School District curtails COVID-19

PALMER — On Tuesday at a joint meeting between the Mat-Su Borough School District School Board and Mat-Su Borough Assembly, MSBSD Superintendent Dr. Randy Trani detailed the efforts in mitigation of COVID-19 implemented in the schools. Despite the continued rise of COVID-19 cases around the Mat-Su Valley, data presented by Trani showed the steep decline of positive cases in schools recently.

“The schools have a lower infectious rate than the communities in which they reside and in some places it’s dramatic, like Palmer it’s less than half of the infectious rate in the community,” said Trani. “The schools may actually be a mitigating factor for the spread of the coronavirus. Being open may actually slow down the coronavirus in the community.”

On Wednesday, there were 577 new cases of COVID-19 announced among Alaska residents and the cumulative total is now 37,342 cases. There are 150 people currently hospitalized due to COVID-19 which accounts for 17.2% of all hospitalized patients in Alaska. Out of the 1,099,555 total tests conducted in Alaska, 28,212 were done over the last week with an average test positive rate of 6.65%. There have been a total of 1,356 nonresident cases and only 31 Intensive Care Unit beds are available across Alaska. There have been 149 deaths due to COVID-19.

“One of the prime reasons that we had to take that break district wide was because of staffing. We were ending up in situations where we simply had numbers of required subs that we had never seen before and it wasn’t necessarily that staff had COVID, although some have had it, it’s that they were identified as close contacts and we were ending up with more and more people excluded and we were unable to fill the sub vacancy and it started to turn into the safety problem in the school itself without regard to COVID,” said Trani.

“It allowed all of the staff that were quarantined at that time to get out of their quarantine and we hoped that that would really help us mitigate the spread even further and you can see that since then, our case number has gone down dramatically,” he added. “So we feel like that was a good strategy that we used. It still seems to be holding out this week as well.”

Over the last 14 days, 101 cases of COVID-19 have been reported among students and staff of MSBSD and no school has had more than 10. Of the five key district mitigation strategies, Trani has emphasized short term school closures and exclusions for potential close contacts as the most important. While more than half of all MSBSD schools have remained open 90% of the school year or more, only a small handful have not had extended closures due to positive cases within the school.

In Mat-Su, 86 new cases were announced on Wednesday bringing the total up to 5,117 cases. There are only two remaining ICU beds at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center and 29.1% of all hospitalized patients are hospitalized due to COVID-19. Over the last week, 9.31 % of COVID-19 tests in the Valley have come back positive and 71,572 tests have been conducted in total. There are 23 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 at MSRMC and eight Valley residents have died.

Trani noted that intramural athletics were returning after a brief hiatus with the additional caveat of a mask mandate. Trani mentioned that of the 441 cases that had occurred to members of the school community, only 59 % of those had been infectious inside the school buildings and that maskless events were more likely to contribute to spread.

“They were talking about the hockey tournament in Anchorage and how that was turning into kind of a superspreader event,” said Trani. “We were sitting in our chairs in the Health Advisory Team meeting, we could kind of watch that spread happen in real time and we even had photographic evidence of the spread happening.”