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Variant identified in UK found on Navajo Nation

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WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. — A coronavirus variant first identified in Britain has been found on the Navajo Nation.

Tribal health officials said that the United Kingdom strain was confirmed in a sample obtained in the western part of the reservation.

The Navajo Department of Health is working with states and other public health entities to identify any more variant cases.

Navajo President Jonathan Nez says the finding reinforces the need for social distancing, wear masks, washing hands and limiting travel. The person who tested positive for the variant on the Navajo Nation had been fully vaccinated and is now recovering.

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THE VIRUS OUTBREAK:

VACCINES: More than 95 million people, or 28.6% of the U.S. population, have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some 52.6 million people, or 15.8% of the population, have completed their vaccination.

CASES: The seven-day rolling average for daily new cases in the U.S. increased over the past two weeks from 55,332 on March 15 to 65,789 on Monday, according to Johns Hopkins University.

DEATHS: The seven-day rolling average for daily new deaths in the U.S. decreased over the past two weeks decreased from 1,364 on March 15 to 989 on Monday, according to Johns Hopkins University.

— WHO team: Patience, more studies needed of coronavirus origin

— More than a dozen US states to open up vaccinations to all adults

— German leaders meet as some halt AstraZeneca for under age 60

— US states struggle to get rent relief to tenants amid pandemic

— Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

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HERE’S WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

BATON ROUGE, La. — The governor of Louisiana said he intends to keep the state’s face covering requirement firmly in place even as several states have shed their mask mandates.

Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards also said he is ending many other coronavirus restrictions for businesses.

Customer limits on bars, restaurants, salons, gyms, malls, casinos and other nonessential businesses will be removed, though they’ll be required to use social distancing. Direct table service still will be required at bars, but an 11 p.m. alcohol curfew will end.

The changes represent the fewest restrictions for businesses since the pandemic began. The new rules start Wednesday. Local officials could choose to enact tougher limits.

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BERLIN — German health officials have agreed to restrict the use of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine in people under 60, amid fresh concern over unusual blood clots reported in a tiny number of those who received the shots.

Health Minister Jens Spahn and state officials agreed unanimously to only give the vaccine to people aged 60 or older, unless they belong to a high-risk category for serious illness from COVID-19 and have agreed with their doctor to take the vaccine despite the small risk of a serious side-effect.

Several German regions — including the capital Berlin and the country’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia — had already suspended use of the shots in younger people earlier Tuesday.

Berlin’s top health official Dilek Kalayci says the decision was taken as a precaution after the country’s medical regulator announced 31 cases of rare blood clots in people who had recently received the vaccine. Nine of the people died.

Some 2.7 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine have been administered in Germany so far.

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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The governor of Arkansas said the state will open up coronavirus vaccinations to anyone 16 and older, and is dropping its mask mandate immediately.

Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced the moves as the state saw its virus cases and hospitalizations continue to decline. The state had previously made the vaccine available to people 65 and older as well as several other categories, including teachers, health care workers and food service employees.

Hutchinson last month lifted most of the state’s virus restrictions, including restaurant and bar capacity limits, and had said the mask mandate would expire at the end of March if the state met goals for test positivity and hospitalizations.

Hutchinson is lifting the mask mandate despite President Joe Biden urging states to reinstate or maintain such restrictions to stave off another surge of the virus.

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MADISON, Wis. — Wisconsin health officials plan to make everyone in the state 16 and older eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations next week.

Gov. Tony Evers tweeted that anyone 16 or older can get shots beginning April.

Currently health care workers, people over 65, nursing home residents and staff, educators and people with underlying health conditions are eligible.

State health officials on Monday announced more than 1 million people in the state, about 17% of Wisconsin’s population, have completed their vaccination cycles.

State Department of Health Services Deputy Secretary Julie Willems Van Dijk said that the general public is actually a smaller group than people with underlying conditions.

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LOS ANGELES — Universal Studios Hollywood announced plans to reopen to the public under California COVID-19 restrictions next month.

The park will resume operations on April 16, following an event the day before for annual and season pass members.

Under current restrictions, Universal Studios Hollywood will only be open to California residents and all guests must undergo temperature checks. Visitors with temperatures exceeding 100.4 degrees (38 Celsius) will not be allowed to enter. Other protocols include face coverings and capacity limits to ensure physical distancing.

