Native Voice One

Native American Radio Network

What’s Next – Not quite Post Pandemic

By

Temporary studio at the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center was the home of Indian Country Today. This week the news program moves into a regular studio at Arizona PBS. (Mark Trahant photo)
Sometimes a call for patience can be tough.
This is Trahant Reports.
In Phoenix, Arizona, the team that produces the television version of Indian Country Today has been eager to get into the studio to produce a better version of the show. 
This whole enterprise is a pandemic special. 
Last March we started producing Zoom calls and Facebook live reports and discovered that we had a significant audience. At the time ICT was a digital publication but we had also planned on a weekly broadcast. So we started to interview key people about what was going on … the first episode was asking reporters what was going on what they saw. Then Dean Seneca, an expert in infectious disease. Then we started doing it everyday. 
Within a week the programs were 26 minutes and 46 seconds … this is the PBS standard for a half-hour show. The program was carried by FNX: First Nations Experience … and we were producing a daily news report. Last summer we created a temporary studio at the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center. 
A lot has happened since then. We never could have pulled this off without the pandemic. Normally we would have needed millions of dollars in equipment and people in order to produce a broadcast quality program. But the pandemic was an excuse to do it differently. We could interview people on Zoom. We used a home office or living room as a studio. We showed that the content, Native American stories, was worthy of a national audience.

Today we are carried daily or weekly by many public television stations across the country (and in Australia.) As they say … check your local listing. More are being added regularly. 
March 15 was supposed to be our first day in a new studio at Arizona PBS. But late last week there was a COVID-19 report in our building. So we all went home again. I recorded Monday’s show in my living room, a full circle.
The good news is the test was a false positive — our show will debut in the studio later this week. 
That’s really cool because there is so much news going on now. Soon we will be able to say, Madam Secretary, as Rep. Deb Haaland is confirmed as the Secretary of the interior. And the new American Rescue Plan Act has so much to unpack because it’s the most significant investment in tribal communities in the history of our country,
But the lesson here is worth heeding. Even though we have plans … even though we want life to return to normal … we still live in a moment of caution. 
When the pandemic began we did not let going home limit our imaginations. We can still balance innovation with safety. 
As we begin the “what’s next?” portion of this story, this experience, is a lesson here for us all. 

 

I am Mark Trahant.

Red Summer

By

A century ago the United States was finally free from the Great War and dealing with day-to-day waves from a flu pandemic. 
The country was also tested by unresolved questions about racism and violence. 
Tested and largely failed. 
This week marks  the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre. 
This is Trahant Reports.

The headlines from summer of 1919 almost seem familiar today. Riots in Washington, D.C.; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Phillips County, Arkansas; Omaha, Nebraska and – most dramatically – Chicago. The spark was racial strife.
Even the pandemic, the flu, had a racial framework because hospitals were segregated and African Americans had to seek care at black-owned institutions. 
That era was known as the “Red Summer. There were public murders and lynchings carried out on streets across the country, dismissed as riots. That story conflicted with the story that America was telling the world that the post-World War I-era notion that America was making the world safe for democracy.
And, if the Red Summer was not enough … on May 31, 1921, stirred by a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, known as the Black Wall Street, was attacked and demolished. 
“A mob destroyed 35 square blocks of the African American Community during the evening of May 31, through the afternoon of June 1, 1921,” said a report on the event by the state of Oklahoma in 2001. 
Hundreds of whites were deputized and participated in the violence, even providing firearms and ammunition to people, all of them white, who looted, killed and destroyed property. Officials may have blamed African Americans for the “race riot.” But the community and the Red Cross labeled it a massacre from the start. 
No one was ever prosecuted or punished for the violent criminal acts.
Human Rights Watch published a report Friday that called for reparations. Finally. 
“The Tulsa Race Massacre and surrounding events led directly to the loss of hundreds of lives, loss of liberty, substantial personal and business property loss, and damage to objects of cultural significance. Compounding inequalities stemming from the massacre led to lower life expectancy, increased need for mental health services, loss of economic opportunity, and other harms to community members over decades … Yet the victims of the massacre have yet to receive an effective remedy.”
I am Mark Trahant.

Data – What’s the Story?

By

The numbers are stark.
Last week Navajo Nation health officials reported six new deaths Friday and 180 new cases of COVID-19. That adds up to 1,590 known coronavirus infections across the Navajo Nation and some 58 deaths.
That topline number places the Navajo Nation at 45 out of 55 states and territories, ahead of ten other jurisdictions. 
What’s the story behind the data? 

This is Trahant Reports.

The state and territory data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention includes three columns: Column A for the state or territory (which should include tribal nations, by the way); the number of confirmed cases; and the number of deaths. But if you insert a new tab, a filter for population, then the story grows even more significant. 
Welcome to the world of the denominator. As one source put it: ‘‘Physicians lie awake at night worrying about numerators. Epidemiologists lie awake at night worrying about the denominators’
As Indian Country Today’s Jourdan Bennett-Begaye reported “denominators are key” to understanding the big picture of COVID-19 in Indian Country.

