After starting July at 56%, then moving to 58% on Aug. 1, the rate of eligible Alaskans getting at least their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine has now climbed to 60%.
Though the rate is improving, Alaska is still far behind the national average of 71%, as reported Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Alaska is two-thirds of the way down from the top in rankings of the 50 states.
Just like the state’s rising tally, Wrangell’s rate of eligible residents with at least their first shot has climbed from 61% to 64% in the past few weeks, though the community still has the lowest rate among Southeast towns listed on the state’s COVID-19 website.
While Alaska’s vaccination rate is climbing, the infection rate is rising even faster — driven in great part by the more contagious Delta variant, public health officials said.
As of Tuesday evening, Wrangell had reported 34 cases over the past two weeks, more than a quarter of all known cases in the community since the pandemic tally started in March 2020. The borough assembly was told at its Tuesday meeting that six of those cases were recorded just that day.
Most of Wrangell’s two-week surge in cases are residents who had been in close contact with infected individuals.
State health officials reported about 5,800 cases in the past two weeks through Tuesday, averaging more than 400 new cases a day. The rate was under 100 cases a day six weeks ago.
After setting a record, case counts have been on the decline in Ketchikan, which reported a pandemic peak of 122 active cases last Friday before dropping to 56 on Tuesday, with just two people in the hospital.
Of the cases over the past five months, the Ketchikan Gateway Borough reported 80% were either unvaccinated or their status unknown.
The surge in infections across Alaska has overwhelmed state public health workers assigned to contract tracing, trying to find and alert people who may have been close contacts of infected individuals.
“COVID-positive individuals are being requested to conduct their own contact tracing,” Wrangell officials reported last week. Juneau officials issued the same advisory on Monday.
“If you are advised by someone that you are a close contact, or you believe yourself to be a close contact of a COVID-positive individual, please quarantine and contact your health care provider to test as soon as possible,” Wrangell officials advised last week.
State health officials “are now asking people who test positive to reach out to their close contacts themselves and ask them to quarantine,” Juneau Deputy City Manager Robert Barr told his borough assembly on Monday.
Juneau reported 83 new cases over the weekend and Monday. “It’s our highest case load to date,” Barr said, adding that the numbers are “about double the caseload that we were experiencing in November of last year.”
The high number is making it harder to fly people out of Juneau for medical care, he told the assembly. “We continue to struggle quite a bit with medevac capacity, to the point of commonly not being able to medevac people who need to be medevaced outside of the community,” Barr said.
Juneau officials report many of the recent cases are linked to one of the mines near Juneau, an in-person social gathering, several family groups who all tested positive when they came back to town from travels — and many cases are spreading within households.
The Juneau School District on Tuesday reported 16 positive cases Aug. 18 – 23, with five classrooms closed on Monday to allow for contract tracing. Classes started Aug. 16.
The state’s hot spot for school infections has been the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, which on Tuesday reported 68 COVID infections since the start of classes on Aug. 18. The school district is the largest in the state not to require face masks in buildings or aboard school buses at the start of classes.
The district canceled 76 bus routes on Monday due to a shortage of school bus drivers due to infections and quarantines.
Students and staff at the Mat-Su Career & Tech High were required to wear face masks as of Tuesday after the district reported about a dozen new cases at the school.
The Matanuska-Susitna Borough’s vaccination rate is among the lowest in Alaska, at 43% of eligible residents as of Tuesday, according to the state health department COVID dashboard. The Mat-Su Regional Medical Center reported that every bed in its intensive-care unit was full on Sunday morning — all but one of the patients was sick with COVID-19.
Hospitals across the state had 121 COVID-19 patients as of Tuesday’s count.
In a virtual public health briefing Aug. 18, Alaska Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anne Zink said working in hospitals right now is “heartbreaking.”
“It’s the most depressing place I have worked in my career,” she said.
“And now we’re seeing so many sick people, who it’s completely preventable, or at least the majority are preventable,” she said. “I mean, it is unvaccinated person after unvaccinated person who’s struggling to breathe, saying, ‘I didn’t think this would be this bad.’”
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