As of Monday, Los Angeles County’s daily COVID-19 test positivity rate was 1.4% and 655 people were hospitalized, figures far below numbers seen in the most recent surge. Public health officials, however, urged the public and businesses to maintain safety practices.

In neighboring Orange County, Disney earlier announced that Disneyland and Disney California Adventure will reopen on April 30 with limited capacity and other restrictions.

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GENEVA — The United States and more than a dozen other countries are expressing concerns about a World Health Organization study into the possible origins of the coronavirus in China, pointing to delays and a lack of access to samples and data.

A joint WHO-China study on the origins of COVID-19 published Tuesday says transmission of the coronavirus from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and a lab leak is “extremely unlikely.”

It called for further study, and the WHO chief has said all hypotheses remain open.

After the study’s release, the State Department said 14 countries were calling for “momentum” for a second-phase look by experts and pointed to the need for further animal studies “to find the means of introduction into humans” of the coronavirus.

The countries expressed support for WHO’s experts and staff, citing their “tireless” work toward ending the pandemic and understanding its origins to help prevent a future one. But they said the study had been “significantly delayed and lacked access to complete, original data and samples.”

Critics say China’s government it took too long to allow a WHO-convened team of experts into the country earlier this year.

The State Department said Australia, Britain, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Slovenia and South Korea released the joint statement.

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NEW YORK — Concerned about a wave of evictions, states announced plans last year to get millions of dollars into the hands of cash-strapped tenants.

So far, the results are mixed. Many tenants were helped through the more than $3 billion in federal coronavirus relief. Yet housing advocates say many programs fell far short of their goals. Some were overwhelmed by demand and others were undermined by burdensome criteria that denied needy renters. Last year, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Mississippi and Kansas were among the states that struggled to distribute rental assistance.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced in July that New York would spend $100 million in federal coronavirus relief to help cash-strapped tenants pay months of back rent and avert evictions.

By the end of October, the state had doled out about $40 million, reaching only 15,000 of the nearly 100,000 people looking for help. More than 57,000 applicants were denied because of criteria set by New York lawmakers that many say was difficult to meet.

That included tenants showing they were paying over 30% of their income toward rent. Applicants also had to show a loss of income from April to the end of July, when some saw an increase from extended unemployment and other benefits.

New York has since expanded the program’s eligibility and will reconsider applicants who were initially denied.

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TORONTO — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Pfizer has moved up its vaccine delivery schedule so Canada will receive 5 million more doses in June.

Trudeau expects every adult who wants a vaccine to get one by the end of June. The prime minister says Canada’s vaccine procurement has been heavily weighted toward getting Pfizer and Moderna doses.

On Monday, Canada suspended the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine for people under age 55 following concerns it might be linked to rare blood clots.

Trudeau says Canada is getting a million Pfizer vaccines every week over the next two months and the number will rise to 2 million a week for the month of June.

Canada doesn’t have domestic production and gets its Pfizer and Moderna doses from Europe. Procurement Minister Anita Anand says Canada will start getting Johnson & Johnson vaccines by the end of April.

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PHOENIX — Arizona’s confirmed death toll from the coronavirus outbreak is approaching 17,000.

The state on Tuesday reported 586 cases and 23 more deaths, increasing the pandemic totals to 841,078 cases and 16,941 confirmed deaths.

Arizona’s death toll ranks 13th among the states by total deaths and sixth among the states in deaths per 100,000 population, according to federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

The COVID-related hospitalizations dropped to 549 on Monday, far below the pandemic record of 5,082 on Jan. 11, according to the state’s pandemic dashboard.

Nearly 2.1 million people, 29.1% of the state’s population, have received at least one dose. Almost 1.3 million are fully vaccinated.

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TIRANA, Albania — Albania has involved the military medical personnel to help in a mass inoculation campaign ahead of the summer tourism season.

Albania acquired 192,000 doses of coronavirus vaccine Sinovac after Prime Minister Edi Rama’s visit to Turkey last week. Albania has administered 10,000-20,000 inoculations a day since last weekend, aiming to reach half a million by June.

Forty military doctors and nurses have been assisting to make the shots available to people older than 70, according to Defense Minister Niko Peleshi.

