Erasure by Numbers

American Indians and Alaska Natives have been found to be 3.5X more likely to be diagnosed with COVID-19—but that number is based on “gross underreporting” of data on indigenous people, warns article co-author Abigail Echo-Hawk, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and head of the Urban Indian Health Institute.
 
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, tribal health authorities have fought to gain access to COVID-19 data—a struggle that marks the continuation of indigenous peoples’ erasure from national data sets, often through racial misclassification.
 
The CDC, for example, has 3 racial categories for classifying maternal mortality data: white, Black, and Hispanic. Other races are classified as "Other."
 
Science