Mariano Quisto, a remote community leader in Peru’s dense Amazon rainforest, first learned of the global pandemic in October when health workers arrived by boat at his isolated village with vaccines.

“We didn’t know about Covid-19. This is the first we are hearing about it,” Quisto said through a translator from the village of Mangual, in Peru’s vast but sparsely populated Loreto region in the country’s north.

Reuters arrived with government health workers and International Red Cross members in Quisto’s Urarina indigenous community, after a three-day boat ride along rivers starting from the Amazonian city of Iquitos, the world’s largest metropolis that is unreachable by road.

The broader Urarina indigenous group, one of Peru’s most insular, has just 5,800 people, official data show. Not all communities have been spared from the knowledge, or impact, of the pandemic. At least five Urarina people have died of Covid-19, a rights activist said.

Read the full Reuters story here.