COVID cases drop to three regionwide

By Peter Loewi
COVID-19 infections in Alaska appear to have hit a low plateau and risen slightly —15 percent by New York Times statistics— in the last two weeks, just as cases in this region drop into “Medium” community level.
There are currently three active cases in the region: One in Nome, one in Unalakleet and one in White Mountain.
As cases drop, and the current Omicron variant presents itself less harmful in vaccinated patients, efforts to track the virus have also started to drop. The Alaska Department of Health and Social Services switched to updating death totals once a week some time ago and has recently moved to updating their dashboard for cases only once a week, as well.
William Hanage, an epidemiologist and associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told CNN, “Things are not stable right now. Even if I don’t reckon we are going to see [another] large surge, weekly reporting means that if I am wrong, we would learn about it later and so be able to do less about it.”
The importance of measuring goes beyond simply recording trends in cases, hospitalizations and deaths, but appears in variant surveillance as well. South Africa, which has some of the most advanced genomic sequencing in the world, has identified a BA.4 and a BA.5 variant, both of which appear to have an increased ability to evade the immune system.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, FDA commissioner under former President Donald Trump, shared on a social media a link to a preprint study which opens with the line “Recent emergence of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron sublineages BA.2.12.1, BA.2.13, BA.4 and BA.5 all contain L452 mutations and show potential higher transmissibility over BA.2.” This means that there are new variants circulating which are even more transmissible and increasingly ignore the protection gotten from previous infection or vaccination.
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have yet to update their definition of “fully vaccinated,” they started using the phrase “up-to-date” instead.
According to Alaska Dept. of Health and Social Services data, 71.9 percent of residents in the state have at least one shot, and only 28.1 percent have received their first booster.

The week in numbers:
On Tuesday, April 26, Norton Sound Health Corporation identified three new COVID-19 cases in the region. There were two in Golovin and one in Unalakleet.
This made for 12 active cases in the region: six in Shishmaref, three in Nome, two in Golovin and one in Unalakleet.
On Wednesday, April 27, NSHC identified two new COVID-19 cases in the region. One was in Nome and one was in Unalakleet.
This dropped the number of active cases in the region to 10: Four in Shishmaref, three in Nome, two in Unalakleet and one in Golovin.
Between Thursday, April 28, and Sunday, May 1, NSHC identified two new COVID-19 cases in the region. There was one in Nome and one in Shaktoolik.
This further dropped active cases in the region to four: Two in Nome, one in Shishmaref, and one in Unalakleet.
On Monday, May 2, NSHC identified four new cases of COVID-19 in the region. There was one case detected in Nome, Shishmaref, Unalakleet and White Mountain.
The totals
Since the start of the pandemic, there were 81,444,332 officially reported cases of COVID-19 and 993,999 associated deaths in the USA.
Alaska had at least 244,914 cases of COVID-19, 3,757 hospitalizations, and 1,219 deaths. There are currently 32 people in the hospital due to the virus, an increase of more than 50 percent since last week.
The Nome, Bering Strait and Norton Sound region had at least 5,969 cases, 44 hospitalizations and six deaths due to COVID-19.