What population is counted determines our understanding about how widespread the disease is and where it will go next.

Take the Indian Health Service “service population” at 2,562,000. That means the reported infection rate is 0.08 percent. But if you calculate based on the IHS user population of 1.662 million, then the rate is 0.12 percent. 
But that’s only the reported cases. We know this disease can be without symptoms and we don’t have enough testing to know how many people are really infected,
And that will be a much larger number.z
If you use the World Health Organization framework  and the IHS service population that means we will eventually reach 5,778 cases and 275 deaths. 
But numbers again are different if the 2010 Census with the American Indian and Alaska Native population at 5.2 million is used. Then the Indian health system could expect 12,017.2 cases and 572 deaths. 

But all of that changes if a different denominator is used. The problem here is that we know the Census undercounts Indian Country. We don’t know by how many people, though.

This is when that number is absolutely critical.

 

I am Mark Trahant

The New Normal

By

The corona virus pandemic is like nothing we have experienced before. The virus is new — and something we humans have no protection against — and so governments around the world including tribal governments are still trying to figure out how to respond.

This is Trahant Reports.

Why don’t people believe? Why the business as usual? And what will it take to change behavior?

Consider this math: California has a model that projects 25 million of its citizens will be infected by the virus over the next 8 weeks. That works out to 62.5 percent of the population.

And if California is a bellwether — as it often is — that means that out of 3 million people some 1.8 million people in Indian Country.

The World Health Organization and the CDC say mild cases account for 75-to-80 percent of the total. This is harsh, but that model means that about 500,000 people in Indian Country will get seriously ill or will die.

“It’s unfortunate that people are not taking this serious. Maybe it would be mass casualties that would really open people’s eyes,” Dean Seneca, executive director of Seneca Scientific Solutions. He told Indian Country Today and worked for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention’s Office for State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial Support for more than 18 years.

Seneca knew the U.S. was going to face a pandemic, and especially when China had more than 20,000 cases.

It is a hard thing to do to shut down everything. No visiting. No shopping. Just sit and wait.

And here’s the thing. We may have to do this for weeks if not months.

In California normally congested freeways are wide open and city streets are mostly empty.

Clearly life is not normal. Yet a lot of people still are living in denial.

Sunday night Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, White Earth, announced on her Instagram page that she lost her brother to the pandemic.

“Almost exactly two months after we buried our dad, my brother Ron passed on Saturday,” she wrote. “To many, he’ll be a statistic: Tennessee’s second COVID-related death. But to me, I’ll remember a loving, older brother, uncle, father, and husband.”

Flanagan said several weeks ago her brother was diagnosed with cancer. “His immune system was compromised and he contracted COVID-19,” she wrote. “He fought as hard as he could but it was simply too much for his body. THIS is why we must #StayHomeMN.”

She wrote that someone feeling well could still be carrying the virus … “then you walk past the next Ron, my big brother, in public.

The new normal. I am Mark Trahant.

Pandemic

By

There is nothing more important now than good science — and that means washing your hands often, staying at home and avoiding people.

This is Trahant Reports.

Our ancestors have faced smallpox, influenza, and war. Now our generation is looking at a pandemic that is disrupting our daily lives.

Things that we take for granted are on hold. Visiting friends, even family. Going to work. Or watching our favorite team or musicians.

The coronavirus spreads by contact, so when you meet someone who has the virus, they are likely to spread it. The math says that everyone who carries the disease will likely pass it along to at least two others. That’s a lot of people. And what makes this even more nasty is that you can spread this disease before you’re sick. So the idea of … if you are sick, stay home … is less relevant. We also know that coronavirus spreads more easily than the flu. Think of it as an infectious pneumonia.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic is new in so many ways, one that’s particularly dangerous for elderly people or those with chronic health conditions such as diabetes.

But the biggest concern is human behavior. Can we all adjust, quickly, so that we don’t spread it on? Can we stay home? Away from people? And this is the big one: Can we wait in line for medical help?

So we have been trained to go to the doctor when we are sick. We want to get fixed up as soon as possible. That’s normal.

Perhaps we even had contact with someone who tested positive.

Yet we should wait.

If we get sick, go to bed. Most people get fever and cough, sometimes fatigue or shortness of breath, and then recover in about two weeks. About 15 percent of the cases develop into pneumonia. The symptoms usually start slowly and often worsen as the illness goes on.

So if you are running a fever, experts say, assume that you have coronavirus. Stay home. Yes there will be a growing number of tests available but those should be reserved for patients who are high risk. Most of us should just go to bed and stay there until it passes.

The alternative is the entire medical system will be overrun and none of us will get the care we need.

This is not in our nature. We want to get healed. Now. But this is different. We should call the doctor — and even seek help if we can’t breathe.

This pandemic is different because we can control the outcome. We can shut down life — for a bit — and then limit the damage from this disease.

 

I am Mark Trahant.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use our site, we will assume you have given your consent. Click here to opt-out.