Javari Valley, Brazil
Viral threat to tribes: The coronavirus has reached Brazil’s Javari Valley, a South Carolina–size area of the Amazon rain forest that is home to the world’s largest number of isolated indigenous people. At least 110 members of the Kanamari tribe have already tested positive for Covid-19. If the coronavirus continues to travel upriver and infects uncontacted indigenous communities with little immunity to modern diseases, entire tribes could be wiped out. About 20 percent of Brazil’s 57,000 coronavirus deaths have occurred in the Amazon region, even though only 8 percent of the country’s population lives there. We have to “expect the worst,” said
Eliésio Marubo of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley.