Alaska saw its largest single day jump in new cases of COVID-19 on Saturday.
State health officials are reporting that 231 people tested positive for the virus. Among them are 186 residents and 45 nonresidents.
Of those, 158 were in residents of Anchorage, where a seafood processing plant reported 56 cases on Friday.
Another nine residents of Fairbanks tested positive for the virus. There are also a handful of cases on the Kenai Peninsula, in the Valdez-Cordova Census Area, from the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. A resident of the Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area and another from Unalaska also tested positive.
In Southeast Alaska, there are new cases among residents of Ketchikan, Sitka, Wrangell, Juneau, the Prince of Wales-Hyder Census Area and the Yakutat/Hoonah/Angoon area
Among non-residents, 34 were in Seward, three in the Fairbanks North Star Borough and one in Ketchikan. There is no information listed for seven of the new cases. Most of the new non-resident cases are people who work in the seafood industry.
There are also dozens of new cases among seafood workers in Juneau, though those numbers have not yet been reported by the state.
Another five people with COVID-19 are now in the hospital, 35 people across the state are currently in the hospital with the virus: four of them are on ventilators. Another eight people are in the hospital with COVID-19-like symptoms awaiting test results. That number has been steadily increasing over the last week, and some models show it could increase substantially in the coming weeks. Four Alaskans with COVID-19 are now on ventilators, up two from yesterday’s report. Still, the number of available hospital beds, ventilators, and ICU beds remains in the ‘green’ level, the state reports.
Alaksa Public Media’s Lex Treinen contributed to this report. This story has been updated.
