Virus heads upriver in Brazil Amazon, sickens native people

MANAUS, Brazil (AP) — In the remote Amazon community of Betania, Tikuna tribe members suspect the coronavirus arrived this month after some returned from a two-hour boat trip down the Solimoes River to pick up their government benefit payments.

Dozens subsequently got headaches, fevers and coughs. Two died. And the five government medical workers for the community of about 4,000 are not treating the sick because they lack protective equipment and coronavirus tests, said Sinésio Tikuna, a village leader.

So the Tikuna rely on their traditional remedy for respiratory ailments: Inhaling clouds of smoke from burning medicinal plants and beehives.

The Tikuna's plight illustrates the danger from the coronavirus as it spreads to rainforest areas where tribe members live in close quarters with limited medical services. Most are reachable only by boat or small aircraft.

“We’re very worried, mainly because help isn’t arriving,” Sinésio Tikuna said in a telephone interview.

Brazil has Latin America's highest COVID-19 death toll, with more than 15,000 as of Sunday. The country's hardest hit major city per capita is in the Amazon — Manaus, where mass graves are filling up with bodies.

As Sinésio Tikuna described in an interview his belief that beehive smoke saved four sick tribe members, there was no one at a Manaus hospital to help a feverish woman, struggling to breathe, make it inside the emergency room. A police officer put her on a gurney, wheeling it inside with an Associated Press photographer's help.

The indigenous people dwelling up the Solimoes and Negro rivers that merge in Manaus to form the Amazon River tried for weeks to seal their reserves off from the virus, pleading for donations while awaiting government deliveries of food so they could remain isolated. It didn't come for many, indigenous...