Snowshoe latest school to close due to COVID

MAT-SU — Mat-Su Borough School District students and staff had Monday off from school for Labor Day, but COVID-19 cases continue to spread throughout schools within the district. On Monday, only two new cases were reported district wide, but 212 have been reported over the last week. Snowshoe Elementary became the latest MSBSD school to close this year due to a COVID outbreak, joining Butte Elementary and Glacier View School, who returned to the medium risk category on Monday after building closures.

Snowshoe Elementary has had 18 total cases within the school community over the last week, and will remain closed with an update to be provided on September 10.

Glacier View School students will return to classrooms for in-person instruction on September 7 with masks required for all staff and students in grades 3-5 while remaining strongly encouraged for grades K-2. There are now 14 different schools in the medium risk category, accounting for 29.8 % of the 47 schools across the Valley.

Big Lake Elementary, Butte, Dena’ina, Knik, Sherrod and Willow are all at a medium risk level where masks are required for grades 3-5 and strongly encouraged for students in 2nd grade and younger. Sherrod Elementary School in Palmer has had nine total cases over the last week. There are five Valley high schools in the yellow, where masks may be required for all students and staff. Additionally, students riding buses to schools in the medium risk “yellow” category will also be required to wear masks. Houston Jr./ Sr. High School, Career Tech High School, Palmer, Redington Jr./Sr. High School and Wasilla High School all have mask requirements as they have entered into the medium risk category. Wasilla High has had 16 cases over the last week and Houston has had 28 cases over the last week, with one new case reported on Monday.

Teeland and Wasilla Middle School are the only middle schools to have mask requirements in the medium risk category, while 32 Valley schools are in the low-risk category with no mask requirement. The MSBSD is the largest school district in the state without a district-wide mask mandate in place.

Mat-Su Regional Medical Center CEO Dave Wallace was among a number of medical industry professionals who presented to the Alaska House Health and Social Services Committee during a hearing on Friday where he detailed the difficulty of providing healthcare to not only Mat-Su Valley residents, but transfer patients from across Alaska.

“We have the highest levels of COVID hitting our system and staying in our system for a long period of time and you have the highest need for other services simultaneously, and it is just a very difficult landscape to navigate,” said Wallace. “So two weeks ago we had unprecedented transfers in. We were receiving patients from Ketchikan, from Barrow, from Homer, from Cordova and then we filled up and could not take any more. We went through a period of time where we were just trying to cope with all of that but with the nature of this pandemic, we had beds open up. Some of those patients got better, some of those patients expired.”

With 125 beds at MSRMC, Wallace said that a secondary unit for patients who would be treated in the Intensive Care Unit was created on the second floor of MSRMC to service all of the COVID-19 patients.

“We are in disaster mode here. We are in a situation where we don’t want to close or say we can’t accept the next patient,” said Wallace. “We find ourselves begging for the staff to please come back for the next shift because we absolutely need you because we’re stretched that thin.”

Wallace said that he learned from a ward clerk in the ICU that every nurse at MSRMC is receiving counseling, and reiterated that the current COVID-19 surge is the most stressful time for healthcare workers in recent memory. Along with nearly every other presenter during the committee meeting, Wallace implored the committee and Governor’s office to provide additional resources to make a difference for healthcare facilities.

“It is a grim situation when our ER director says ‘I cry on the way to work and I cry on the way home and I try and hold it together the rest of the day,’ we know we are at an unprecedented level of stress,” said Wallace. “This disaster is now a year and a half old and it’s now at it’s very worst state and ironically no one seems to want to even talk about it anymore, let alone recognize that the hospital safety net is starting to fray and is very close to breaking.”

New cases of COVID-19 among Alaska residents were not reported on Monday due to the Labor Day holiday. On September 2, there were 78 new cases among Mat-Su residents. The MSRMC ICU has 14 beds, but 19 patients hospitalized due to COVID, accounting for 21.6 % of the total population of patients at MSRMC. As of the last reporting on September 2, there were two patients on ventilators and no ICU beds available. The seven day rolling test positivity for Mat-Su residents is at 13 %. There are 33,745 residents who have been fully vaccinated, accounting for 39 % of the total population of the Mat-Su, and 4,211 who are awaiting their second dose.