Australia’s Aboriginal Communities and Covid-19
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Summary
As a consequence of the increasing spreading of the new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) as well as the coronavirus illness linked with it (COVID-19), enormous strain has been exerted on health-care systems, nations, and businesses. COVID-19 is a new severe and acute respiratory syndrome that emerged from China in late 2019 and declared a global disaster in early 2020. This report identifies some of the impacts of COVID-19 on Australia’s Aboriginal communities to include community-based, economic, and business. Specifically, these communities are identified to be lagging behind in terms of adapting to the new changes in the external environment.
Introduction
The ensuing effect of the virus on Indigenous Australians’ psychological health, as well as their exposure to discrimination, should also be carefully studied. The purpose of this report is to present an overview of the impacts and implications of Australia’s Aboriginal Communities due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the U.S, the UK, China, and Argentina, Aboriginal and racial minority populations are at increased risk of COVID-19 lethality and death, highlighting the existence and pervasiveness of world health disparities. COVID-19 has yet to be fully studied despite the urgency it has created in the research and academic circles. Indigenous Australians, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (hence referred to as Aboriginal), are among the worst health results in the globe. Because of a number of existing medical as well as socioeconomic imbalances that exacerbate susceptibility, Indigenous Australians are at increased risk of death from severe acute respiratory infection as in comparison to non-Indigenous Australians if they get diagnosed with the disease. Community Impact
Poverty and Lack and Food
In Australia, the Health Department recommends that individuals above the age of 70, including those well over age of 65 who have serious health issue, remain indoors and try and prevent all interactions with people. Between food availability and affordability and the closure of missions, reserves, and towns in order to keep Aboriginal population safe from COVID-19, there is a fundamental conflict to be resolved (Power et al. 2020). For example, the Barkindji Indigenous peoples in New South Wales are reported to be a small group of about 750 people in one rural town who have been affected severely by the pandemic. The effect is that the access to foods and government services have been reduced significantly. Prior to the outbreak, one in every three adult Indigenous Australians who resided in rural areas of Australia claimed that they had ran out of food and were not able to obtain additional food. Indigenous communities in China (including the Tibetans, Uyghurs, Zhuang) and the First Nations in Australia have gradually entered into unprecedented levels of poverty, leading to food scarcity due to increased joblessness (Furlong & Finnie, 2020). In China, Tibetans have not been affected severely by the pandemic, yet their access to vital services and food have been reduced too. Comparing this to the non-indigenous groups, there is a notable gap in the way the pandemic has affected these two groups. Indigenous Communities have suffered greatly. Food is expensive in several distant villages since there exist only one shop to purchase it from, and costs are extravagant because of transportation and accessibility concerns.
Commodity Price Hikes and Overcharging
In certain instances, overcharging is clearly visible (Central Land Council 2020). Since foodstuffs in rural villages can be up to sixty percent more expensive than in urban areas, numerous Indigenous Australians prefer to purchase in town centres rather than in urban areas. The same is true for Chinese Indigenous communities that do not have access to shops unless they travel outside of their rural villages into the more urban zones. This is no nearly impossible today due to the implementation of biosecurity lockdowns. COVID-19 exasperates food shortages by causing unanticipated rises in unemployment, a stoppage in tourist industry, and the inability of individuals to abandon their community members in order to hunt and take part in social health determinants. COVID-19 is a virus that spreads through the air and land. This highlights the plight of Native Groups in Australia who have a longstanding experience of being restricted to specified regions known as missions and reserves.
Prevalence of Mental Illnesses
Locking down has traditionally been a self-determined practice in various Indigenous communities around the globe. On the Australian mainland, the issue of inducing occurrences of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in older native people who still reside on missions and reserves has come up for discussion (Bhaskar et al., 2020). Several Aboriginal Australians, among them the Wahine Maori, have reported that they have been locked down afresh as result of government interference and regulation, as they had been starting in the early 1970s in the state of Queensland, and that this is still a part of their lived occurrences. The same has been true for Chinese indigenous groups in Rural China. As a result, several communities have reported rape, sexual abuse, and domestic violence as among the traits of crises such as pandemics, which entail a sharp rise in these crimes (Peterman et al. 2020). The occurrence of domestic violence amongst indigenous peoples globally has already improved as a result of colonialization and historical trauma, with “incidence rates of 57 percent and 80 percent amongst the Wahine Maori found for lifelong violence amongst Wahine Maori,” (Wilson et al. 2019, 15). “Aboriginal women are 32 times more likely than non-Aboriginal females to be hospitalized for domestic violence especially in Australia,” (Wilson et al. 2019, 15).
Business Impact
Reduced Resource Allocation During the Pandemic
It is the historical colonization process of the continent of Australia that has given rise to aboriginal discrepancies in the country. Native population are widely acknowledged to be the most marginalized population in Australian community, a fact that has been thoroughly documented. Although the state gave this subject a great deal of attention and allocated significant resources, making genuine, quantifiable improvement in both the real world and the statistical, quantitative perspective has proven to be exceptionally hard (Caroll et al. 2021). Aboriginal communities are widely acknowledged to be the most marginalized population in Australian community, a fact that has been thoroughly documented.
