COVID Crisis In Anchorage Hospitals

 As some of you know, in addition to my regular posting here, I also do daily updates of Alaska COVID stats in a tab above which also has a chart of those number going back to March 15, 2020.  Those reports were filling up this regular blog post space, so I pushed them into the tab.  But every now and then I spill over from just reviewing the new numbers to adding additional context.  That happened today as we hit a new pandemic  high for new resident cases and for Test Positivity. And the number of COVID patients in our hospitals is only slightly below Monday's all time high.  So I'm copying today's Alaska COVID update here.

Wednesday, September 15, 2021 - We need a new way of classifying insane.  Doctors from Providence Medical Center testified at the Assembly that we are in a health crisis and that 30% of their patients are COVID positive and require much more intensive care, and people jeered them and Assembly Member Allard questioning the veracity of their testimony.

From Hrrrl Scouts Twitter coverage of Assembly

They Mayor of Anchorage is quoted in the Anchorage Daily News today as having said last week that "hospital capacity issues weren't caused byCOVID-19 patients but nurses leaving their jobs over vaccination requirements."  I'm going to believe the doctor's knowledge about the hospital crisis over the Mayor's undocumented claims.

Meanwhile we have two more deaths reported today (nine reported in the last three days.)  18 more hospitalizations.  201(34) COVID patients in the hospital- one less overall from yesterday, but one more on vents.  Is it an improvement when we gain a hospital bed because two people died?  

1064/1068 new resident cases.  That's another  2021 record.  It's a pandemic record period for one day.  (If you scroll through the chart above you'll see some higher numbers in that column - but those are for more than one day (usually Mondays when three days are reported.)  27 new non-resident cases. 

Over 11,700 tests, a fairly high one day number, yet the Test Positivity went up from 9.1 to 9.62.  A couple of notes here.  1)  Test Positivity is on a rolling seven day average.  So, even though yesterday it reported 9.1, today it reports (for 9/13/21) 9.57. Adding today's high number and dropping off the number eight days ago, raises all the numbers.  and 2) Test Positivity is the percent of people tested who test positive.  So if the Test Positivity is high, it means you should test more.  I said 'yet' above because 11,000 tests is higher then normal for one day, but the number still went up.  We should be testing more.  But the staffing to do all the contact tracing is probably not available for this level of infection.  

I'm not including the chart.  You can see that at the Alaska Daily COVID-19 Count 3 - May 2021 - ???  above.