How an "underfunded" healthcare system caused Navajo Nation to top U.S. in COVID-19 infections

As coronavirus infections continue to rise in the U.S., the place with the third-highest rate of infection per capita is Navajo Nation, the largest Indigenous reservation in the country. We get an update from two doctors treating patients on Navajo Nation. Dr. Michelle Tom is a member of the Navajo Nation and a family physician treating COVID-19 patients at the Winslow Indian Health Care Center and Little Colorado Medical Center in northern Arizona near the Navajo reservation. In Gallup, New Mexico, Dr. Sriram Shamasunder is leading a medical volunteer group of 21 nurses and doctors from the University of California, San Francisco as part of the HEAL Initiative. He says the Navajo Nation has been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus due to a “trajectory of an underfunded health system,” noting that the Indian Health Service is funded at one-third the rate per capita as Medicare. “The level of inequity that you’re seeing … it’s part of this pattern.”

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