Lummi’s coronavirus cluster last week ‘a wake-up call’ for all Whatcom residents
The Lummi Nation community may have received the wake-up call last week about staying vigilant during the coronavirus pandemic after a recent COVID-19 cluster emerged, but it’s a call every resident in Whatcom County should heed.
During a four-day stretch between Wednesday, April 29, and Saturday, May 1, the Lummi Public Health Department reported the number of Lummi community members who had tested positive for COVID-19 had nearly doubled — jumping from 22 to 40 cases.
Before three new cases were reported Wednesday signaling the beginning of a cluster of cases, the Lummi community had not reported a positive test result in 10 days. That was followed by news of 15 more positive cases over the next three days and the report Sunday, May 3, that the Lummi Nation Commod Squad, which assists community members with food and other needs, had been notified of a possible exposure to a known case of COVID-19.
“Part of the reason why we publicize (test results) is to keep the Lummi community informed and to remind them that the best way to protect themselves is to follow the ‘shelter-in-place’ orders,” Lummi Nation Health Director Dr. Dakotah Lane told The Bellingham Herald in an email. “This latest cluster of cases was a wake-up call to the Lummi community that the virus is still here and poses a significant threat to the community.”
But Lummi is not the only Whatcom County community that needs to be aware that the respiratory illness is still active our area.
“It is easy to believe that Lummi appears to keep having new cases, but we are the only distinct community in Whatcom County who is publicly sharing our testing data,” Lane told The Herald.
Testing and case information broken down by individual cities or communities in Whatcom County has not yet been reported, Lane wrote. Instead, all the data from Bellingham, Lynden, Ferndale, Blaine and every other Whatcom community — including that from Lummi — is lumped together and included in Whatcom County’s overall numbers.
“From a logistic point of view, this makes some sense as it allows for the data to all be in one place,” Lane wrote. “However, this can lead each community within Whatcom County to believe that it ‘doesn’t affect them’ or have the appearance that new cases are only occurring at Peace Health hospital, nursing facilities or at Lummi Nation.”
The Herald’s requests to the county health department and Whatcom Unified Command, the multi-governmental agency that’s directing local pandemic response, to break down the county’s coronavirus statistics by location within the county — such as by zip code or city — have not yet been answered.
“Our data team is really making sure as we go about sharing data that any of the combinations of data that we present could (not) potentially be (used) to identify specific individuals,” county health department spokesperson Melissa Morin said during an online media briefing Monday, May 4. “They’re back in the office determining the appropriate time for us to share that data and looking at possible sub-county levels we could share that data, whether that’s by zip code, school district or other geographic boundaries, we’re working on this week.”
The reason Lummi has chosen to release detailed numbers, Lummi Indian Business Council Chief of Staff Anthony Hillaire told The Herald, is because the council set two objectives when the region entered the coronavirus pandemic:
“First, we wanted to envision a future for our people,” Hillaire said. “We want that future to be where grandfathers and grandmothers get to teach their grandchildren to be Lummi and what it means to be Lummi. ... We decided if it looks like we’re overreacting, good. We don’t want to lose one of our elders. Losing one is too many.
“Second, we’ve seen all over the world, when leaders and governments don’t tell the truth, that’s when they get in trouble. ... We wanted to be completely transparent and honest with our community.
“We are still true to both of those today.”
The Lummi Indian Business Council on March 22 ordered all people living on the Lummi Reservation in Whatcom County to shelter in place due to the coronavirus outbreak — one of the first communities to make such an order. That order has since been extended to May 31 and a curfew added from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. for residents of the reservation.
This story was originally published May 6, 2020 at 11:05 AM.
