmed cases and 98 confirmed deaths for the Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation with a population of 350,000 residents, and it continues to rise. On May 6, the Nation finally received their portion of the federal coronavirus stimulus aid, six weeks after it was promised to them, and only after the US Treasury Department was sued.

In April, a group of Native American tribal governments sued the US Treasury Department over unjust distribution of coronavirus stimulus aid. They sued the Treasury in order to prevent the agency from allowing for-profit Alaska Native Corporations (ANCs) to access the $8 billion allocated to Native American tribes from the $2.2 trillion emergency stimulus rescue package.

The ANCs were established after the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) in 1971—a law governing how Alaska Natives could manage their lands. According to Vox, the passage of the ANCSA was likely because the “ANCSA paved the way for oil and gas exploration, which some ANCs have gone on to profit from in the years since.”

The tribes argue that the aid should not include the for-profit Alaska Native Corporations, and should be distributed solely to the 574 federally recognized tribes. If the 237 ANCs were able to apply for the relief money, it would greatly reduce the amount the nation’s tribal people would receive because the Alaskan Native Corporations would disproportionately benefit. According to Politico, “it could also tilt much of the funding even further toward one state by giving some Alaska Natives the ability to seek aid as both villagers and shareholders of a corporation.”

On May 5, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta gave the tribes a victory when he limited access of the relief aid to the Native American tribes, blocking the ANCs from getting money from the stimulus funds.

Asiya Haouchine

is an Algerian-American writer who graduated from the University of Connecticut in May 2016, earning a BA in journalism and English. She was an editorial intern and contributing writer for Warscapes magazine and the online/blog editor for Long River Review. She is currently studying for her Master’s in Library and Information Science. @AsiyaHaou

Facing COVID-19 With Community Instead of Fear

As the coronavirus spreads anxiety and panic across the globe, people are finding ways to share information and support each other.

Citing the “collective solidarity” of friends and family in China and Hong Kong who have been affected by the coronavirus, a Seattle group has formed an online community to coordinate resources and provide support to those most vulnerable to the infection.

It’s called Covid19mutualaid, an Instagram account where “regular folks, especially folks of color, immigrants, people with disabilities…” can share information and find community.

“There has been a lot of collective storytelling in China and Hong Kong, and the people have gotten creative in how to support and protect each other,” one of the group’s organizers says, declining to give a name because, they said, the effort is collective, not individual. “Our hope is to share resources and strategies to protect each other and keep each other safe.”

we'd love your support! get creative! what can you do to keep yourself and your communities safe? Seattle/King County/Washington folks let's get organized!!!! . #covid19mutualaid #covid19outbreak #mutualaid #mutualaidnetwork #wekeepussafe #covid19mutualaid

265 Likes, 2 Comments - COVID-19 Mutual Aid (@covid19mutualaid) on Instagram: "we'd love your support! get creative! what can you do to keep yourself and your communities safe?..."

It’s a rare sentiment amid escalating panic and fear, but one that could gain traction as COVID-19, the potentially deadly disease derived from the virus, continues its rapid global spread.

More than 111,000 coronavirus cases have been reported worldwide, as the U.S. announced its 28th death. Across the globe and here in the U.S., big public events are being canceled, schools and universities are closing, financial markets are in free-fall and companies are urging their employees to work from home.

Meanwhile, incidents of ageism and ableism are on the rise and fear-fueled hysteria is driving an increase in prejudice, xenophobic violence and racism against Chinese people and others of Asian descent, particularly in the West.

In an Instagram video, author, poet, and social justice activist Sonya Renee Taylor, who founded The Body Is Not An Apology movement, urged her 37,000 followers to “banish the binary” so that their thinking around this public health crisis is more nuanced.

If you’re not one of those people panicked by the outbreak, Taylor says, be sensitive to those who are, recognizing that individual health and personal circumstances are different for each person.

“There’s a way in which fear can be one of two things—the great divider or the great gatherer,” Taylor says. “What is the most compassionate, most community-building, the most loving thing right now when everyone is afraid? I think we have an opportunity where we can be great gatherers.”

Sonya Renee Taylor on Instagram: "A tbinaa community member asked us what to do about coworkers joking about Coronavirus 'hysteria' and how invisible they felt as a person..."

1,178 Likes, 87 Comments - Sonya Renee Taylor (@sonyareneetaylor) on Instagram: "A tbinaa community member asked us what to do about coworkers joking about Coronavirus 'hysteria'..."