Albania, which as a population of 2.8 million, has signed contracts for a total of 2.5 million vaccine doses from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Sputnik V and Sinovac. It is working on securing new vaccine contracts to fully inoculate the population by spring 2022.

Albania has registered nearly 125,000 coronavirus cases and 2,227 confirmed deaths, according to health authorities.

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GENEVA — Members of an international team that wrote a study into the origins of COVID-19 with Chinese colleagues say it is only a “first start” and more needs to be done.

They appealed for patience as reams of information continues to pour in. The team emphasized that hypotheses, including a possible laboratory leak theory, cannot be fully ruled out.

Team leader Peter Ben Embarek of the World Health Organization says its members remain “open-minded” as it formally presented its long-awaited first-phase look into the possible outbreak the coronavirus. The virus has left nearly 2.8 million people dead and damaged economies and livelihoods since it first emerged in China.

Ben Embarek says international team members faced political pressure from “all sides,” but insisted “We were never pressured to remove critical elements in our report.” He also pointed to “privacy” issues in China that prevented sharing of some data, saying such restrictions would exist in many countries.

Joined by several other members of the 17-member international team for a news conference, Ben Embarek says, “where we did not have full access to all the raw data we wanted, that has been put as a recommendation for the future studies.”

Ben Embarek says it was difficult to know when — if at all — the exact origin of the pandemic will come to light. He says one hypothesis, pushed hard by the Trump administration, that the virus may have leaked from a laboratory wasn’t likely, but “not impossible” either.

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Science

NASA honors Navajo language on Mars with Perseverance rover rock names

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NASA is highlighting the Navajo language with its latest Mars mission. 

After landing successfully on the Red Planet Feb. 18, NASA’s Perseverance rover is exploring, focusing its sights on a rock named “Máaz,” the Navajo word for “Mars.” The team behind the rover is in collaboration with the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President, and together they have been naming different features on the Martian surface using words in the Navajo language.

Mission scientists at NASA worked with Navajo (or Diné) team member Aaron Yazzie, an engineer for NASA’s Mars 2020 mission at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California to seek the Navajo Nation’s permission and collaboration to name these features.  (Yazzie built the drill bits that the rover will use to collect samples on the planet.) Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez, Vice President Myron Lizer and their advisors created a list of Navajo language words that the teams at NASA would be able to use for the mission. 

“The partnership that the Nez-Lizer Administration has built with NASA will help to revitalize our Navajo language,” President Nez said in a NASA statement. “We hope that having our language used in the Perseverance mission will inspire more of our young Navajo people to understand the importance and the significance of learning our language. Our words were used to help win World War II, and now we are helping to navigate and learn more about the planet Mars.”

Related: NASA and Navajo Nation Partner in Understanding the Universe

By assigning names to local landmarks on Mars, it makes it easier for the mission team members to refer to features like rocks and soils. While the planetary features have formal names given by the International Astronomical Union, these informal names are used by the team. 

“This fateful landing on Mars has created a special opportunity to inspire Navajo youth not just through amazing scientific and engineering feats, but also through the inclusion of our language in such a meaningful way,” Yazzie said in the NASA statement.

The Navajo Nation team provided the rover team with a list of 50 words that they could use to start with and will work together on more names as the rover explores more. This list includes names like “Máaz” and “tséwózí bee hazhmeezh” (which means “rolling rows of pebbles, like waves”), “bidziil” (which means “strength”) and “hoł nilį́” (which means “respect”). The Navajo Nation team even included the Navajo language word for “Perseverance” which translates to “Ha’ahóni.”

Related: What’s in a name: Why NASA chose ‘Perseverance’ for its Mars rover

The rover was set to land in one of many quadrangles mapped out on a grid in Jezero Crater, with each “quad” measuring about 1 square mile (1.5 square kilometers) in size. They named these quads after natural areas on Earth with similar geological features, and Perseverance ended up touching down in the quad named after Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly National Monument, or Tséyi in the Navajo language, which is in the heart of the Navajo Nation.

