Difficult Times
Dear Editor: I sent in my one-year subscription for Sitka Sentinel. I appreciate your gifts to the community during this critical time!
I appreciate how the City of Sitka, SEARHC, Sitka Fire Department, Sitka School District and all the folks in the “Sitka COVID Unified Command” are working together to keep everyone in this community safe.
I appreciate especially all the news on COVID daily and your publishing each school COVID plan in the SSD. Every SSD administrator, principal, teacher, teacher aids, and staff are applying every technique they can think of to prevent the virus from spreading. Each school has a great plan in place and is committed to changing the plan as need arises. This is what teachers do. They have a plan when they start the day and then work with improving it as they go along to create the outcomes they were looking for. I have so much respect for each and every teacher.
These are very difficult times. Every one of them is a star in my book! Because of “viral loading” I worry about them the most. When it come down to it, good hygiene and wearing a mask is the only thing that is in our control now. While our availability for testing is improving (gunalcheesh, SEARHC) the tests are still not perfect and we have to keep that in mind. We wear masks to safeguard against that testing uncertainty and the uncontrolled movement in the community of people who are choosing not to protect others by masking up. Gunalcheesh to the folks who scored the beautiful Alaska flag masks and made them available to everyone in Sitka!! They are comfortable and it reinforces how we are pulling together as a community and as a state to get through this.
My 7-year-old granddaughter, Walela, at the beginning of this pandemic, drew a colorful rainbow and wrote the words, “Good Luck is in Your Future!” It is hard to believe, but there is “good luck” ahead. Time is on our side, if we can hold the line on infections. Time to elect a government that will improve testing, the availability of tests, support healthcare efforts on surviving, healing long term illnesses that we face, and education. In the meantime aren’t we glad that we have this Sitka “bubble” of community members who work together to protect each other? Gunalcheesh, Sitka!
Patricia Dick, Sitka