Every day, stories are emerging about people who, in the face of uncertainty, are doing just that.

The New York Times, for example, wrote about two men who contracted the virus on a Diamond Princess cruise in Japan, stayed in touch through text messages, and are now making vacation plans.

A video showing a group of doctors and other care providers in Iran dancing as a way of keeping spirits high has generated heartwarming reactions from around the world. Iran is coping with one of the world’s highest COVID-19 mortality rates as its economy and health care system struggle under crushing US sanctions.

“Look how they lift the spirit of patients by dancing,” one person commented on Twitter.

Another wrote: “Dancing is great for the immune system and a great stress reliever. I’m sure they are under a lot of stress!”

And, “This gives me hope for the world.”

Loving the videos of heroic Iranian medical staff battling coronavirus & dancing through it all to lift spirit of patients! Because we dance:) https://t.co/BEoSvhtraN

— Farnaz Fassihi (@farnazfassihi) March 4, 2020

An Instagram post from a “medically vulnerable/chronically ill person in Seattle” offered a helpful guide for taking care of friends affected during the outbreak.

It includes tips such as offering judgment-free assistance to do specific tasks such as delivering groceries, housecleaning, helping care for children or pets; refraining from purchasing items that sick or disabled people need to survive when they are in short supply; and checking in on isolated friends by calling, texting, etc.

The outbreak, meanwhile, is forcing employers to reexamine sick-leave policies so that employees don’t feel compelled to show up to work sick because they can’t afford to miss a paycheck.

The organizers of covid19mutualaid, who include public health professionals, say their work is geared toward supporting just such individuals. It was modeled after other communities created by family and friends in China and Hong Kong, who share stories about illness, stigma, and navigating the quarantine.

“The dilemma that workers face having to choose between health and economic survival is similar there and here,” the Seattle group says. “The collective solidarity folks there have expressed in the midst of panic and epidemic has been inspiring.”

notes from the bed of a medically vulnerable / chronically ill human living at the epicenter of the US COVID-19 outbreak. Take care of yourselves and your loved ones as always, friends. Hope this helps someone.

19.1k Likes, 154 Comments - c a r o l i n e (@mybodyofwater) on Instagram: "notes from the bed of a medically vulnerable / chronically ill human living at the epicenter of the..."

Before the outbreak in Seattle, they say, they had conducted fundraisers and sent care packages to Asia, some of it with the help of PARISOL, or Pacific Rim Solidarity Network, an anti-capitalist Chinese/Chinese-diaspora organization focused on revolutionary international solidarity.

This latest, broader online effort is more grassroots. They are calling for no new prison, jail, and detention center bookings statewide; that major employers pay a work-from-home, quarantine wage; for the creation of neighborhood stations with free testing and food supplies, and that property developers with empty apartments give free housing until the crisis is over.

They urge people to hold their government to account, citing an inadequate response on the local and federal levels to a crisis that is hitting marginalized communities hardest. “It’s great to keep washing our hands, but we don’t want an individualized solution that targets only individual behavior change for what is a structural problem,” they say.

Recommendations to work from home, for example, target people who hold desk jobs that can be done remotely, leaving those who lack that option—those employed in food, health care, and service jobs—vulnerable. They created a letter template that those who feel unsafe in their jobs can adapt and present to employers.

Government recommendations “don’t begin to serve folks in our community who live with chronic illness or other factors that put them at risk for coronavirus being hard-hitting, whether that’s health-wise or financially,” they say.

Meanwhile, the state of health care in prisons and jails leaves populations there completely unprotected, without options to self-quarantine, they say. “What happens if there’s an outbreak at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, where a lot of detained people are already suffering immensely from medical neglect?

“We are planning out some actual events to do mutual aid and solidarity work involving loved ones who are incarcerated. They are the most vulnerable.”

Lornet Turnbull is an associate editor for YES!, a Seattle-based freelance writer, and a regional freelance writer for The Washington Post.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON YES! MAGAZINE

Tokyo Olympics: How Coronavirus is Hitting Preparations

The World Health Organization’s decision to officially recognise the coronavirus outbreak as a global pandemic means organisers are facing difficult decisions on whether to go ahead with major sporting events. There were more than 124,000 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, in 118 countries, and more than 4,600 documented deaths by March 12. This is a problem for sports events around the world – not least the Olympic Games, scheduled to start in Tokyo at the end of July.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the main approach to prevent the spread of coronavirus is social distancing and practising proper hand hygiene. In late February, the CDC issued a Level 2 travel health notice advising travellers to take enhanced precautions when visiting Japan. The country is currently activating preparedness and prevention plans to block further transmission of the virus ahead of the Olympics.