Now, for Perseverance to identify these features in the Navajo language, it has to learn the language. However, the limitations of the English language aren’t able to fully express the intonation and accents in the Navajo words, so the team is working to come up with translations that better represent Navajo spellings. In the meantime, they are using English letters to represent the Navajo words. Mission scientists and team members are also taking this opportunity to learn Navajo words. 

“This partnership is encouraging the rover’s science team to be more thoughtful about the names being considered for features on Mars — what they mean both geologically and to people on Earth,” Perseverance Deputy Project Scientist Katie Stack Morgan of JPL said in the same statement. 

Space.com spoke with Yazzie at JPL on Feb. 18 immediately following the successful landing of the rover, which will search for signs of ancient life on Mars. “We are so excited, I am so relieved, this is such a great day,” Yazzie told Space.com. 

“It feels unreal and it is unreal to be part of such a historic [mission]” Yazzie added. “It feels like we’re contributing knowledge to the whole world on behalf of humanity. The possibility that we might find ancient microbial life on Mars, [it] would be a huge discovery and I’m so excited that I even have a small part in that discovery.”

“We are very proud of one of our very own, Aaron Yazzie, who is playing a vital role in NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Mission,” President Nez said. “We are excited for the NASA team and for Aaron and we see him as being a great role model who will inspire more interest in the STEM fields of study and hopefully inspire more of our young people to pursue STEM careers to make even greater impacts and contributions just as Aaron is doing. As the mission continues, we offer our prayers for continued success.”

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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Science

NASA team using Navajo language to name Mars land features seen by Perseverance rover

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The team operating NASA’s Perseverance rover has started cataloging geological formations on the surface of Mars with names from the Navajo language.

The names are a nod to the project’s large contingent from universities and national labs in New Mexico and Arizona, states that include traditional Navajo land, Forbes reported.

Perseverance, nicknamed Perky, landed on Mars February 18 following a 239-million mile journey. 

The rover’s first scientific focus is a rock named ‘Máaz’ – the Navajo word for ‘Mars.’ 

An image of the the rover’s first scientific focus, a rock named ‘Máaz’ – the Navajo word for ‘Mars’

Navajo Nation Vice President Myron Lizer (left) and President Jonathan Nez (right)

Surface missions assign nicknames to landmarks to provide the mission’s team members, which number in the thousands, a common way to refer to rocks, soils and other geologic features.

Before launch, Perseverance’s team identified a grid of quadrangles of about 1.5 square kilometers (1 square mile) each. The team named the quads after national parks and preserves on Earth with similar geology, with Perseverance touching down in the quad named for Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly National Monument.

Aaron Yazzie of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, a team engineer who is Navajo, sough the Navajo Nation’s permission and collaboration with the naming aspect of the work.

Some terms were inspired by the terrain Perseverance captured in images at its landing site, such as ‘tséwózí bee hazhmeezh,’ or ‘rolling rows of pebbles, like waves.’ Yazzie added suggestions including ‘bidziil,’ or ‘strength,’ and ‘hoł nilį́,’ or ‘respect.’ Perseverance was translated to ‘Ha’ahóni.’ 

Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer provided a list of words in the Navajo language that could be used by the Perseverance team.

The list includes 50 names and is expected to grow as the rover team works with Navajo Nation officials and Perseverance continues to explore. 

‘The partnership that the Nez-Lizer Administration has built with NASA will help to revitalize our Navajo language,’ Nez said. 

‘We hope that having our language used in the Perseverance mission will inspire more of our young Navajo people to understand the importance and the significance of learning our language,’ Nez added. ‘Our words were used to help win World War II, and now we are helping to navigate and learn more about the planet Mars.’

Perseverance has to be ‘taught’ the language to recognize landmarks labeled in Navajo. The accent marks used in the English alphabet to convey the intonation of the language cannot be read by the rover’s computer.

While the team attempted to find translations that best resembled Navajo spellings, Yazzie said they plan to use English letters without special characters or punctuation to represent Navajo words.

Project scientists embraced the opportunity to learn Navajo words and their meaning, Perseverance Deputy Project Scientist Katie Stack Morgan said.

‘This partnership is encouraging the rover’s science team to be more thoughtful about the names being considered for features on Mars – what they mean both geologically and to people on Earth,’ Stack Morgan said.

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize Mars geology and past climate, becoming the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and soil and paving the way for human exploration.

