Indigenous peoples suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic, experiencing a lack of sovereignty, limited infrastructure and discrimination in local health care systems that make them particularly vulnerable to infectious diseases. Yet little research exists to guide interventions and public health efforts tailored to remote-living Indigenous populations during pandemics.
In Bolivia, for example, a team of researchers including UC Santa Barbara's Tom Kraft and Michael Gurven, and local collaborators, attempted to mitigate SARS-CoV-2's impact on the Tsimané, a small-scale Indigenous society living in remote areas of the Amazon via voluntary collective isolation.
"Remote-living, small-scale populations are highly vulnerable to global diseases," said Kraft, an anthropologist from both UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah, and the lead author of the study."We can't rely on remoteness and voluntary isolation alone to mitigate risks—we need to plan to direct medical resources to these communities."
For this work amidst the pandemic, the team wanted to understand how best to direct public health messages and deploy their limited medical resources. About 18,000 Tsimané live in over 95 villages spread along rivers and logging roads—the farthest requires a multi-day boat trip to the market town. Multiple generations live together in large extended households. The close-knit community is quite social, and individuals travel frequently between villages to visit friends and family.
To the researchers' surprise, the remoteness of the Tsimané communities made little difference in preventing the spread of COVID-19. Once introduced, the disease spread in a chain reaction to even the most isolated villages, as predicted by the model. The timing and magnitude of infection differed in the short term, with communities closest to market towns getting infection peaks earlier than remote villages.
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