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According to statistics, Mae Tso’s chances were not good. A revered tribal elder with extensive knowledge of Navajo traditions, Tso, 83, lived in the remote village of Dinebitoh in the Navajo Nation. She was in the most vulnerable demographic of Arizona’s most vulnerable population for succumbing to Covid-19.
But Tso was determined not to get sick. She had no chronic health problems and still wandered the desert around her home to pick herbs for medicine. She also made plant pigments and wove hand-dyed wool on exquisite traditional rugs that were famous among art collectors. Angelina Jolie once bought one of Tso’s rugs, Tso’s family likes to brag.
Tso was the matriarch of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who lived on a vast family estate that, like many houses in the Navajo reserve, had no running water. “She always told us to wash our hands,” said her daughter, Juanita Tso. “My mom was not too afraid, but she was very afraid of Covid.”
Tso hadn’t set foot in a public place since February 2020, but even so, in mid-December, he developed a dry cough that his herbal teas didn’t seem to shake. She began to have difficulty breathing, while everyone in the isolated family compound began to exhibit symptoms of Covid-19.
Tso was admitted to the hospital in Tuba City, on the Navajo reservation, on December 23, with severe pneumonia. Juanita and other family members were relegated to trying to comfort her by standing outside the window of her hospital room, where they talked and sang to her through the glass.
She passed away three weeks later, on January 12. She was the fourth person in her immediate family to die from the virus and one of more than 13,100 people now in the Covid Arizona death column.
The uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus in Mae’s hometown, Dinebitoh, came amid a terrible increase in cases across Arizona this winter. On January 3, the Arizona Department of Health Services reported 17,200 new cases of Covid-19, the highest number in a single day since the pandemic began. Throughout the month, the Grand Canyon state recorded at least 5,000 new cases almost every day. In recent weeks, he has consistently led the country with the highest number of cases and the highest number of Covid-related deaths, according to the Covid Data Tracker of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Cases decreased slightly in the past week from the peak, but the total number of hospital beds for the state remained at over 90% of capacity.
Native Americans are among the hardest hit in the state. Comprising 26% of the population of Coconino County, where the Arizona portion of the extensive Navajo reserve is located, indigenous people suffered 77% of Covid-19 deaths in the county. And almost 70% of all deaths in the Navajo nation caused by the virus occurred among tribal members over 60, like Tso.
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Although several US states recorded an increase in cases of Covid-19 after the holiday, Arizona health officials were alarmed not only by the scale of the spread in all areas of the state, but also by the arrogant attitude of many residents toward health security measures.
“There is a population that, for various reasons, considers that the objects used to mask or does not consider the problem are serious enough,” said Dr. Joshua LaBaer, director of the Arizona State University Biodesign Institute. “Right now, in Maricopa County [where the Phoenix metro area is located] I’ve seen crowded restaurants that should have 50% capacity, but people are sitting shoulder to shoulder, without masks and socializing. And we are in the middle of our worst wave ever. “
Even though Phoenix Valley is the tenth largest metropolitan area in the country, many Arizona citizens miss the state’s wild and undisciplined past, with its legendary cowboys, snipers and prospectors. Arizona territory did not become a state until 1912, the last of the 48. And it was only in 2000 that it became illegal to fire a gun into the air in Arizona cities.
LaBaer grew up in Arizona and attributes people who ignore health security mandates to the state’s “very libertarian point of view”. He sums it up as: “Don’t get in my way. I want to do what I want to do. “
This attitude was also reflected in the way the state government is dealing with the crisis. When Arizona’s restaurants and bars reopened last August, the governor, Doug Ducey, ordered the reopening to take place only if counties had less than 100 positive tests confirmed for every 100,000 people. However, there was no similar policy in place for closing companies when cases increased.
Last week, Arizona health department data showed more than 10,000 cases per 100,000 people in Maricopa County and similar numbers for urban areas across the state. However, along with restaurants and bars, the gyms remain open. State universities and many school districts are offering face-to-face classes, as well as inter-school team sports.
“Governor Ducey wants to protect lives and livelihoods,” said Ducey’s spokesman, CJ Karamargin, in December, when Covid’s cases started to rise. He said there are no plans to restrict business and that the best hope for controlling the pandemic in Arizona is vaccination.
