Anchorage officials urged the public to continue taking precautions to limit the spread of COVID-19 as cases reported in the city continued to increase Friday.
“We’re telling the public right now that cases are going up, that caution lights should be popping up in your mind,” Natasha Pineda, director of the Anchorage Health Department, said in a community briefing Friday.
In the city, four people who didn’t have symptoms and were screened for the illness as part of a hospital admission tested positive. There were seven people who had symptoms and were tested, Pineda said.
“All of these indicate to us at the health department that we do have presence of community spread,” she said.
Some of the Anchorage cases were related to gatherings outside the city over Memorial Day weekend, Pineda said.
Statewide, there are 134 active cases of the illness, including 11 new cases announced Friday that are concentrated in Southcentral Alaska.
Four of the new cases involved Anchorage residents and two were in Eagle River. There were also two cases listed among residents of other smaller communities on the Kenai Peninsula, as well as one in Anchor Point, one in Homer and one in Nikiski.
One of the new Southcentral cases involves someone who traveled from Anchorage to Kotzebue and tested positive after arriving there Monday, a Maniilaq Association spokeswoman said. They were tested at the airport, Maniilaq spokeswoman Kelli Shroyer said, and their test result came in Thursday from Alaska Native Medical Center. They were taken to a respiratory clinic for quarantine and monitoring of symptoms, and the extent of their interaction with others was under investigation, Maniilaq said.
At Anchorage’s Providence Transitional Care Center, a total of 14 residents and 15 caregivers have tested positive for COVID-19, according to Katie Marquette, community relations manager at Providence. Two of the residents are hospitalized while some aren’t showing symptoms. Providence completed initial testing and will begin a second round of testing on Friday, Marquette wrote in an email.
Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz said during Friday’s briefing that he would release municipality-specific travel orders later in the day and that they would be “very much consistent with where the state is.”
Berkowitz said that the municipality was in an “ongoing dialogue with the state” over some remaining questions about the new travel order.
The city’s order would clarify aspects of the state’s plan to offer more certainty for travelers and more protection for Anchorage, he said.
“One of the things that we’re most concerned about is the introduction of the coronavirus from outside sources,” Berkowitz said.
Berkowitz urged travelers coming into the city to exercise the same precautions they would while at home. He also noted that he’d heard reports of issues with cargo crews in Anchorage and had alerted airlines about it.
“It has come to my attention that some of the restaurants, particularly in downtown, have had uncomfortable experiences with cargo crew engaging in, let’s just say, too much revelry and with too many people,” Berkowitz said.
As the Municipality of Anchorage began a phased reopening, they released several metrics to evaluate how Anchorage was dealing with the virus. The metrics can go from green to yellow to red.
On Friday, Pineda said two of the indicators — health care capacity and epidemiology — were moved to yellow, “indicating caution to our community and policymakers."
The measurements changed due to “growing evidence” of asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers in Anchorage, new positive cases from out-of-state workers and continued disruptions in the supply chain of personal protective gear and testing supplies.
The city issued a health advisory Friday “to address the renewed spread of COVID-19 seen throughout our municipality and encourage the public to help slow the spread," Pineda said.
Individuals are the ones who can spread the illness from person to person, Pineda said, and it falls on individuals to keep from spreading it further.
“I see a lot of people not wearing face masks or taking precautions," Pineda said. “And we’re asking for people to really reflect on their own behavior and help.”
Reporter Zaz Hollander contributed.
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