The latest recording shared by NASA is Perseverance firing off its laser for the first time on Mars (concept drawing)

The rover is strapped with a slew of high-tech instruments to help it uncover the crater’s secrets.

A SuperCam fires laser beams that heat targets to 9,982 degrees Celsius (18,000 Fahrenheit), which is hot enough to transform the solid rock into plasma that can be imaged by a camera for further analysis.

The technology, located on the mast, releases pulses capable of vaporizing rocks from up to 6 meters (20 feet) away and is a key component for investigating signs of ancient life in the Jezero Crater, a former lake that flowed with water 3.5 billion years ago.

Attached to the mast is a 12-pound sensor designed to perform five types of analyses to help scientists determine which rocks the rover should sample. 

The latest audio recording shared by NASA was from Perseverance’s first laser shot. The sounds of 30 impacts can be heard during the recording captured by an attached microphone. 

The clip shared by NASA, which is about 10 seconds, includes the first sounds recorded from the Martian world. 

The laser enabled the ground team to analyze the target’s composition, which proved to be mostly volcanic rocks.

NASA says ‘variations in the intensity of the zapping sounds will provide information on the physical structure of the targets, such as its relative hardness or the presence of weathering coatings.’ 

Perseverance chose the target Máaz, which is Navajo for ‘Mars,’ which sat 10 feet away from its location. NASA intercepted the pulses for a further analysis that determine the rocks were mostly volcanic

Combining two images, this mosaic shows a close-up view of the rock target named ‘Yeehgo’ from the SuperCam instrument on NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars. The component images were taken by SuperCam’s Remote Micro-Imager (RMI). To be compatible with the rover’s software, ‘Yeehgo’ is an alternative spelling of ‘Yéigo,’ the Navajo word for diligent

Picture is an image of delta near Jezero Crater that is a raised area of dark brown rock in the middle of the ground.  Perseverance now making its way to the crater that was a former lake flowing with water 3.5 billion years ago

‘These recordings have demonstrated that our microphone is not only functioning well, but we also have a very high-quality signal for our scientific studies,’ SuperCam team member Naomi Murdoch, a researcher at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace in Toulouse, France, said Wednesday. 

It is not yet clear if the area was once volcanic, said SuperCam principal investigator Roger Wiens of Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy facility in New Mexico.

Máaz could be ‘a sedimentary rock composed of igneous grains that were washed downriver into Jezero Lake and cemented together,’ Wiens said. 

Perseverance is one of two NASA rovers currently operating on the Red Planet. Curiosity has been trundling along Gale crater since August 2012. 

The sounds of 30 impacts can be heard during the audio recording, which were shot from the rover’s SuperCam instrument and captured by a microphone attached to the rover

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Science

NASA is naming the rocks and soil on Mars in the Navajo language

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The Perseverance rover’s team, in collaboration with the Navajo Nation, has been naming features of scientific interest with words in the language, according to NASA. And it includes a rock named “Máaz,” the Navajo word for “Mars.”
It is common for NASA missions to assign informal names to landmarks to provide the mission’s members a way to refer to various features of interest. And Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer made a list of words in the Navajo language available to the rover’s team to do so, according to a NASA press release.

“We hope that having our language used in the Perseverance mission will inspire more of our young Navajo people to understand the importance and the significance of learning our language. Our words were used to help win World War II, and now we are helping to navigate and learn more about the planet Mars,” Nez said in the statement.

The team already has a list of 50 Navajo names, including “strength” (“bidziil”) and “respect” (“hoł nilį́”). Perseverance itself has been translated to “Ha’ahóni.”

Perseverance had to be “taught” the language so it could recognize landmarks that have been labeled in Navajo, NASA said. The accent marks used in the English alphabet to convey the unique intonation of the Navajo language cannot be read by the computer languages Perseverance uses. So the team is using English letters without special characters or punctuation to represent Navajo words, the statement said.

“This fateful landing on Mars has created a special opportunity to inspire Navajo youth not just through amazing scientific and engineering feats, but also through the inclusion of our language in such a meaningful way,” said a Navajo engineer on the team, Aaron Yazzie of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

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Health

Arizona fought restrictions amid a dire Covid surge. Navajo elder Mae Tso paid the price | Coronavirus

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Just going by the statistics, the odds for Mae Tso were not good. A revered tribal elder with extensive knowledge of Navajo traditions, Tso, 83, lived in the remote village of Dinebitoh on the Navajo Nation. She was in the most vulnerable demographic of the most vulnerable population in Arizona for succumbing to Covid-19.