Japan’s current methods of prevention include closing schools, cancelling events, quarantining international travellers, and banning certain travellers from public transport. Its efforts have so far prevented the number of people infected with COVID-19 from rising significantly. But these methods don’t seem transferable nor feasible for managing the influx of spectators, athletes, media and staff for the games should the current number of cases and transmission rates worldwide be maintained until July.

Events cancelled and postponed

Some qualification events for the Olympics have been cancelled because of the outbreak. World Taekwondo moved its Asian qualifier from the Chinese city of Wuxi to Amman, Jordan. The sport’s European qualification tournament, scheduled in Milan in the heart of Italy’s infected zone, was moved to Moscow.

The cancellation of several other sporting tournaments is preventing changes to the world rankings of athletes, which determines who qualifies to compete at the Olympics. Athletes needing additional competitions to improve their ranking in order to qualify for the Olympics might miss out on the games.

The International Shooting Sport Federation asked to extend the Olympic qualification process until early July – leaving some athletes unsure if they will compete at the Olympics until just three weeks before the games begin. The test event for the wheelchair rugby tournament at the Tokyo Paralympics was also cancelled.

Tokyo staff replace athletes during test events for the Olympics at the Aomi Urban Sports Park in early March. Christopher Jue/EPA

Event cancellations and travel restrictions may also result in fewer anti-doping tests of athletes leading up to the Olympics as testers may be prevented from travelling. The World Anti-Doping Agency is monitoring the situation, but the fear in this unprecedented situation is that some athletes could use gaps in testing to use illegal substances and then test positive for doping in Tokyo.

Options for Tokyo

If the Olympic Games in Tokyo go ahead as planned, a few scenarios could play out. One approach would be to allow athletes to compete, but without the support of spectators. The goal here would be to reduce the likelihood that someone in the crowd would transmit the disease to thousands of others. This has already happened at some football matches in Italy, a women’s golf tournament in Asia and was being explored by the NBA until it opted to suspend its season instead.

As a precautionary measure leading up to the Olympics, the torch lighting ceremony on March 12 will proceed without spectators. This may be an early sign that event organisers are exploring the wider use of this tactic.

Another approach could be to replicate the actions of African nations during the two most recent outbreaks of Ebola virus disease when athletes and fans were subjected to health screening before entering football stadiums. This process would allow the games to continue with reduced – but not eliminated – risks.

Treat it like the flu

A third possibility is to simply treat the novel coronavirus like the flu – which for sporting events, means doing nothing out of the ordinary. The Super Bowl attracts thousands of sports fans to the host city every February, which coincides with flu season. The flu virus goes through cycles in which certain strains have been particularly deadly at different historical moments. Even with deadly flu strains circulating, there have never been calls to cancel the Super Bowl. Still, Americans have a blasé attitude towards the flu, and the Super Bowl only involves spectators from one nation – unlike the global spectators who attend the Olympic Games.

On March 3, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced its commitment to hold the games during the planned dates in summer 2020. However, Japan’s Olympic minister stated the country’s contract with the IOC only states the year 2020 – meaning there could be a possibility of postponing the games.

Postponement would provide time to develop preparedness and prevention plans. But it would cause significant disruption to sponsors, television broadcasters, hotels, the Paralympic Games, and the post-Olympic timetable for transforming Tokyo’s Olympic Village into private accommodation.

Both athletes and spectators must wait to see if the spread of the virus slows and the Olympics proceed as planned, or whether the world’s biggest sporting event will, for the first time in its history, be postponed.

Kari Brossard Stoos is the Associate Professor, Department of Health Promotion and Physical Education Faculty, Ithaca College

Heather Dichter is the Associate Professor, Leicester Castle Business School, De Montfort University

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE CONVERSTAION

Coronavirus: How Media Coverage of Epidemics Often Stokes Fear and Panic

New contagious diseases are scary. They frighten us because they are unknown and unpredictable. The ongoing outbreak of the novel coronavirus has received extensive media attention, coverage that can tell us a lot about how uncertainty in the face of such an epidemic can all too easily breed fear.

For about a decade, I have been studying the role of emotions in journalism, including in the coverage of disasters and crises. Media coverage is vital to our shared conversations and plays a key role in regulating our emotions, including fear.

