Superintendent praises staff for work during the pandemic

PALMER — Just ahead of winter break for students in the Mat-Su Borough School District, Superintendent Dr. Randy Trani presented the Mat-Su School Board with positive news regarding the mitigation of COVID-19 across the district.

“Our rate of increase is far lower than the Borough so the information keeps bearing out that we are acting as a mitigating factor for the spread of the virus in our borough and it’s for all of those reasons I’ve said before but I’ll say them again, it’s the staff in the schools and working with students teaching them the value of mask wearing and social distancing. It really does work,” said Trani.

Across Alaska, there have been 41,041 total cases of COVID-19 and another 604 were announced Wednesday, with 123 of those from the Mat-Su Valley. There have been 5,607 total cases in the Valley and 59 total hospitalizations. Of the 14 Intensive Care Unit beds available at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, only one remains available. There are 19 covid positive patients at MSRMC accounting for 26 percent of all hospitalized patients. The Mat-Su Valley has a seven-day positivity rate of 9.87 percent and 75,368 COVID-19 tests have been conducted on Valley residents. Dr. Trani began his report on COVID-19 in the school district with quotes from Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“Close the bars and open the schools,” wrote Fauci.

Trani presented the numbers of positive cases in the Borough alongside the cases tracked from the school district side, not all of which were inside school buildings. There have been 552 total COVID-19 cases associated with MSBSD, and 60 percent of those cases have been infectious in schools. Juxtaposing a rise in cases in the Valley in recent weeks, the school district averaged only 67 cases for the week of Nov. 29 through Dec. 5 and went down to 47 cases for the week of Dec. 6 through Dec. 12. There have been 112 positive cases among the school community over the last 14 days.

“There’s been some concern about the reliability of self reporting like I said we have 552 cases, every single one of those cases except one was self reported to us. There was only one case where the person did not report it to us and we had to learn about it from DHSS,” said Trani. “The self reporting by that metric is 99.8 percent effective. We get better information from self reporting than we would relying on community health because their information lags so dramatically.”

Of the 552 total cases associated with the school district, 62.8 percent of the 331 people who were infectious with COVID-19 while present in school buildings were students and the other 37.2 percent were staff members. Along those same lines, 2,400 students have been identified as close contacts where just 350 staff members have been identified as close contacts with positive cases.