Ten members of a declining tribe living on a secluded island in the archipelago of the Andaman Islands have tested positive for coronavirus, as the pandemic affects even the most remote regions of India.
There are only 59 surviving members of the Great Andamanic tribe, all on Street Island in the Andaman Archipelago.
A team of health workers sailed to the small island last week to conduct tests after six members of the tribe, who went to work in the region’s capital, Port Blair, tested positive for the virus. on the mainland.
The examples show that four other members of the tribe who had never left the island were also infected with the virus.
Dr Avijit Roy, a regional senior health director, said the virus had reached the island, although Covid tests were performed on each person who traveled to one of the 38 inhabited islands.
“In recent months, every person who travels to these islands, especially the restricted travel areas, has been tested, but it seems that someone who has the virus must have been discovered,” he said.
On Thursday, India reported a daily record of 75,760 new coronavirus infections, bringing the total to 3.1 million. 1,023 deaths were recorded in the same 24-hour period, bringing the toll to 60,472.
While the virus was initially concentrated in the densely populated cities of India such as Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, it is now spread in rural and isolated communities that have limited resources for health care. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, which have a population of 400,000, have reported a total of 2,944 cases of coronavirus among the non-tribal population.
The four tribesmen on the island who tested positive were aged between 26 and 55 years, and all were taken to hospital as a precautionary measure, although Roy said no one showed severe symptoms. The six who originally tested positive for the virus in Port Blair are under observation quarantine.
Roy was confident that the Great Andaman people would remain safe with continuous testing and further restrictions on movement. “All routes of possible transmission are being monitored,” he said. “No one is allowed to the island until they have been negatively assessed, and so we have now ruled out the possibility of new cases.”
Arjun Munda, the union’s minister of tribal affairs, expressed concern about the Great Andamanian infections and said the government had taken “all precautionary measures” to keep them safe.
The Great Andamanians are one of five tribes living in the Andaman Islands that are feared to be very vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic.
In 1788, when the British first attempted to invade the islands for free, the Great Andamans numbered between 5,000 and 8,000, and consisted of 10 different tribes.
Today, there are just 50 people left, and members of only two of the 10 tribes have survived. Their language has been largely lost – in April this year the last speaker of the Sare Great Andamanese language died of multiple health problems – and the tribe now speaks mostly Hindi.
The native Andamanian population has been declining for decades because they have poor immunity to many diseases and have been particularly vulnerable to tuberculosis and alcoholism.
There are only about 200 surviving members of the Shompen tribe, 150 of the Sentinelese tribe, 100 of the Onge and about 400 of the nomadic Jarawa tribe, who are thought to be deep in the jungle. have been displaced since the outbreak of the pandemic in an attempt to protect themselves.
The Sentinelese tribe, hostile to outsiders and made headlines in 2018 when they shot and killed an American missionary, John Allen Chau, with bows and arrows after traveling to their island, were probably unaware of ‘ the pandemic of the coronavirus.
“It’s very alarming that members of the Great Andamanese tribe tested positive for Covid-19,” said Sophie Grig, a senior researcher at Survival International, an organization that represents tribal people around the world. “They will be all too aware of the devastating impact of epidemics that have decimated their people.”
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