Special thanks
to our supporters

  • Mickey Odawa
  • Monika Dorman
  • Janet Marcotte
  • Donna Evans
  • Bill Roe
  • JD Wallace
  • Lincoln Steffens
  • The Water Desk
  • Regional Transportation Authority/Pima Association of Governments
  • Ernie Pyle
  • NewsMatch
  • & many more!

We rely on readers like you. Join them & contribute to the Sentinel today!

Hosting provider

Proud member of

Local Independent Online News Publishers Authentically Local Local First Arizona Institute for Nonprofit News
 1 2 >
The sparsely populated Navajo Nation Reservation is larger than West Virginia, with dirt roads and houses so remote they don’t have addresses and can be out of range of police radios.

Navajo Chief of Police Phillip Francisco - with a 200-member department that polices a rural Arizona area larger than West Virginia - hopes the federal government’s most recent COVID-19 relief bill will help pay for some of the department’s critical needs after the stresses of the pandemic. Read more»

Sam Wang, organizer of the group Chinese-Americans COVID-19 Relief AZ, unloads boxes of face masks at Mountain Park Health Center last year, some of the 158,000 masks the group was able to secure last year for area first responders.

In the first months of the pandemic, when demand for personal protective equipment far exceeded supply, Sam Wang helped lead a group called Chinese Americans COVID-19 Relief AZ, whose 40 volunteers used their skills to secure 158,000 masks from China for communities in Arizona. Read more»

Technology with multilingual function can be used to better communicate with non-English-speaking patients and staffers.

Hospitals across the country have reported more hospitalizations and deaths of Black and Latino patients than of whites, and lower-income communities with patients who didn’t speak much, or any, English had a 35% greater chance of death. Read more»

Registered Nurse Shawna Snyder and her husband Ernesto Burbank, who sang Native American songs before she died of COVID-19 in July.

Health care workers across the country have risked their lives to care for COVID-19 patients, and Cronkite News reporters teamed up with the Guardian and Kaiser Health News to tell some of the stories of those who died because of exposure to the novel coronavirus that causes the deadly disease. The overall project was awarded the Batten Medal for Coverage of the Coronavirus Pandemic on Monday. Read more»

More than 3,600 U.S. health care workers perished in the first year of the pandemic, according to “Lost on the Frontline,” a 12-month investigation by The Guardian and KHN to track such deaths, who died and why. Read more»

Emails exchanged between Trump official Peter Navarro and Airboss Defense Group CEO Patrick Callahan show that the company sold respirators to FEMA before any contract was awarded and expected to be paid upfront, breaking from typical protocol. 'Consider it done,' Navarro wrote.

House Democrats investigating the COVID-19 response say Trump adviser Peter Navarro pressured agencies to award deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Navarro, who served as Trump’s deputy assistant and trade adviser, essentially verbally awarded a $96 million deal for respirators to a company with White House connections. Later, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency were pressured to sign the contract after the fact, according to correspondence obtained by congressional investigators. Read more»

The most popular hiking trails in the Sedona area have been particularly littered over the past year, locals say.

Face masks, plastic bottles and bags – and feces, both dog and human – are some of the unsightly waste you could encounter these days while hiking in the red rocks of Sedona. Discarded masks also litter the beaches of Southern California, which already were battling a growing scourge of plastic and microplastics in the ocean. Environmentalists fear the situation will get worse as the nation emerges from a year of pandemic restrictions. Read more»

On Feb. 10, the CDC updated its guidance to health care workers, urging workers to wear an N95 or a “well-fitting face mask,” which could include a snug cloth mask over a looser surgical mask.

A new wave of research now shows that several of the “aerosol-generating” procedures considered the riskiest were not the most hazardous to health care workers. Recent studies have determined that a basic cough produces about 20 times more particles than intubation, a procedure one doctor likened to the risk of being next to a nuclear reactor, and patients with COVID simply talking or breathing, even in a well-ventilated room, could make workers sick in the CDC-sanctioned surgical masks. Read more»

In the midst of a national shortage of N95 masks, the U.S. government quietly granted an exception to its export ban on protective gear, allowing as many as 5 million per month to be shipped overseas. FEMA issued the waiver in the final moments of Donald Trump’s presidency. Read more»

Almost a year into the pandemic, supply shortages remain so severe that nurse Kristen Cline reuses her N95 for several shifts while her hospital buckles, patients suffer and folks nearby socialize maskless as if the pandemic were already over. Read more»

The best way to help our medical workers isn’t to stand at windows cheering or to give them thank-you water bottles. It’s to stay out of their ERs and ICUs by keeping ourselves and our neighbors safe. Read more»

The nation’s pandemic hotspots have shifted to rural communities, overwhelming small hospitals that are running out of beds or lack the intensive care units for more than one or two seriously ill patients. Read more»

The nearly 3,000-inmate Arizona State Prison Complex Kingman, operated in Golden Valley by GEO Group, experienced a COVID-19 outbreak in mid-July, with positive results for five of the 17 people tested.

As COVID-19 began to spread across the Southwest in March, lawyers representing incarcerated Arizonans reported “unsanitary conditions,” “inadequate medical staffing and treatment” and a “failure to take strong and sensible precautionary measures” in state prisons. Read more»

OceansAsia, a Hong Kong nonprofit dedicated to protecting the seas from pollution, collects PPE trash that washed ashore on the Soko Islands.

Strewn across parking lots, in rivers and washing up on beaches, disposable face masks, gloves and other personal protection equipment are turning up everywhere except where they should be – in the landfill. Read more»

Ventilators and other donations from the U.S. Agency for International Development outside Moscow. The White House has pushed the agency to spend millions on donating ventilators, with little clarity on how countries are chosen.

Nearly 8,000 ventilators are destined for foreign countries as part of Trump’s plan to make the U.S. “king of ventilators.” But public health experts worry the machines are crowding out more urgently needed aid. Read more»

 1 2 >