Genocide: The COVID-Frontier
By 
A prominent women’s hospital here has separated some Native American women from their newly born babies, the result of a practice designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 that clinicians and health care ethicists described as racial profiling.
Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque implemented a secretive policy in recent months to conduct special coronavirus screenings for pregnant women, based on whether they appeared to be Native American, even if they had no symptoms or were otherwise at low risk for the disease, according to clinicians.
The hospital screens all arriving patients for COVID-19 with temperature checks and asks them whether they’ve been in contact with people who have the illness. But for soon-to-be moms who appeared to be Native American, there was an additional step, according to clinicians interviewed on the condition they not be named.
Hospital staff would compare the expectant mother’s ZIP code against a list of Indian reservation ZIP codes maintained by the hospital, known informally as the “Pueblos List,” a reference to New Mexico’s Pueblo Indian tribes. If the pregnant woman’s ZIP code matched one on the list, she was designated as a “person under investigation” for COVID-19, the clinicians said.
Lovelace does not use rapid COVID-19 tests, and babies were sometimes born before asymptomatic Native American mothers’ test results came back from the lab, a process that can take up to three days. As a result, the hospital separated Native American newborns from their asymptomatic mothers in at least a half-dozen cases, one clinician said.
Such separations deprive infants of close, immediate contact with their mothers that doctors recommend.
“I believe this policy is racial profiling,” one clinician said. “We seem to be applying a standard to Native Americans that isn’t applied to everybody else. We seem to be specifically picking out patients from Native communities as at-risk whether or not there are outbreaks at their specific pueblo or reservation.”
Racial profiling is exactly what this is.
At Lovelace, only women who appear to be Native American were singled out for the additional examination, even if they showed no symptoms and had not been in contact with a person who has tested positive for the illness, clinicians said.
“This isn’t about where you live or if you live in a hot spot — it’s about whether someone thinks you look Native,” a clinician explained. “The only people for whom we’ve been told to check ZIP codes are patients who appear to be Native.”
We’ve had a lot of talk in the last two weeks about how the entirety of American institutions discriminate against and kill Black people. This is absolutely 100% true. But we also have to remember that the exact same institutions do the exact same thing to Native people too. From police violence to schools to hospitals, Native people are routinely treated as bad or worse than any other Americans. This is absolutely outrageous, Lovelace Hospital needs to be punished, but more to the point, this is just far too typical of how this nation treats Native peoples.