KFSK - Petersburg

With each new positive COVID-19 case, questions follow. How sick is the person? Do they have any underlying health conditions? How did they get it?

Legally, all of that is private. But as cases increase in Alaska, public officials, journalists and health care providers must negotiate the tensions between privacy law and the public’s need for information critical to understanding the pandemic.

Federal law protects personal health information, and that hasn’t changed during the coronavirus pandemic. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, outlines who can have access to protected health information, when it can be disclosed and for what purposes.

“It’s this idea of protecting the privacy and security of certain patient health information, during their most vulnerable moments,” said Joy Chavez Mapaye, a journalism professor at University of Alaska Anchorage and a health communications researcher.

HIPAA was enacted in 1996, at a time when health care records systems were moving to digital and the health care industry was booming. Congress legislated broad privacy and security rules for health entities like hospitals, pharmacies and insurance companies. That means medical records, patient history or any personal information are all private. Mapaye says “that includes social security — any information that might be tied back to the patient that’s identifiable.”

For COVID-19, HIPAA requires that hospitals and public health departments must be careful to protect the identity of each individual with a positive diagnosis. Members of small communities may want to know who has tested positive and how they’re doing, but health officials legally can’t release that.

Instead, they release aggregate data by region.

“In smaller communities, anything with a count less than six is considered identifiable data,” said Coleman Cutchins, a pharmacist with the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services recently on a press call. “If you look at some of the data hubs, that’s why certain regions are combined, there might be an asterisk. Basically it’s just to prevent people in those communities from being identified with their personal data.”

Petersburg Medical Center CEO Phil Hofstetter said they’ve had to withstand intense public pressure to release individual information when a new COVID-19 case was identified.

“I was glad there was HIPAA. I can’t imagine releasing that information,” said Hofstetter. “And with so many unknowns and fear, that that person becomes ostracized. And that’s a real thing.”

Hofstetter explained the process: when a new COVID positive case is diagnosed in the community, the doctor first notifies the patient. Then they talk through care and quarantining away from others for 14 days. If symptoms become severe, the patient may be hospitalized. The medical center then reports the new case to the state health department and the Petersburg Borough, but they do not release any details to the public.

“Certainly not the level of illness,” he said. “Maybe if they’re asymptomatic or symptomatic, that’s about the extent of it.”

Then state contact tracers get to work. They interview the patient, figure out possible exposures and talk about safe quarantining to reduce any further spread of the coronavirus. Privacy rules also apply, so when they communicate with close contacts, they can’t disclose who the positive case is — only that the contacts were potentially exposed.

But personal accounts of what it’s like to have COVID-19, shared on social media or by news outlets, have been crucial to public understanding of the pandemic. Personal stories capture complexity, feeling, and detail that data cannot. Patients in hospitals, which are governed by HIPAA, can still choose to share their stories. In those settings, journalists must get authorization from patients each time before reporting personal information.

Of course, patients are free to speak publicly with anyone at any time.

“If individuals are okay with their information being shared, then that’s fine,” Alaska Chief Medical Officer Anne Zink said recently on a press call. “And so we also see that in the media and other places, where people share their status or on Facebook or with their employer. Individuals are always welcome to share their information. We just can’t share their information without their permission.”

But access for journalists can be challenging, says Professor Joy Chavez Mapaye.

“Some people are saying that really people don’t understand the devastation that this is causing, because they don’t get to see it firsthand,” she said.

Some of these privacy rules might hinder in disseminating of important information, she says.

“That the public does need to know, and yes this does have devastating consequences,” she said.

Mapaye says privacy considerations have prevailed in the pandemic media coverage, so journalists have interviewed health care workers and used creative visuals to report on what’s happening inside hospitals.

“When you think about it, it’s quite a delicate balance,” she said. “On the one hand, you have providers and the need to protect privacy of patients during their most vulnerable moments. And then on the other hand, the public doesn’t really get to see the extent and toll of this pandemic. And that’s difficult.”

At a time when monuments of colonizers and enslavers are being debated and removed across the country, a mural is going up this July 4th in the birth place and on the birthday of a Native civil rights leader. The new mural in the Southeast Alaska community of Petersburg celebrates Elizabeth Peratrovich, her legacy as a Native Tlingit woman, and voice for equal rights.

