South Dakota Sioux tribe says it won't remove coronavirus checkpoints at request of governor

Harold Frazier.
(Image credit: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

In order to monitor and track the coronavirus, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe in South Dakota set up checkpoints, and the tribe's chairman, Harold Frazier, told CNN on Sunday the tribe must keep them up as they are the "best tool we have right now" to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

"We want to ensure that people coming from hot spots or highly infected areas, we ask them to go around our land," Frazier said. The reservation is home to 12,000 people, and there is only one eight-bed medical facility with no intensive care unit. Frazier said the nearest critical care facility is three hours away, and the checkpoints are due to "the lack of resources we have medically."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.