Juneau officials reported 63 more cases of COVID-19 over the weekend. It’s part of a grim trendline over the last two weeks.
“It’s our highest caseload to date,” Juneau Deputy City Manager Robert Barr said at a briefing for the Juneau Assembly on Monday night. “It’s double — about double the caseload that we were experiencing in November of last year.”
November was the peak of the last wave. For now, Barr says Bartlett Regional Hospital is OK.
“The hospital systems outside of Juneau are struggling significantly more than our hospital is right now. I am certainly concerned about the fact that we are continuing to see record cases because a record case day — we don’t know how that’s going to impact the hospital until about two weeks later,” he said.
The strain is affecting medical evacuations, too.
“We continue to struggle quite a bit with medevac capacity, to the point of commonly not being able to medevac people who need to be medevaced outside of the community,” Barr said.
With cases up, Barr says the state’s contact tracers with the Division of Public Health are overwhelmed. They’re now asking people who test positive to reach out to their close contacts themselves and ask them to quarantine. Close contacts are defined as people who were within 6 feet for 15 minutes or more in the 48 hours before symptoms began.
The struggle to keep up with contact tracing also means that on Monday, Public Health stopped providing the data that went into cumulative, recovered and active case counts in individual communities.
Barr said demand for the city’s free, drive-through tests is up, with appointments filling up most days by early afternoon. He’s reassigning city staff to help with testing and with taking calls on the city’s COVID hotline, 907-586-6000.
Despite the surge, he said turnaround time for test results should continue to be about 18 hours.
Barr did have some good news: Juneau has a high community vaccination rate. He said state data shows vaccination is very effective at preventing hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19. And with the Food and Drug Administration’s full approval of the Pfizer vaccine on Monday, there’s one more assurance that it’s safe.
The city’s emergency operation center’s latest weekly report included more details about how cases spread in the last week:
- There are 15 cases tied to one of the mines.
- A cluster of cases was tied to a social gathering.
- Several family groups who traveled all came back to town positive.
- A handful of employees from different small cruise ships are isolating aboard their ships.
- There were nine cases among people experiencing homelessness or in shelters.
- Many cases are spreading within households.
Editor’s note: The original headline of this story used the phrase “contract tracers” instead of “contact tracers.” This has been corrected. The headline has been updated to clarify the surge in Juneau cases is not the only factor driving statewide issues with contact tracing.