Elizabeth Peratrovich was born on July 4, 1911, in Petersburg to a Tlingit family. At that time, being Native meant facing segregation and discrimination. Now, one 109 years later – to the day – Peratrovich will be memorialized with a new mural on the state courthouse building to honor her life and civil rights legacy.

“Elizabeth Peratrovich had a real gift with language and articulating the situation,” says Malena Marvin, who serves on the Petersburg Arts Council, which helped organize the funding for the mural. “And using her words to help make change at a really pivotal time in Alaska’s history.”

In 1945, as a 34-year-old mother of three, Peratrovich was an advocate for Native rights, and organized with the Alaska Native Sisterhood in Juneau. She testified before the Alaska Territorial Legislature – talking about her life, her friends, her children, and being barred from buying a home in Juneau – and advocating for an end to discrimination and equal rights for Native people.

Alaska Native people were barred from workplaces, buying land and living in certain neighborhoods. Signs in some storefronts read “No Dogs, No Natives.”

“Here’s the woman that, you know, 20 years before Martin Luther King did what he did, we have a woman that you know, her testimony was instrumental to the first anti-discrimination law that was passed in the United States of America,” said award-winning Haida artist Janine Gibbons, who painted the new mural. “And this woman was from Petersburg, Alaska.”

Many people say her speech inspired the passing of the anti-discrimination bill. Then-Alaska Governor Ernest Gruening signed the landmark legislation on February 16, 1945 – now celebrated as Elizabeth Peratrovich Day. The law effectively banned discrimination based on race.

The U.S. Treasury announced in fall of 2019, that its 2020 Native American $1 dollar coin would feature Peratrovich and honor the 75th anniversary of her famous testimony. People took notice.

Organizers came together in Petersburg to commission a mural in her honor and raised about $7,000 from donations around the state.

“In the painting she kind of, (it’s) like a classic Native Southeast look. We all have very prominent eyebrows,” Gibbons said with a laugh. “You can say a lot with just your eyebrows. It’s kind of Mona Lisa-like. She kind of has one eyebrow a little bit arched – like she’s asking a question. And then the other eyebrow is a bit softer so kind of like she’s listening and questioning at the same time. That was the look I wanted to have.”

In a nod to Petersburg cultural history, Gibbons merges both Native and Scandinavian aesthetics into the background.

In the process of painting the mural, Gibbons had to dive into the historical record, but also says she was immersed in the emotional experience and the generational trauma of Native communities.

“It’s really intense. Most people are not fully aware of what happened to people,” she said.

Native people faced discrimination in all sectors of society – even children.

Schools – especially boarding schools – removed Native children from their family, homes and heritage. “You had to give up all parts of who you were as a Native person,” Gibbons said. “You had to give everything up to go to a public school, right. It was segregated. And people really had to disguise themselves, to fit in.”

The system left many Native children without families. At a young age, Peratrovich herself suffered that fate. She was adopted by a white family and grew up in Ketchikan, but maintained a connection to her Tlingit heritage.

Gibbons relates to Peratrovich’s story deeply, as she and many of her friends growing up also came from generations of orphaned people.

“One of my best girlfriends, her grandmother and all of her siblings were born out at Blind Slough,” says Gibbons. “There was nine of them, and each one of those kids was taken legally, from their parents, and shipped to nine different parts of the country.”

The trauma of those experiences were rarely talked about, yet continue to reverberate through families and communities.

“So they were sent to boarding schools,” she explains. “They didn’t want shared knowledge. They took away your language, cut off your hair, they did the worst possible things you could imagine. And you know, people come back, and it’s like well, why didn’t my grandma teach me this or do that, and it’s like well they were tortured, you know, a lot of them. So it’s a big weight to carry.”

The vice president of the Petersburg Indian Association, Brenda Norheim was a lead organizer on the mural project. For Norheim, seeing Peratrovich honored on the courthouse is an important representation for Native cultural history.

“I can’t even put it into words,” Norheim said. “Thinking of what my grandparents went through, and my mom. It’s like when we put the totem poles up downtown years ago, it was a powerful, emotional moment that I never anticipated – just because of the heartache that people in our past had to go through. The suffering.”

