School board discusses contact tracing

PALMER — Over 16,000 Mat-Su Borough School District students returned to in-person classes on Wednesday at school buildings all across the Valley. The MSBSD School Board held a meeting later Wednesday night where the district’s COVID-19 mitigation policies were under intense scrutiny.

The meeting opened with three consecutive public commenters who offered their testimony remotely and urged the district to mandate masks in schools. Overall, eight people spoke against masks and four spoke in favor.

“Tuesday Alaska had 132 people hospitalized with covid. At our peak in December it was 151. In two weeks after school opening we will far surpass that record. Wearing masks indoors helps prevent the spread of this virus. Vaccines and masks are our best weapons. We have practical scientifically proven tools to keep kids healthy and in school where they learn best,” said Katie Ables. “The Mat-Su Valley alert level is high but schools were open today with no mask mandate and an alarmingly flawed mitigation plan. Listen to the licensed medical professionals that you have on staff in every school. I urge you to create and enforce a mask mandate to protect our children and our community.”

While all but one who testified in favor of stricter mitigation practices testified remotely, every one of the eight who testified in opposition to testing, contact tracing and vaccinations spoke in person.

“We could debate the science till we’re blue in the face. The bottom line is do we stand for freedom and liberty or do we stand for medical tyranny,” said Garrett Christiansen. “I read the letter that was sent out today regarding the future plan if there’s more cases arising, we may force our children to wear masks again. I find that abhorrent. I find that despicable, one because the children are not at risk and two because as we said before those who have desire to be vaccinated can be vaccinated to protect themselves and it is not the childrens job to protect the teachers. It’s not anyone’s job to protect the health of anyone else, it is our job individually.”

As of Wednesday, 127 Alaskans were hospitalized due to COVID-19 with 28 intensive care units beds available and 28 people on ventilators. There have been 404 Alaskan deaths attributed to COVID-19 and 78,407 cases since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. In the Mat-Su, 75 new cases were reported on Wednesday and only two out of 14 ICU beds at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center are unoccupied. There are five people on ventilators at MSRMC and 19 percent of those hospitalized are suffering from covid. MSBSD Superintendent Dr. Randy Trani’s began his report with the enrollment, reporting 18,245.75 students enrolled with 88 percent of those students receiving their instruction in person. At the end of Trani’s report covering the district mitigation strategies, he presented a collage of photos including clip art of one red stick figure in a crowd of blue stick figures.

“People have different perspectives. Some people see the crowd, so when we heard from Dr. Zink and Renee at DHSS, they are looking at the crowd and they tell us things like we heard last night, every ICU bed in Mat-Su Regional is full and all of the beds in Anchorage are full. They’re thinking about the crowd. Their system to deal with the crowd – all of us – is built for those other background things that happen ,driving to school and getting sick and then when you add a third thing to that they get very worried because they don’t have the capacity to handle it and it’s not necessarily that the kids are going to overburden the hospital but they could pass it on to somebody else, that’s their perspective,” said Trani.

Trani provided examples and detailed how the district would handle positive cases during the school year. In the event of a positive case, students will receive exposure notices. If a student was properly masked, fully vaccinated, or had covid within the last 90 days, they will not be considered a close contact and be subject to quarantine by public health.

“We know that our staff cannot do contact tracing, particularly at the upper levels and community health knows that they cannot do contact tracing at the upper levels and so we’ll be doing exposure notifications. We in fact probably have one in the works right now. We had six cases in the district and I think there was one more after school that’s going to prompt an exposure notification which will be a note home to a parent that your student was in contact with someone who had covid,” said Trani.

There have been 264 cases in the last week in the Mat-Su, more than double the threshold to be at the highest alert level. The school district began the school year with each school acting as their own community, similar to 2020.

“In the medium risk, and we were very careful not to put a metric on here because we learned last year there’s so many intricacies to every case or a group of cases,” said Trani. “In a medium risk situation we would start adding those tiered levels of mitigation that we had used before. Masks is an example but it’s not the only example and I think we were even clear in here the masks may be required because every single set of information we get is different.”

Trani also noted changes to the definition of close contact, noting that the distance is down to three feet and excludes students who were properly masked. Trani will attend a community health echo for MSBSD parents on Thursday night with Alaska’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anne Zink to answer questions.

Following Trani’s report, School Board Member Ryan Ponder began to question specifics of who would be considered a close contact and what effects that may have. Trani used a number of hypothetical examples including a sports team traveling on a bus together.

“If you’re considered a close contact because you’re not vaccinated then what happens, what’s the downstream effects,” said Ponder. “I keep hearing over and over individuals just like Dr. Zink that even if you’re vaccinated you’re still a spreader. So what is the difference between the individual on the bus, on the long bus drive that was vaccinated and not vaccinated, keeping those that are not vaccinated quarantined while those that are vaccinated are coming to school. Are we not concerned about the science that’s being put out there.”

Ponder clarified that the school district will not qualify any student as a close contact, but that nurses and school staff may inform parents.

“It’s more us filtering the cases than anything and because we’re in the school with kids, our nurses are going to know things and is that contact tracing or is it just them being aware,” said Trani. “We’re sending exposure notifications. We aren’t doing contact tracing, except nurses are goin got know when things happen and so they will likely say to parents your student was a close contact here are the expectations that DHSS has. They will maybe get a hold of you.”