Boy, 15, becomes remote Amazon tribe's first coronavirus case amid fears bug could wipe out native communities

A teenage boy, 15, has become the first coronavirus case of a remote Amazon tribe. The 15-year-old boy, from the Yanomami community along the Brazilian-Venezuelan border, is currently in the intensive care unit with coronavirus symptoms.

According to reports, the boy was initially tested negative, however, during a second test coronavirus was confirmed.

He was then admitted to the General Hospital of Roraima, Brazil’s northernmost state, on April 3 as he suffered from shortness of breath, chest pain, a sore throat, and fever.

Though it’s not clear how the teenager contracted the disease, it was said he traveled back to his reserve on the banks of the Mucajaí River after his school classes were suspended due to the deadly virus outbreak in the South American country.

The Yanomami tribe is reportedly the largest indigenous people in Brazil and occupies over 200 villages across 2.3 million acres.

This comes a few days after a woman from another tribe tested positive for coronavirus. The unidentified 19-year-old woman from the Kokama tribe contracted the disease in the district of Santo Antonio do Ica, located near the border with Colombia some 880 km up the Amazon river from the state capital Manaus.

“Unfortunately, we have an indigenous person with the virus," said a Sesait spokeswoman without revealing the name of the patient. However, reports claimed that the patient is a medical worker who had traveled upriver to several villages, including the town of Tabatinga, and returned home with a fever, a sore throat and chest pains.

With these two cases, a total of seven tribal people has now contracted the deadly virus across the Amazon states of Pará, Amazonas, and Roraima. These cases have escalated the fears that the COVID-19 pandemic could "wipe out" these native communities.

To tackle the disease, some indigenous communities in South America are either blockading their villages or fleeing to their traditional forest and mountain homes. Some members of some communities are also dividing into smaller groups equipped with hunting supplies to isolate themselves.

Meanwhile, indigenous communities and organizations in Ecuador declared on April 6 that they were launching an “Amazon Emergency Action Fund (COVID-19)”  to raise urgent support globally to stop the spread of the coronavirus into indigenous territories, thus guaranteeing Indigenous peoples’ survival.

“We indigenous peoples don’t have guarantees for our lives in the midst of this nationwide and global crisis. If this pandemic reaches our communities, it will be the end of us as indigenous peoples. There are no hospitals near our communities, we don’t have access to information or basic services, and the geographic isolation of our territories means that this pandemic could be fatal for our people," Jaime Vargas, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), said. 

“There is an incredible risk of the virus spreading across the native communities and wiping them out. Everyone gets sick, and you lose all the old people, their wisdom and social organization. It's chaos,” Federal University of São Paulo researcher Dr Sofia Mendonça told BBC.

Experts have also suggested that as the old people are more vulnerable to the deadly bug and if they will die, it would strip the tribe of its highly valued wisdom and hierarchy which could unleash "chaos" their structures.