RIO DE JANEIRO — The telltale symptoms began in late May, about a week after government medical workers made a routine visit to the Kanamari Indigenous community in a remote part of the Amazon: Elderly members of the group were struggling to breathe. For months, as the coronavirus tore through Brazil, the Kanamari had sought to shield themselves from the pandemic by strictly limiting access to their riverside villages in the secluded Javari Valley, one of Brazil’s largest Indigenous territories. But it seemed even there, the virus had reached them. “Many people grabbed some clothes, a hammock and ran into the forest to hide,” said Thoda Kanamari, a leader of the union of Indigenous peoples in the vast territory, home to groups with little contact with the outside world. “But it was too late, everyone was already infected.”And the vectors of the disease, according to interviews and federal data obtained by The New York Times, may have been the health workers charged by the federal government with protecting the country’s Indigenous populations.

Source: New York Times July 19, 2020 21:09 UTC