Loss of Business Due to Use of Traditional Business Models
Considering that this is being scientifically demonstrated that the sociocultural health determinants have an enormous beneficial impact on the health of Aboriginal populations, this is a serious problem (Bourke et al. 2018). Several indigenous and Torres Strait Islander populations in Australia move across communities on a regular basis to attend to the business of Sorry Business (funerals and grieving; Department of Health 2020). Native individuals are having difficulty combining coronavirus restrictions with their relationally based traditional commitments in the contemporary setting of lockdowns and social separation, with grief having influence over other responsibilities. The Wahine Maori in Aotearoa have also been required to change the way they conduct cultural rites to say goodbye to a loved one who has died, as well as how they provide help to the elderly and others with special needs in their communities. Similarly, Chinese Indigenous communities have further been marginalized, forced to abandon some of their cultural practices, and to adopt new ones in line with COVID-19 mitigation measures.
Closure of Small-Scale Businesses to Large Competitors
In China, preliminary evidence suggests that the prevalence of severe and deadly COVID19 cases is higher among the elderly and those who have pre-existing diseases such as cardiovascular disease, asthma, chronic pulmonary disease, pressure, and leukaemia (Li et al., 2020; Tan et al. 2021). It has been suggested by research that the outbreak had already triggered widespread displacement among small enterprises owned by the native Australians just a few weeks after it had begun and before the provision of government assistance. The COVID-19 outbreak caused the temporary closure of 43 percent of companies across the whole population, with almost many of these closures attributed to the outbreak (Power et al. 2020). Respondents who had briefly closed their doors primarily cited a drop in sales and employee medical issues as the main causes for their decision, with interruptions in the distribution network playing a less significant role. Businesses stated that they had decreased their current employment by an average of 39 percent since January, according to the data.
Economic discrepancies
Joblessness
Beginning with joblessness, the Aboriginal rate was estimated 23 percent at the time of the 1996 Census, compared to other nonaboriginal rate of 9 percent. This means that the native rate was 2.5 times greater than the general rate. It is true that the degree of this disparity is significantly bigger in practice. In 1996, over 28,000 aboriginal individuals were enrolled in 274 similar programs. According to estimates by Reinders et al. (2020), if such individuals had been considered unemployed, the Aboriginal rate of unemployment would indeed be pretty close to 40%, more than four times higher than the national average. Joblessness continues to be an economic issue for indigenous groups.
Inability to Compete with More Educated Non-Native Groups
Low levels of education and healthcare are both causal factors of having a low socioeconomic standing. According to data on academic achievement, Native communities are significantly more likely than non-aboriginal Australians to have never attended school (3%) or to have dropped out of school well before the age of 16 (44%) when compared to non-aboriginal Australians (less than 1 per cent and 36 per cent, respectively) (Yashadhana et al. 2020). Additionally, Native communities have less postsecondary qualifications (24%) and were less likely to be enrolled in higher education institutions (14%) in 1996 when compared to their non-Indigenous peers (25 per cent and 40 per cent, respectively) (Yashadhana et al. 2020). Male Native average lifespan at birth in Nepal Indigenous communities is 18 years lesser than non-native life expectancy at birth, and women Aboriginal average life expectancy is 17 years lesser than non-native average life expectancy; just 6 percent of the Native populations in the 1996 Census was more than 55 years old, in comparison to 20 percent of the non-native community (Poudel & Subedi, 2020).
Economic Stagnation
Different communities including the Native hunter-gatherer economies, did not result in the use of the country’s renewable resource before to the French and Indian War of 1788 (Rose-Redwood et al., 2020). When viewed through the lens of western economics, this production process was underdeveloped and basic since it did not generate enormous material surpluses—there was no complex agriculture or industrialization, and there was only minimal extraction of non-renewable resources. In addition to the eviction of Aboriginal population and the shift of ‘property rights’ in natural resources from them to colonizers, white settlement had been a major contributor to the economic growth of Australia (O’Sullivan, Rahamathulla, & Pawar, 2020). In the twentieth century, this trend of estrangement was still in progress, and the effects of it are still being experienced by native population today. Shortly put, while colonization offered material well-being to several European migrants, it resulted in Native economic stagnation as a result.
Conclusion
Broadly speaking, Indigenous Populations bear a disproportionately high impact of noncommunicable and viral infections, which is associated with social and health inequalities that have resulted from conquest and subsequent colonization. Unquestionably, aboriginal populations have a greater risk of illness than non-indigenous individuals. This is obvious not just in reduced average life expectancy, but also for the younger age at which humans become far more susceptible. This also illustrates one of several distinct peculiarities amongst Indigenous populations around the world when it comes to securing their communities that they remain constrained in areas defined as protected zones. The inequalities in social, physical, emotional, and environmental health that have been described are symbolic of the cultural inequalities that Aboriginal Australians have experienced, and all of these characteristics combine to form important risk factors for COVID-19 infection. Native Australians’ access to health care services is negatively impacted by their linguistic and cultural marginalization, which has a direct impact on their health care access and availability as well as results. The effect of discrimination, that has been described as a public health crisis by Aboriginal Australian officials and as the “second scourge” around the world, is a significant role in health as well as social outcomes in Native groups.
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