Monitoring COVID19 and Building Capacity with Northern Plains Tribes and the Future of Pandemics

Monitoring COVID-19 and Building Capacity with Northern Plains Tribes & the Future of PandemicsAbstract: The spread of COVID-19 across the world and throughout the United States has brought extant disparities inhealth care resources and capacity into new focus as the various health, economic, and social harms of COVID-19 disproportionately fall upon under-invested communities. Ongoing limitations in testing capacity, medicalinfrastructure and resources, and strong community partnerships are leading to greater spread of COVID-19,more difficulty in balancing precautionary isolation vs economic decisions, and a lack of data to guide publichealth policies. At the same time, efforts to overcome these issues that are led by faraway groups without localknowledge or consent can not only result in the promotion of ineffective solutions over local needs, but can alsoperpetuate ongoing harms to health, social, and economic concerns. Therefore, solutions that aim to addressCOVID-19 public health capacity in under-resourced environments must include local resources, local consent,and ensure long-term capacity, shared equity, and data control for participants. Here, we propose to leveragepre-existing resources and partnerships between the Stanford School of Medicine & tribal affiliates to upgradeexisting laboratory infrastructure for conducting COVID-19 diagnostic tests, health consultations, and tribe-widepublic health data management and policy. This capitalizes on existing resources built with the Native BioDataConsortium (NBDC)-an Indigenous-led research group- from its collaboration with the SPHERE Project 1 Bio-Repository for American Indian Capacity, Education, Law, Economics, and Technology (BRAICELET) center.The work proposed here was designed to result in a tribe-governed health resource being operational within 6months to conduct COVID-19 diagnostic tests and monitoring on an ongoing basis for improved public health.