But Tso was determined to not get sick. She had no chronic health issues and still wandered the high desert around her home to gather herbs for medicine. She also made pigments from plants and wove the hand-dyed wool into 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 living on a sprawling family compound that like many homes on the Navajo reservation had no running water. “She was always telling us to wash our hands,” said her daughter, Juanita Tso. “My mom was not afraid of much but she was very afraid of Covid.”

Tso hadn’t set foot in a public place since February 2020, but still, in mid-December she developed a dry cough that her herbal teas did not seem to shake. She started having difficulty breathing, while everyone in the isolated family compound began exhibiting Covid-19 symptoms.

Tso was admitted to the hospital in Tuba City on the Navajo reservation 23 December 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 12 January. 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 fatality column for Arizona.

A patient is taken from an ambulance to the emergency room of a hospital in the Navajo Nation town of Tuba City, Arizona, on 24 May 2020. Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

The uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus in Mae’s home town Dinebitoh came amid a dire surge in cases across the state of Arizona this winter. On 3 January, the Arizona department of health services reported 17,200 new Covid-19 cases, 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 nearly every day. In recent weeks, it has consistently led the nation for the highest number of cases and the highest number of Covid-related deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid Data Tracker. Cases declined slightly last week from the peak but total hospital beds for the state remained at more than 90% capacity.

Native Americans have been among the worst hit in the state. Comprising 26% of the population in Coconino county where the Arizona portion of the sprawling Navajo reservation is located, indigenous people have suffered 77% of the county’s Covid-19 deaths. And nearly 70% of all Navajo Nation deaths from the virus have been among tribal members over the age of 60, like Tso.

•••

While several US states experienced record Covid-19 cases surges after the holidays, Arizona health officials have been alarmed not only by the scale of the spread in all areas of the state but also by the cavalier attitude of many residents toward health safety measures.

“There is a population out there that for various reasons objects to mask wearing or doesn’t feel the problem is serious enough,” said Dr Joshua LaBaer, the director of Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute. “Right now, in Maricopa county [where the Phoenix metro area is located] I have seen crowded restaurants that are supposed to be at 50% capacity but people are sitting shoulder to shoulder, not wearing masks and socializing. And we are in the middle of our worst surge ever.”

Mae Tso was the fourth person in her immediate family to die from Covid-19. Photograph: Courtesy of her family

Even though the Phoenix Valley is the 10th largest metro area in the nation, many Arizona citizens are nostalgic for the state’s unruly, wild west past with its legendary cowboys, gun fighters and prospectors. The Arizona territory did not become a state until 1912, the last in the lower 48. And it was not until 2000 that it became illegal to fire a gun in the air in Arizona cities.

LaBaer grew up in Arizona and he attributes people ignoring health safety mandates to the state’s “very libertarian viewpoint”. He sums it up as: “Don’t get in my way. I want to do what I want to do.”

That attitude has been reflected in the state government’s handling of the crisis, too. When Arizona restaurants and bars reopened last August, the governor, Doug Ducey, ordered that reopenings could only take place if counties had less than 100 confirmed positive tests per 100,000 people. However, there was no similar policy established for closing businesses when cases climbed.

Last week, Arizona department of health data showed more than 10,000 cases per 100,000 people for Maricopa county and similar numbers for urban areas across the state. Yet along with restaurants and bars, gyms remain open. State universities and many school districts are holding in-person classes as well as interscholastic team sports.

“Governor Ducey wants to protect lives and livelihoods,” said the Ducey spokesman CJ Karamargin in December when Covid cases were first spiking. He said there were no plans to restrict businesses and the best hope for bringing the pandemic under control in Arizona was vaccinations.

‘Their defiance is fear’

Last week, Covid became the leading cause of death for Arizonans in all age groups, more than cancer or heart disease or accidents.

“If there had been a bomb set by a terrorist that only killed a fraction of this many people, Arizonans would be outraged,” said ASU’s LaBaer. “Yet here we are, just watching this virus kill people.”