‘Their challenge is fear’
Last week, Covid became the leading killer of Arizonans in all age groups, more than cancer, heart disease or accidents.
“If there was a bomb dropped by a terrorist that killed only a fraction of that number of people, Arizonans would be outraged,” said ASU’s LaBaer. “However, here we are, just watching this virus kill people.”
Many of Arizona’s Covid-19 “rebels” may not fully understand the “abstract concept” of how Covid-19 spreads, often asymptomatically, from person to person, leaving some completely unharmed and others dead, said LaBaer .
Brandy Carothers’ husband contracted flu-like symptoms, including loss of smell, during the New Year holiday. Carothers, a senior clinical research coordinator at the University of Arizona medical school in Phoenix, knew that her husband had coronavirus, although she was reluctant to seek medical attention. Days later, she became ill and insisted that the whole family be tested for the virus. Carothers and her husband tested positive, along with their two young children, who remained asymptomatic.
Carothers has asthma and his infection has progressed to double pneumonia. She was admitted to a Banner Health facility in Phoenix, where she spent a week receiving sophisticated treatments.
Carothers’ husband did not believe in wearing masks. “My husband does not usually wear a mask because he is rebelling and does not like the feeling on his face,” she said. “And he thinks prolonged use of masks is bad for your health because you’re inhaling bacteria.
Fully aware that such claims about masks are false, Carothers often urged her husband to mask himself, even to wear a double layer mask, she said. “My husband knows that the virus is serious for some populations, but he did not fit those populations. So he said he didn’t want to stop living his life, ”she said.
Carothers doesn’t know whether her family’s experience with Covid-19 has changed her husband’s attitude towards masks, she said.
Dr. Tommy Begay, a cultural psychologist at the University of Arizona medical school in Tucson, sees the reluctance of some Arizonans to wear masks in public places as more than just a show of boastful independence. “Some people are obviously struggling to defy health standards,” said Begay. “And for many, it is a political statement in support of what Donald Trump stands for, which is white nationalism and a disregard for science.”
Begay grew up on the Navajo reservation and he sees the nostalgia for the wild west that is mythified in Arizona as being really about “a time when everyone knew their place”.
He believes that despite the state’s high Covid-19 death rate, many Trump supporters are following the mask of disdain from the example set by the former president as a way of holding on to that past. “Their challenge is really fear,” he said. “They fear that the new majority in our country is made up of people of color.”
US Census Bureau data predicts that this transition will materialize in Arizona by 2030, 15 years before it happens across the United States. An early indication of demographic change came with the November 2020 election, when historically red Arizona narrowly turned blue. Despite Biden beating Arizona, Trump got 1.6 million votes, which was about 400,000 more votes than in 2016. In Begay’s opinion, not wearing a mask keeps people feeling connected to Trump and conspiracy theories.
According to a recent study by the University of Southern California, white Americans are the group least likely to wear a mask when they are around people from other families. While only 46% of whites wear masks regularly, the study found that 67% of blacks wear masks, along with 63% of Latinos and 65% of people of other races.
However, as in many other regions of the United States, people of color in Arizona have been impacted by the pandemic. The counties with the highest number of cases are those with predominantly Latin or Native American populations. In Yuma County, which leads the state in per capita cases, one in six people tested positive for the virus. Many are immigrants who work in lettuce fields in winter, staying in community homes and taking crowded buses to work. In many Arizona reserves, tribal members obey strict curfews and health regulations, but poor, multi-generational families with a lack of infrastructure make it difficult to prevent the virus from spreading.
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When Mae Tso’s condition at the hospital worsened in mid-January, her daughter Juanita gave her a teddy bear “to have something to hug” while she was alone in the sterile hospital room.
Juanita began to worry about how to carry out Navajo funeral practices under Covid-19’s strict safety precautions if her mother passed. “My mom was very traditional. At the very least, she needed to paint her face with red paint to safely enter the beyond ”, Juanita remembers thinking.
When Tso died, Juanita was unable to dress her mother with turquoise loafers and jewelry as she expected – Mae was considered a biological threat. But a nurse put red paint on Mae’s face after her last breath. Then it was closed in a body bag with its teddy bear.