‘Forgotten’ indigenous tribes in the Amazon rainforest have finally been made aware of the global Covid pandemic more than 18 months after the world was plunged into lockdown.
Mariano Quisto, a remote community leader deep in the dense forests of Peru, first learned of the global pandemic in October when health workers arrived by boat at his isolated village with vaccines.
‘We didn’t know about COVID-19. This is the first we are hearing about it,’ Quisto said through a translator from the village of Mangual, in Peru’s vast but sparsely populated Loreto region in the country’s north.
Government health workers and International Red Cross members arrived in Quisto’s Urarina indigenous community last month after a three-day boat ride along rivers starting from the Amazonian city of Iquitos, the world’s largest metropolis that is unreachable by road.
In Mangual, the village highest up the river, residents hunt and fish for food and live in wooden stilt houses with no electricity, and many common ailments
Connection with the outside world is minimal and the local language developed in isolation over centuries.
‘Brigades haven’t come here in many years. These communities are really forgotten,’ said Gilberto Inuma, president of Fepiurcha, an organization advocating for Urarina rights.
The broader Urarina indigenous group, one of Peru’s most insular, has just 5,800 people, official data show.
But not all communities have been spared from the knowledge, or impact, of the pandemic with at least five Urarina people having died from the virus.
The trip upriver underscores the challenges of vaccinating remote indigenous communities in Peru and beyond, as well as gaps in wider healthcare access for remote groups.
Many community members complained that what they really needed was better continuous healthcare services.