Arts Council member Malena Marvin says organizers hope the mural will inspire dialogue and reflection on the lessons from the past, which are [particularly significant now, as the U.S. grapples with the history of racism and colonization, and many Confederate monuments are coming down.

“We’re at this time where we’re having a big national conversation about what we put in public, how we remember our history,” said Marvin. “And there are so many ways to remember our history. We just wanted to see the special gifts that Elizabeth Peratrovich brought to the conversation on race relations in Alaska.”

Organizers will continue to raise funds to add a carved Tlingit artisan frame around the mural and an educational plaque and create a website with more information and media on Peratrovich and her contemporaries.

Due to coronavirus concerns, the large celebration for the mural unveiling had to be scaled down. A short program will be held at the courthouse in Petersburg on Saturday, July 4. People are invited to come in person with masks and socially distanced, or watch on a livestream on Petersburg Arts Council Facebook page.

In the last week of April, a captain and senior flight instructor finished off a nearly 30-year career with Alaska Airlines the same way he started it — flying the “milk run” through Southeast Alaska.

John “Hal” Andersen, 60, says that challenging flight is what hooked him on the airline.

Alaska Airlines has several routes nicknamed the “milk run,” but they all mean the same thing: short-hop flights between several communities. Those routes bring in groceries, cargo and passengers to the Alaska Panhandle and send out the region’s bountiful seafood catch.

The route was also the first training flight Andersen did with the airline back in 1992.

“Of course the real hook the first time is the challenge of flying into these airports, with the weather and the terrain and the short runway,” Andersen said. “It was very rewarding and challenging flying.”

Andersen had the chops for this kind of challenge. He grew up in Albuquerque and earned his private pilot’s license at 15. He joined the Air Force, where he flew a big tactical airlift plane called the C-130 Hercules, which required landing short on remote runways.

In 1992, he left the Air Force for a job with Alaska Airlines, starting as a flight engineer on Boeing 727s. He soon upgraded to the copilot’s seat and was working on 737s by the mid-90s. He also was an engineer for the airline and helped improve navigational support for the flights.

“I was part of a group of people in the mid-1990s that brought into Alaska Airlines, and then eventually what became the global standard for the advanced navigation platforms that we use to get into airports like Petersburg, that kind of fundamentally changed our ability to operate with vastly increased safety and efficiency,” he said.

Andersen was promoted to captain with the airline in 2000 and then instructor in 2003. In that job he was several layers removed from the line pilots who fly daily airlines routes. He was responsible for hiring and training some of the airline’s top-level instructors.

During his career, Andersen estimates he’s probably been on tens of thousands of flights. His experience, and that of countless commercial and local pilots before him, is compiled in manuals for flying the milk run.

“For instance, we know that if you’re going into Petersburg you don’t want to come down the (Wrangell) Narrows with a strong — you know, on the approach to landing to the east, because the turbulence is really bad down there,” he explained. “We have wind limitations in Wrangell and very extensive wind limitations in Juneau, and even wind limitations in Petersburg based on the direction and velocity of the winds because of that very local microclimatology.”

The milk run route is well known for its short, bumpy flights, hard landings and notoriously bad weather of the Southeast rainforest. But it was also Andersen’s choice for his last flights.

“A lot of folks, their final flight they’ll take the family to Maui and come back, one leg, into Maui or something like that,” he said adding, “And I always want to do the milk run. And so I had the great privilege on Monday and Tuesday, did five legs up to Anchorage and then Tuesday five legs back down to Seattle. And it was just the best day.

“It was pretty windy across Southeast, really windy in Ketchikan. It was a good workout,” Andersen said. “It was just fantastic. Flying our visual routes between Petersburg and Wrangell down. It’s just so beautiful, and it was just such a wonderful capstone to my career.”

Andersen is excited to spend more time with his wife, a retired flight attendant, and his family. That’s something a flight instructor and pilot misses out on during a long career.

But he also looks back fondly on the life it gave his family.

“There’s an opportunity to know a different world and see the world and travel,” he said. “My young daughter, she still tells as an adult, and it’s fun to watch her when I’m with her. She’s with her boyfriend and friends, and she’ll start talking about being a little girl and flying with Daddy on the milk run, because in the summer she would fly the milk run with me and stay on the layover in Anchorage and come back. We’d get off in every station. I’d show her the big bear or wolf or whatever’s in the lobby, and take her out on the ramp and say, ‘OK, here’s Wrangell, here’s Petersburg, here’s Ketchikan,’ and it’s a great joy when your adult children tell their friend about their childhoods and that’s a theme of it.”

