Greater access to COVID-19 home testing kits, changes to the state statistics dashboard, and the arrival of the Omicron variant in Alaska were among the topics covered by Dr. Anne Zink in a report to the Sitka Assembly on Dec. 14.
“I know the last thing we want is COVID,” said Zink, the state’s chief medical officer. “Man, we are all done with it. Unfortunately, it’s just not done with us.”
She said the state’s role is “to provide tools for Alaskans to keep themselves, their families and their communities healthy.”
Zink attended the meeting by Zoom. Before she spoke, a number of Sitka residents expressed views on COVID that ran counter to those of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Alaska Department of Health and Social Services.
“I love America’s big, beautiful, diverse democracy, and really appreciate the city council taking time,” Zink said in her opening remarks.
Zink said she encourages those who use the state’s dashboard to pay attention to onset date versus report date of new infections, as reports can be delayed.
“There’s more than cases to COVID,” she said. “We know we don’t catch all of the cases – our goal is not to catch all of the cases. Our goal is to provide information and resources to every Alaskan to make the best choices that they can for themselves, their family, their community, their business, really honoring and respecting those individual choices and freedoms that we appreciate/need.”
Other goals in the state’s strategies are keeping hospitals open and running and not overwhelmed, and keeping kids in school, she said, talking about the variants of the virus that are emerging.
“Delta was different; Delta was highly contagious and spread quickly from person to person,” she said. “And so, from a population perspective, that just meant a lot more people got exposed and a lot more people got infected quickly.’’
She said previous COVID infection provides some significant protection against reinfection, “but it’s not perfect.”
“We see reinfections. … The vaccines provide amazing protection from hospitalization but again it’s not perfect, particularly if your immune system has a hard time responding to that.”
Referring to another part of the state’s statistics dashboard, she said the percentage of tests coming back positive — which has been coming down recently — will be removed due to the burden of reporting by clinics.
Zink said her department is getting a number of questions about the Omicron variant, which she referred to as “another wild card” in the battle to keep people healthy.
“I would just emphasize that science is not a fixed body of knowledge,” she said. “It’s asking questions. ... I hate the comment, ‘I believe in science.’ Science isn’t a belief, it’s a process, and in that process we learn. And so we are continuing to learn constantly about respiratory illnesses, about this virus.”
Zink described vaccines as any substance that teaches your natural immune system to develop antibodies, to take down the virus more quickly.
“And in the process, we are learning more about this virus and this virus is also changing,” she said. “Every time that it replicates, every time it uses our bodies to replicate — because viruses need our cells to replicate — it can change. It has a really messy spellchecker. And so every time it replicates it can make ‘mistakes’ and some of those mistakes make it less likely to spread from one person to another, some of those mistakes make it more likely to spread to one another.”
Zink said the initial data about Omicron is that it appears to move more easily and quickly from person to person, but that it may not make people “super, super sick.” She added that it’s too early to tell at the beginning of a surge. A bad sign is that it also looks like those with one or two vaccine doses and no booster — or who have had COVID already — may be “quite susceptible” to the latest variant that is moving across the country and has been reported in Alaska.
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