Many of Arizona’s Covid-19 “rebels” may not fully grasp the “abstract concept” of the way Covid-19 spreads, often asymptomatically, from person to person, leaving some completely unscathed and others dead, LaBaer said.

Brandy Carothers’ husband came down with flu-like symptoms, including a loss of smell, over the New Year’s holiday. Carothers, a senior clinical research coordinator for the University of Arizona’s college of medicine in Phoenix, knew her husband had coronavirus although he was reluctant to seek medical care. Days later she became ill and insisted the entire family get tested for the virus. Carothers and her husband tested positive, along with their two young children, who remained asymptomatic.

Last week, there were more than 10,000 cases per 100,000 people for Maricopa county, but restaurants and bars remain open. Photograph: Matt York/AP

Carothers has asthma and her infection progressed into double pneumonia. She was admitted to a Banner Health facility in Phoenix where she spent a week receiving sophisticated treatments.

Carothers’ husband didn’t believe in wearing masks. “My husband generally doesn’t wear a mask because he’s rebelling and he doesn’t like the way it feels on his face,” she said. “And he thinks the long term use of masks is bad for your health because you are inhaling bacteria.”

Fully aware that such claims about masks are false, Carothers frequently urged her husband to mask up, even to wear a double layer mask, she said. “My husband knows the virus is serious for some populations but he didn’t fit into those populations. So he said he didn’t want to stop living his life,” she said.

Carothers is not aware if her family’s Covid-19 experience has changed her husband’s attitude about masks, she said.

Dr Tommy Begay, a cultural psychologist at the University of Arizona’s college of medicine in Tucson, sees some Arizonians reluctance to wear masks in public places as more than just a show of swashbuckling independence. “Some people are obviously going out of their way to defy health mandates,” Begay said. “And for many it is a political statement in support of what Donald Trump stands for, which is white nationalism and a disrespect for science.”

Begay grew up on the Navajo reservation and he views the wild west nostalgia that is mythologized in Arizona as really being about “a time when everybody knew their place”.

He believes that despite the state’s high Covid-19 death rate, many Trump supporters are following the mask disdaining example set by the former president as a way to cling to that past. “Their defiance is really fear,” he said. “They are afraid of the new majority in our country being made up of people of color.”

Data from the US Census Bureau predicts this transition will materialize in Arizona by 2030, 15 years before it happens for the entire United States. An early indication of the demographic shift came with the November 2020 election when historically red Arizona turned blue, just barely. Even though Biden carried Arizona, Trump garnered 1.6m votes, which was roughly 400,000 more votes than he got in 2016. In Begay’s view, the act of not wearing a mask keeps people feeling connected to Trump and conspiracy theories.

Nearly 70% of all Navajo Nation deaths from the virus have been among tribal members over the age of 60, like Mae Tso. Photograph: Courtesy of her family

According to a recent study by the University of Southern California, white Americans are the least likely group to wear a mask when around people from other households. While only 46% of white people regularly wear masks, the study found that 67% of Black people wear masks, along with 63% of Latinos and 65% of people from other races.

However, like many other regions in the US, people of color in Arizona have borne the brunt of the pandemic. The counties with the highest number of cases are those with predominantly Latino or Native American populations. In Yuma county, which leads the state for cases per capita, one in six people have tested positive for the virus. Many are immigrants who work in the winter lettuce fields, staying in communal housing and riding crowded buses to work. On many Arizona reservations, tribal members abide by strict curfews and health mandates but poor, multi-generational households with a lack of infrastructure make it hard to keep the virus from spreading.

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When Mae Tso’s condition in the hospital worsened in mid-January, her daughter Juanita gave her a teddy bear “to have something to hug” while alone in the sterile hospital room.

Juanita started to worry about how to perform Navajo burial practices under the stringent Covid-19 safety precautions if her mom were to pass. “My mom was very traditional. At the very least she needed to have red paint put on her face for safe entry into the afterworld,” Juanita recalled thinking.

When Tso died, Juanita couldn’t dress her mother in the moccasins and turquoise jewelry as she had hoped – Mae was considered a biohazard. But a nurse put the red paint on Mae’s face after her last breath. Then she was zipped up in a body bag with her teddy bear.

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