By SHANNON HAUGLAND
Sentinel Staff Writer
Sitka’s COVID case trend for residents continues on its downward path, hitting a rolling two-week average of 4.36 by Monday night.
Today is the last day the dashboard will use the 14-day rolling average. On Wednesday, September 1, the city Emergency Operations Center plans to align its alert levels with the state Section of Epidemiology.
Today the dashboard showed a two-week rolling average of 4.36, well into the “high” alert level. The current Community Metrics at cityofsitka.org lists all cases – both for residents and nonresidents – but uses only resident cases in the rolling average.
Sitka’s current average has not been down in the 4s range since the second week of July.
The new alert level will be set using all cases in Sitka for the last week, per 100,000 people. Four colors will be used to communicate risk levels: Red, high – 100 or more cases per 100,000 for the last seven days; Orange, “substantial” – 50 to 99 cases per 100,000 for the last seven days; Yellow, moderate – 10 to 49 cases per 100,000 for the last seven days; and Blue, low – less than 10 cases per 100,000 for the last seven days.
The city has been working with the state for the past three weeks to update its dashboard, and should be ready to go live with the new system by Wednesday, an Energy Operations Center representative said.
“I think all the cogs are in place – we’ll see what happens,” said Deputy Incident Commander Rob Janik, one of many working on the transition.
Under the new alert system, the numbers from the past week would still put Sitka well into the “high” risk range – with 492 cases per 100,000.
“Almost five times,” commented Janik.
The population figure used in the formula is 8,532.
Janik is expecting the change to occur Wednesday afternoon or evening, sometime after the regular Unified Command meeting at 2 p.m.
Vaccination levels today stayed roughly the same as Monday, with 6,072 partially vaccinated (82.22%) and 5,767 fully vaccinated (78.09%). The percentages are based on an age 12 and up population of 7,385.
