"United Catcher Boats"

As salmon runs falter and western Alaska villagers suffer, some worry that measures will be too incremental and slow to provide meaningful help.

Early in the task force’s process, frustrations are already simmering about who’s in the loop.

Federal fisheries data shows trawlers in the North Pacific took about a tenth of the king salmon caught by Alaska’s commercial salmon fleet last year.

Fishermen and industry leaders are anxious that they might not have places to offload their catch or that their plants might be the next to close down.

Dr. Anne Zink says the state’s vaccine allocation committee is looking at three principals — logistics, science and equity — to get the vaccine out quickly, effectively and fairly.

The pollock boats were in the U.S. exclusive economic zone, which reserves fishing rights for American boats but doesn’t block international vessels from entering.

If companies can put appropriate quarantine procedures in place before boarding, fishing crews stand a good chance of remaining uninfected with COVID-19, largely because of vessels’ isolation at sea.

Even if the shutdown persists, the federal government will still open the Bering Sea fisheries as scheduled. But the government requires inspections of things like scales and monitoring equipment. Those inspections won’t happen until the government reopens.