While fear is an emotion that we frequently experience as individuals, it can also be a shared and social emotion, one which circulates through groups and communities and shapes our reactions to ongoing events. Like other emotions, fear is contagious and can spread swiftly.

Media coverage sets the agenda for public debate. While the news doesn’t necessarily tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about. In doing so, the news signals what issues merit our attention. Research has consistently shown that when issues receive extensive media coverage and are prominent in the news agenda, they also come to be seen as more important by members of the public.

The current outbreak has been much more prominent in media coverage than recent epidemics, including Ebola. For example, a Time Magazine study shows that there were 23 times more articles in English-language print news covering the coronavirus outbreak in its first month compared to the same time period for the Ebola epidemic in 2018.

‘Killer virus’

My own research suggests that fear has played a particularly vital role in coverage of the coronavirus outbreak. Since reports first started circulating about the new mystery illness on January 12, and up until February 13 2020, I have tracked reporting in major English-language newspapers around the world, using the LexisNexis UK database. This includes almost 100 high-circulation newspapers from around the world, which have collectively published 9,387 stories about the outbreak. Of these, 1,066 articles mention “fear” or related words, including “afraid”.

Such stories often used other frightening language – for example, 50 articles used the phrase “killer virus”. One article in The Telegraph newspaper was typical of this fear-inducing language, in describing scenes on the ground in Wuhan shared on social media:

Mask-wearing patients fainting in the street. Hundreds of fearful citizens lining cheek by jowl, at risk of infecting each other, in narrow hospital corridors as they wait to be treated by doctors in forbidding white hazmat suits. A fraught medic screaming in anguish.

Tabloid newspapers such as The Sun and The Daily Mail, were more likely to use fear-inducing language. For example, The Sun’s coronavirus liveblog routinely refers to the virus as a “deadly disease”.

Many stories offered local angles by reporting on fears in local areas affected by the outbreak. In the UK, this led to a particular focus on Brighton, where several cases have been reported. For example, a story in The Times suggested:

Conversations about miniature bottles of antibacterial hand sanitiser are normally far from a mainstay of lunchtime pub chitchat. However, such is the anxiety over the coronavirus that locals in The Grenadier in Hove yesterday readily admitted to changing their hand-washing routines.

Other reports localised the story by discussing the impact on Chinese-owned businesses. The Manchester Evening News, for instance, reported that: “The fear of coronavirus is hitting businesses hard, with some reporting a 50 per cent drop in custom since the outbreak. And Chinese Mancunians report suffering more racial abuse.”

A number of stories, by contrast, sought to temper fears and provide reassurance. For example, Singaporean prime minister Lee Hsein Loong was widely quoted in cautioning against panic:

Fear can make us panic, or do things which make matters worse, like circulating rumours online, hoarding face masks or food, or blaming particular groups for the outbreak.

Fear can be catching

Research on coverage of earlier disease outbreaks show a similar emphasis on fear. In the case of the SARS epidemic in 2003, a study by historian Patrick Wallis and linguist Brigitte Nerlich found that “the main conceptual metaphor used was SARS as a killer”.

China demanded an apology after a Danish newspaper used the Chinese flag in a cartoon about the spread of the novel coronavirus. EPA-EFE/Ida Marie Odgaard

Along the same lines, media scholars Peter Vasterman and Nel Ruigrok examined coverage of the H1N1 epidemic in The Netherlands, and found that it was marked by the “alarming” tone of its coverage. Like the coronavirus, these historical outbreaks were characterised by uncertainty, breeding fear and panic.

To put these observations into perspective, it is instructive to look to a comparison to coverage of seasonal influenza, which is estimated by the World Health Organization to kill 290,000 to 650,000 people around the world every year. Since January 12 2020, world newspapers have published just 488 articles on the seasonal influenza without mention of the coronavirus.

In sharp contrast to coverage of this novel coronavirus, fewer than one in ten stories about flu (37 of 488) mentioned fear or similar phrases.

The prominence of fear as a theme in reports of the coronavirus suggests that much of the coverage of the outbreak is more a reflection of public fear than informative of what is actually happening in terms of the spread of the virus.

Former US president Franklin D Roosevelt probably overstated the case when he famously said that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. Yet at a time rife with misinformation, fake news and conspiracy theories, it is worthwhile remaining alert to the dangers of this contagious emotion in the face of uncertainty.

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen is a Professor and Director of Research Development and Environment, School of Journalism, Cardiff University

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON THE CONVERSATION.