At the beginning of April the Wrangell Sentinel reported on SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium's organization-wide COVID-19 testing numbers, across all of their medical centers and clinics in Southeast Alaska. At the time, SEARHC representatives said that they could not provide community-specific numbers to the public. The test numbers in each individual community were so small, the reasoning went, that releasing those numbers could potentially identify who was being tested and violate their privacy.
However, for several reasons, SEARHC has announced that they will begin providing regular updates to local test numbers to several communities. According to an April 21 press release from SEARHC, there have been a total of 77 COVID-19 tests conducted in Wrangell. Maegan Bosak, director of marketing and communications for SEARHC, said 62 of these tests came back negative, and 15 are still pending results. Mayor Steve Prysunka reported on the same day that there are no confirmed cases of the virus in Wrangell as of this date.
"We will be reporting numbers weekly in Wrangell, Sitka, Juneau, Klawock and Haines, from this point forward for a couple reasons," Bosak wrote in an email to the Sentinel. "1.) These communities have met the threshold of testing that privacy related to number of tests is no longer a concern and 2.) tests performed in our in house labs and rapid testing responses are not being shared on the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services website."
The DHSS website, the Alaska Coronavirus Response Hub, reports only 27 commercial tests have been conducted. However, SEARHC and city officials have reported this number is inaccurate.
"SEARHC had previously refrained from releasing community-specific testing data, but given that the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services is not reporting results completed in-house (including rapid tests), we will provide weekly data for our five largest communities," SEARHC's press release reads.
Prysunka went into a little more detail on April 20, during the daily COVID-19 update.
"Our number on the state website itself said we'd only tested 22 people in our entire town for COVID-19," he said. "So I turned to my wife [Dr. Lynn Prysunka] and said 'Is that reasonable?' She laughed and said 'Not even close.' So when I looked further into it the state hadn't put down the state numbers. They put down the private lab numbers but not their own numbers, so it was giving a skewed vision."
A large jump in tests being conducted does not mean that people have a reason to worry, Prysunka clarified in the daily update. It just means that there might be a new symptom of COVID-19 medical professionals have become aware of, so new people are meeting the new criteria for getting tested. Moving forward, community test numbers will be provided on a weekly basis, according to SEARHC's press release.
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