COVID Stories We Still Haven’t Heard
This article discusses COVID data from Native American Reservations and First People’s Nations. To begin, I want to acknowledge where I sit writing this article, on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations — lands also called home to other tribes including the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, and Fox. Below, I discuss the lands of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Medium, the platform this for this article, is headquartered on the lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples on the San Francisco Peninsula. I acknowledge the painful history of genocide and forced occupation of their territory, and the ongoing process of colonization. I honor and respect the many diverse peoples who called these lands home long before Illinois, California, North Dakota and South Dakota were the United States. [1]
Thursday’s New York Times daily newsletter, The Morning, led with a story of the decline in reported COVID-19 cases across the United States. For the first time in a long time, the state of pandemic is looking slightly better, not catastrophically worse. But — and this cannot be overstated—things can change. As David Leonhardt writes, “the pandemic has not entered an inexorable decline.”
As we tentatively enter this new phase of the pandemic, still is the keyword. Where is the pandemic still disproportionately impacting communities? Who is still suffering? What insights are we still missing?
For the first time in a long time, the state of pandemic is looking slightly better, not catastrophically worse. But — and this cannot be overstated— things can change.
Now, moving forward, how can we work towards a more equitable recovery? Part of the challenge is finding areas that are undercounted — missing data on cases and deaths. Recent CDC data provides insights at the county level to identify where low levels of per-capita testing might not be capturing a full picture of community impact. Reporting in the Fall looked at deficits of state-level testing, but we can learn a lot more from county level stats. Additionally, we can use the overlays on the US Covid Atlas to draw attention to historically undercounted areas and highlight potential needs.
In a recent demo we explored using the overlay of Native American Reservations and First Peoples’ Lands, on top of testing capacity per capita to spot where testing may not be giving a complete picture. Below is a hotspot map for January 25th of testing capacity overlaid with Native American Reservations — blue is low testing rates, red is high testing rates relative to the overall country.
Two larger boundaries stand out here near cold spots in testing capacity — on the border of North Dakota and South Dakota and in Oklahoma. The area highlighted on the border of the Dakotas is home to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. The four corresponding US County boundaries are Ziebach, Dewey, and Corson, SD and Sioux, ND. Selecting the four counties in the Atlas (holding control, and click), we can highlight the case count over time for the four US County boundaries. Using the line chart of confirmed cases below on the right, we observe an upward trend in late fall, around October to December, trending with the major wave in the upper Midwest.
On the map, the testing capacities of the area appear in the lower bins (less than 100 tests per 100,000 population on a 7-day rolling average), and much of neighboring South Dakota seems to have similar capacities. Testing positivity though tells a different story: CDC data indicate very high rates in Ziebach (33% positivity) and Dewey (10%), with a lower, but still concerning rate in Corson (5%) and a low rate in Sioux, ND (0.8%).
We can also look back to the case peaks back in Fall — below are two maps from October 30th. On the left is confirmed cases —on 10/30 the four counties had over 500 daily new cases per 100,000 people as a 7-day rolling average. On the left, yellow is lower case rates, and orange to red is higher. On the right is a hotspot map of testing capacity. In this map the hotspot is, counter-intuitively, an indicator of a good response — specifically of better testing coverage. A coldspot indicates relatively low testing capacity. Importantly, we’re observing that that Sioux, ND and Dewey, SD — the more populous of the four counties — are characterized in our Local Moran’s I statistic as low-high in the hotspot, meaning that they are low capacity counties bordering on high capacity counties. Testing in North Dakota has ramped up, and the red there indicates a high testing capacity hotspot.
This exploration is certainly not conclusive, but it does point to a potential gap in testing services, in these four counties and their neighbors. Directly to the north and northwest, testing coverage appears more consistent, both now and during the Fall peak, taken as per capita numbers and as a testing capacity hotspot.
New county level data on testing capacity and testing positivity rate, together with other context, provide more powerful insights than we’ve had before. It’s critical to uncover where — and for whom — testing, vaccination, and health care services aren’t meeting community needs.
It’s still critical.
Writing by Dylan Halpern, with language borrowed from Marynia Kolak
Explore, and see more at https://theuscovidatlas.org/
[1] Land acknowledgment credits to: Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe (Site Currently Offline), Ramaytush Ohlone Peoples, Art Institute of Chicago, Loyola University Chicago, and MIT.
