Covid-19 Stalks Large Families in Rural America

The Woods family did everything together at the house on Paden Road in Gadsden, Ala. They gathered there before going to high-school football games on Friday nights. They ate there after church on Sundays, when the family matriarch, Barbara Woods, would make chicken and dressing for her children and grandchildren.

And this spring, they grew sick there together. For weeks in early April, seven family members staying in the three-bedroom home were stricken by the new coronavirus, several of them recounted. Five ended up in the hospital. Two died.

snip>

‘Big Cough-19’

On the Navajo Nation, where roughly 175,000 people are scattered across a three-state swath of the Southwest, household crowding has contributed to one of the country’s worst outbreaks. Some 18% of homes have five or more people and 14% are classified as crowded, among the highest rates in the country, according to census data.

The Navajo Nation’s coronavirus death rate was 154 per 100,000 people as of June 5—compared with 123 in New York state, 136 in New Jersey and 33 for the U.S. overall.

Tina Harvey lives with her extended family in a cluster of several small houses in the tiny Navajo village of Tes Nez Iah, Ariz. None of the structures have running water, not uncommon on the reservation, making it difficult to wash hands regularly. Ms. Harvey, a 55-year-old home health-care worker, has watched with horror as “Big Cough-19” or “Invisible Parasite-19,” as the coronavirus is known in Navajo, struck family member after family member.

First, she said, it was her brother, Amos Tso, 71, who fell ill in April after returning from New Mexico, where he had gone to have toes amputated due to an infection. On April 4, his niece, one of numerous family members caring for Mr. Tso, drove him to an Indian Health Service clinic after he began experiencing body aches and breathing problems. Seven days later, he was dead from Covid-19.

In one trailer, four of the six family members who stayed there began running fevers, coughing and suffering body aches, Ms. Harvey said. They all tested positive for the coronavirus and were sent home with Tylenol and cough syrup, she said.

In a second trailer, another sister and her husband, in their 60s, fell ill. Their grandson, who lived with them and was sick too, drove them to an IHS hospital in Shiprock, N.M. The couple died days later.

The IHS didn’t respond to a request for comment on Ms. Harvey’s family’s case.

In all, 11 family members got sick, including Ms. Harvey, who was hospitalized for nearly two weeks. “It has been very hard—what has happened to us,” she said. “Right now, people are scared to turn up the road to our house. ‘Those people over there. They all have coronavirus. They’re dying.’ That’s what we’ve been hearing.”

Tribal leaders and health officials said it has been difficult to keep the virus from ricocheting through crowded homes on the reservation.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-households-spread-coronavirus-families-navajo-california-second-wave-11591553896?mod=djemalertNEWS