State officials continue to watch the numbers

ANCHORAGE — Alaska had four more people test positive for COVID-19 on Monday, and 345 people have tested positive statewide. As the number of daily new cases continues to decrease as announced at daily press conferences with Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Alaska’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anne Zink, Zink said that the extension of the last portion of flattening the epidemiology curve can take some time and the ramifications of changing behaviors around the state can take up to two weeks to begin showing up in testing results.

Alaska has tested 16,256 people for COVID-19 and only 2.1 percent of those tested positive. While one more person has been hospitalized due to infection, no more Alaskans have died and 218 of the 345 who have been infected are being reported as having recovered from symptoms.

“We may have turned a corner. I’ve got to be careful there because again, a spike in cases could change that,” said Dunleavy.

Of the four new cases announced on Monday, all were in Southcentral Alaska. Anchorage reported two more positives, one in Eagle River and one in Wasilla. A total of 1,452 Mat-Su Borough residents have been tested, accounting for 1.36 percent of the population.

Sunday’s reported inmate positive was the first case in the Mat-Su Valley over a span of six days since the last positive was reported on April 18. The Valley now has 21 total people who have tested positive for COVID-19 after a Goose Creek Correctional Center inmate was reported as the state’s first inmate to have become infected on Sunday. Dr. Zink praised the efforts of public health nurses who sprung into action at Goose Creek to begin contact investigation this weekend.

“They went ahead and tested over 200 people within that correctional facility including staff and inmates, anyone who might at all have been at risk to try and take a broad sweep to make sure that we are looking for both symptomatic and asymptomatic people to try and identify cases very early,” said Zink.

The DOC reported that the inmate who tested positive had been in quarantine since April 19, and Zink said that the entire housing mod that the inmate who tested positive belonged to were also tested, along with staff. Inmates have been screened for symptoms of COVID on remand and when traveling between correctional facilities, though DOC said that moving inmates between facilities was being limited.

Zink also discussed that the Centers for Disease Control are adding days onto their definition of someone who has recovered from COVID-19 and showed a graph representing the different types of ways cases have been acquired in Alaska through travel, close contacts or cases still under investigation.

The graph detailed the beginning of the spread of COVID-19 in Alaska with mostly travel cases, followed by secondary cases from those close to others who had been infected. While clusters of positive cases across the state have slowed, Zink says that Alaskans still need to maintain social distance when possible, wear a mask around people in public, wash hands diligently and wipe down surfaces to keep COVID-19 from continuing to spread.

“We still have community cases that we’re seeing and from an infectious disease standpoint, you really have to go 28 days without seeing a case in a community with really adequate testing to say that we don’t have community spread. So at this time we still do believe that we have community spread in the state of Alaska,” said Zink.

Zink stressed that Alaskans not let their guard down, and noted that if someone was unable to name everyone they spent more than 10 minutes around over the last week, that person is being too social. As the first phase of reopening Alaska’s economy responsibly was rolled out by Dunleavy on Friday and Anchorage followed suit with their own opening of businesses on Monday, Zink detailed how case investigation will identify contacts at businesses, should that happen with the sudden influx of customers.

“We’re trying to have a really much more kind of surgical approach to this disease, identify cases early and then very quickly go in try to isolate people who are sick so they don’t spread it to others and quarantine all of their close contacts for two weeks,” said Zink.

Dunleavy said that his health team will begin working on planning for phase two of reopening Alaska’s businesses this week, and would not definitively say if the original target date for phase two of May 8 is still his plan.

“This is the beginning, this is a new beginning I hope,” said Dunleavy. “It’s not the scare factor it’s really the science factor and we’ve just got to get a couple weeks under our belt. We’re going to watch this every single day. We’re going to see if there’s an elevation, if we can keep the numbers down and within reason so that we don’t again impact our hospitals to a degree that they start heading towards the collapse, we can start to open things up.”

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