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Coronavirus has swept through tribes, killing elders and inflicting irreparable damage on tribal history, culture and medicine

   When Bep Karoti Xikrin fell ill with Covid-19, he refused to go to a hospital. The 64-year-old chief of a Xikrin indigenous village in Brazil’s Amazon was plagued by headaches and fatigue and struggled for breath. But, according to his daughter Bekuoi Raquel, he was afraid that if he were admitted to hospital he might never return.

   Instead, he died in his village – and with him, was lost decades of knowledge and leadership. “He knew so much about things we haven’t even experienced,” said Bekuoi, 21. “Everyone admired him. He was very loved.”

   As Brazil’s confirmed overall death toll from Covid-19 passes 50,000, the virus is scything through the country’s indigenous communities, killing chiefs, elders and traditional healers – and raising fears that alongside the toll of human lives, the pandemic may inflict irreparable damage on tribal knowledge of history, culture and natural medicine.

   The Munduruku people alone have lost 10 sábios, or wise ones. “We always say they are living libraries,” said Alessandra Munduruku, a tribal leader. “It’s been very painful.”

   The victims include prominent figures such as Paulinho Paiakan, a Kayapó leader who fought alongside rock star Sting against the Belo Monte dam.

   The indigenous organisation Apib has logged at least 332 Covid-19 deaths, and 7,208 coronavirus cases across 110 communities. “We are facing extermination,” said its executive coordinator, Dinamam Tuxá.

   Indigenous leaders such as Tuxá say the government of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, is failing to protect the country’s 900,000 indigenous people – many of whom live in small communities, where dozens often share the same house.

   Tuxá said Brazil’s Funai indigenous agency has taken too long to send emergency food kits to people isolating in their villages, forcing them to risk infection by traveling to nearby towns for emergency government payments. Funai said it had delivered 82,000 basic food kits and 43,000 hygiene kits.

   Some leaders even blame government health workers for bringing the virus. Katia Silene Akrãtikatêjê, 51, a chief from the Gavião tribe in Pará state, believes she caught Covid-19 after a government health team visited their village to give flu vaccines. “Everyone got sick from there on,” she said.

From: shorturl.at/finAM. Accessed on 07/01/2020

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Coronavirus is 10 times deadlier than swine flu: WHO

   COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, is officially 10 times deadlier than the H1N1 swine flu strain that ripped across much of the world in 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed Monday.

   The only way to truly halt the spread is a vaccine, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a briefing from Geneva. More than 1.8 million people have been infected so far worldwide, and at least 115,000 have died.

   “Evidence from several countries is giving us a clearer picture about this virus, how it behaves, how to stop it and how to treat it,” Tedros said. “We know that COVID-19 spreads fast, and we know that it is deadly – 10 times deadlier than the 2009 flu pandemic.”

   While swine flu, as it was popularly known, killed 18,500 people, the true toll may have been closer to between 151,700 and 575,400, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported, citing The Lancet.

   “We know that the virus can spread more easily in crowded environments like nursing homes,” Tedros continued. “We know that early case finding, testing, isolating, caring for every case, and tracing every contact is essential for stopping transmission.”

   Pointing out that in some countries cases are doubling every three to four days, the disease accelerates fast but “decelerates much more slowly,” Tedros said. “In other words, the way down is much slower than the way up,” he said. “That means control measures must be lifted slowly and with control.”

   Tedros cautioned that restarting the shutdown portions of the economy in the U.S. and other countries whose leaders have been anxious to loosen restrictions could prove deadly. He also exhorted everyone around the world to work together, as several development ministers from the United Kingdom, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Germany, Norway and Sweden had done in a recent joint editorial.

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The lessons Italy has learned about its COVID-19 outbreak could help the rest of the world

   Only carefully conducted epidemiological studies will bring to light exactly how and why COVID-19 took off in northern Italy with such speed. But in the midst of the emergency, experts say there are already lessons to be gleaned from Italy's fatal errors — and urgent messages for other parts of the world.

   "The biggest mistake we made was to admit patients infected with COVID-19 into hospitals throughout the region," said Carlo Borghetti, the vice- premier of Lombardy, an economically crucial region with a population of 10 million.

   "We should have immediately set up separate structures exclusively for people sick with coronavirus. I recommend the rest of the world do this, to not send COVID patients into health-care facilities that are still uninfected."

   Already, Italian cities in other regions are doing this, as well as field hospitals in Milan and Bergamo, Lombardy, which are almost complete.

   However, the virus was not only spread to "clean" — i.e. infection-free — hospitals by admitting positive patients. In early March, as the number of infected was doubling every few days, authorities allowed overwhelmed hospitals to transfer those who tested positive but weren't gravely ill into assistedliving facilities for the elderly.

   "It was like throwing a lit match onto a haystack," said Borghetti, who spoke out against the directive at the time. "Some facilities refused to take in the positive patients. For those that did [take them in], it was devastating."

   Along with the tragic misstep of putting infected people under the same roof as clusters of the most physically vulnerable, Borghetti and others point to a deeper structural factor that accelerated the outbreak in northern Italy: a highly centralized health-care system with large hospitals as its focus.

From: shorturl.at/cMRTW. Accesses on 04/09/2020