The coronavirus is tearing across the largest Native American reservation in the United States. Facing a spike in deaths, Navajo officials are scrambling to respond.

By Simon Romero from Window Rock, Arizona, @ NYTimes.com, April 9

[....] The Navajo Nation’s casualty count is eclipsing that of states with much larger populations, placing the rookie cop on the front lines.“My job is to tell our people to take this virus seriously or face the consequences,” Officer Yazzie, 24, said as he set up a police roadblock outside the town of Window Rock to enforce the tribal nation’s 8 p.m. curfew.

Faced with an alarming spike in deaths from what the tribal health department calls Dikos Ntsaaígíí-19 — or Covid-19 — Navajo officials are putting up checkpoints, assembling field hospitals and threatening curfew violators with 30 days in jail or a $1,000 fine.
The measures are part of a scramble to protect more than 150,000 people on the vast Navajo reservation, which stretches 27,000 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, and tens of thousands of others who live in towns bordering the Navajo Nation. As of Wednesday night, the virus had killed 20 people on the reservation, compared with 16 in the entire state of New Mexico, which has a population 13 times larger [....]