By SHANNON HAUGLAND
Sentinel Staff Writer
The final word on a recreational softball tournament, education and publicity materials on COVID, and coordinating information on risk levels in the community were among the issues brought up at Wednesday’s Unified Command meeting.
City Administrator John Leach, the incident commander for the local response to the pandemic, reported on a statewide teleconference that included a discussion on the state’s “leaning local” approach. In the “leaning local” strategy, the state makes recommendations but leaves decisions to the communities on such issues as opening schools.
“All communities are doing this differently and (the state) is allowing all the communities to do it differently,” he said. “They’re making recommendations.”
But Leach said it’s important to coordinate pandemic-related information in town so it’s clear to the public.
“We’re still refining what we want the reports to look like ... but the point is, we want one central source of information, so schools have something to make a decision on, and we as an Emergency Operations Center have something to drive mitigation efforts in town,” he said.
Planning Section Chief Rob Janik has been working a spreadsheet to track positive COVID test results, and Leach talked about the systems other communities are using to guide decisions in such areas as the schools, community, businesses and health care systems.
Leach said the idea is that the information will be available to the public to see the number of positive cases, active cases, recovered cases, where the tests were taken, whether the positive tests were from visitors or residents, for example.
“We can send the community to a central point of information, and right when you open it up ... it’s going to say we are in community risk level one, two, three, or low, medium or high – whatever we want to call it,” Leach said. “My goal here is, use the numbers and mitigation levels that we have right now, try to get those into some central website, something viewable by everybody.”
School District Superintendent John Holst commented that it will be useful for the updates and risk levels to be readily available, particularly for parents.
“Otherwise we’re going to get a call every 20 minutes,” he said. “We just want information that’s clear enough that they can make decisions on their own.”
Once information is out about the risk levels, Leach said, the goal will be to work with public and private entities to get the word out to the public.
Leach also talked about a final appeal of an out-of-town group to hold a softball tournament in Sitka. Leach denied an earlier request (see earlier Sentinel story Monday) with eight reasons for the denial. The group tried a final appeal to the mayor, and was turned down, Leach said.
“I know we want people to get outside and enjoy the outdoors but it was a risk that was too close to our schools reopening and could have potential impacts ...” Leach said.
Later in the meeting, Leach talked about the 8,000 free cloth face coverings, decorated with a Big Dipper design, that the city has received from the state. The masks will be available, one per person, at the fire hall from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday. Residents can pick up masks for their household, and a drive-through option is available. The school district has another 2,000 masks for its purposes.
In his report to the group, Dr. Elliot Bruhl, SEARHC vice president and chief medical officer, said the consortium is taking on a “wide variety of challenges” related to COVID-19 issues.
“We seem to be dealing with those in a very effective way,” he said. “I think people’s familiarity with the issues continues to improve.”
Bruhl said SEARHC is providing support for both the Sitka School District and Mt. Edgecumbe High Schools on mitigation plans, including a testing program for Mt. Edgecumbe students when they arrive for the school year, and monthly after that on a staggered schedule.
“We have specific plans for quarantine and isolation of those students in terms of, if we start to have any cases there, and/or if any of them arrive with cases,” Bruhl said. “The students, as I understand it, are not going to be having the usual amount of circulation in the community.”
Bruhl told the group about some of the changes in patient care, and updated the group on testing.
“We have increasing supplies of test kits and the average turnaround time for send-out kits currently is at 70 hours,” he said. “It’s been at that level now for the last couple of weeks and it continues to fall slowly. We are excited about the fact we can see clearly on the horizon that some of the laboratory machines that we’ve ordered months ago are starting to move toward us. And hopefully by September we will have some additional laboratory machines that will allow us to pull the majority of our testing in house, into our own laboratory, which will further drop the turnaround times of our tests.”
Asymptomatic testing is continuing at the drive up testing site at Mountainside Family Healthcare, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekends.
SEARHC communications and marketing director Maegan Bosak said earlier this week that test turnaround time is about seven days for the asymptomatic testing. She said 203 tests were administered last weekend, about the average for weekends since the testing started July 11.
There were only two positive results from the some 1,200 tests administered at the drive-up site over six weekends.
The program “allows us to respond to cases of confirmed COVID, and allows us to gauge the risk levels and isolate community transmission,” Bosak told the Sentinel earlier this week.
The program is available now in all SEARHC service communities, Bruhl told the Unified Command.
Bruhl said SEARHC medical staff is coming up with a template for exclusions from the mask requirement at SEARHC facilities, including children under two, those with certain disabilities, and those with severe lung disease.
In one of the liaison reports, Holst thanked SEARHC for helping with the testing of 170 staff members before the start of school. Staff members will be tested weekly on a staggered schedule.
“We’re still planning on opening on the 27th, 28th and we’re hopeful we will regain where we’ve been,” he said, noting the recent increase in local cases.
The school district is using a color code to designate COVID risk, based on the rolling average of local cases.
“I’ve tried to emphasize that the number 12, which is our movement in the red, is not a hard line, that it’s a guideline, and there could be all kinds of circumstances under which we would not consider 12 or 13 or 14 a disaster,” he said. “We’re going to be careful and cautious about how this decision is made. ... I am going to rely on people in this room, along with Dr. Bruhl from SEARHC, (public health nurse) Denise (Ewing), with our own administrative team.”
In her update to the group, Ewing provided an update on numbers of cases, broken down by Sitka, Southeast and statewide. Statistics are available on this page and on the state websites.
In other reports from the Incident Command team, finance section chief Jay Sweeney updated the group on some of the challenges of getting Sitka’s COVID-related expenses covered.
Library Director Jessica Ieremia, one of the public information officers for the group, said she and city clerk Sara Peterson have been sending out Unified Command press releases on case updates, and working on “alert level” graphics for the community.