Flying isn’t all in the past for Andersen. He can still give tips to his grandson, who is working to be a pilot.

And he plans to return to Alaska. Officially, Andersen’s last day on the job was flying from Seattle to Phoenix on April 29. From there, he headed to his home in Surprise, Arizona.

The first case of COVID-19 in Petersburg was identified on Sunday.

The Petersburg Medical Center informed the Petersburg Borough of a positive test result. The Petersburg Emergency Operations Center sent out Code Red text messages and emails Sunday evening to residents who are signed up for the emergency notifications.

According to the statement, the infected person is in quarantine and State of Alaska public health officials are monitoring their condition. The individual had traveled to the Lower 48, returned to Petersburg in mid-March, and quarantined at home. The person noticed mild symptoms and was tested in late March. The individual is said to be following isolation guidelines and is improving.

The Alaska Division of Public Health is investigating other people the patient might have been in contact with and will notify them if needed. Anyone who was in direct contact with the person will be in self-quarantine for at least 14 days.

Another Petersburg resident, Pete Erickson, was infected with COVID-19 while he was in Washington State getting medical treatment. Erickson eventually died, March 16 in Washington.

Petersburg’s Incident Commander, Karl Hagerman, urged the community to remain calm. He wrote in the community message that the medical center has been prepared for a positive case and was ready. He urged the community to continue with quote, “the positive and healthy behaviors that we have all been working on.”

Alaska is under a shelter-in-place mandate meaning that people are only supposed to leave their homes for essential needs. When away from home, people are asked to practice social distancing, staying six feet away from others.

The state ferry Matanuska is at a Ketchikan shipyard this week for repairs.

The 57-year-old ship broke down in January leaving Petersburg, Wrangell and other Southeast Alaska communities without ferry service. A reduction gear on the boat failed, leaving it with just one working engine. The Matanuska sailed Friday, March 6, from the ferry terminal in Auke Bay in Juneau on one engine, along with a tug escort, according to ferry system officials.

Marine highway spokesperson Sam Dapcevich said the ferry arrived at the Vigor shipyard in Ketchikan around 9 a.m. Sunday, March 8.

“So all the parties involved are still sorting the issue out,” Dapcevich said. “The ferry system is working with Vigor Maritime to return the Matanuska to service as soon as we can.”

A spokesperson for the company says the ferry is awaiting dry docking at the shipyard and the needed parts have been received.Jill Mackie is senior vice president of public affairs for Vigor. She writes in an email that the company has not fully determined if the repair work, replacement of an oil cooler for the reduction gear, is covered under warranty. The state believes the warranty does cover the replacement.

Repairs could be completed in May and the ship is on the schedule to return to service on June 2. Just last fall the ship had finished up a two-year overhaul that the state now says cost 47 million dollars. Mainline service to Petersburg and Wrangell is not expected until the start of sailings by a different ship, the Columbia, on April 14.

 

The Alaska Marine Highway System announced Wednesday it’s chartering a private company to provide interim passenger service between several Southeast Alaska communities.

The state has hired Allen Marine Tours to run daytrips between Juneau, Kake, Angoon and Tenakee Springs. Those runs will be Saturday, Feb. 29 and Tuesday, March 3.

A second route between Sitka and Juneau was included in the $22,150 contract signed this week. Those dates have not been announced.

Regional ferry service has been suspended since the ferry Matanuska broke down in January. State officials say it will likely need to be dry-docked in Ketchikan’s shipyard. It remains tied up in Juneau’s Auke Bay.

Fares will be the same as on a state ferry: $80 one-way between Juneau and Kake and $56 between Juneau and Tenakee Springs. Tickets are available through the marine highway’s reservation system.

The ferry Tazlina is scheduled to resume service next week to Angoon, Hoonah, Juneau, Haines and Skagway. Service to Wrangell and Petersburg is not expected to resume until mid-April, when the ferry Columbia returns to service.

The ferry system also has yet to release a final schedule for this spring or summer, but it says that schedule will be available by the end of this month.