Nat Herz, Alaska Public Media

As America’s meat producers contend with thousands of COVID-19 cases among processing workers, seafood companies have drafted rigorous plans to ward off similar spread of the disease as their summer season looms in Alaska.

But with that season still gearing up, the industry has already been shaken by its first major outbreak, aboard a huge vessel with an onboard fish processing factory. Last week, Seattle-based American Seafoods confirmed that 92 crew from its American Dynasty ship had tested positive for COVID-19 — nearly three-fourths of 124 people onboard.

Fishing executives had been working long hours to prevent just that type of disaster, and the news hit them hard.

“It was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe this.’ We had done so much — each company had worked so hard to try to avoid this happening,” said Brent Paine, executive director of United Catcher Boats, a trade group whose members fish for pollock and cod off Alaska and another whitefish called hake off Washington and Oregon. “None of us have ever worked so hard in our lives than we have in the last two months, without a doubt.”

The American Dynasty, which is 30 feet shorter than a football field, came into port in Washington after fishing for hake — a spring season that functions as a kind of tune-up before vessels steam to Alaska for the summer pollock fishery. Once at shore, a crew member reported feeling sick to the vessel’s medic, then tested positive for COVID-19, American Seafoods said in a prepared statement.

A day later, the company reported another 85 cases, plus six more Thursday. Then, late Thursday evening, county health officials elsewhere in Washington reported that 25 crew members on two other American Seafoods vessels had also tested positive for COVID-19.

All three vessels are still scheduled to fish for Alaska pollock later this summer, though “schedules aren’t set at this time,” Suzanne Lagoni, an American Seafoods spokeswoman, wrote in an email message. Dozens of other Seattle-based boats are also expected to arrive in the Aleutian Islands this month to participate in the summer pollock fishery.

Seafood industry officials and health-care providers note that Alaska has imposed stricter quarantines for fisherman than the measures used by American Seafoods before the its crews fell ill. But they also acknowledged that the outbreak shows just how badly things can go wrong in a fishing vessel’s cramped quarters — which poses a bigger risk for the remote Alaska communities near factory trawlers’ fishing grounds, given the lack of health-care infrastructure there.

The clinic on the Aleutian Island of Unalaska, home to the state’s largest fishing port, has just three ventilators.

“That poses one of our worst-case scenarios — that high volume at one time,” said Melanee Tiura, chief executive of the nonprofit that runs the clinic. “That could very quickly exhaust all resources in rural Alaska — one boat coming in with, potentially, 124 infected individuals.”

During the summer pollock season, factory trawlers and onshore plants process the harvest from the Bering Sea into surimi, the fake crab sometimes found in sushi; they also supply filets for products like McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches. The fishery is big business, with an annual harvest that can be valued at more than $1 billion after processing.

American Seafoods is the biggest player, with 17 percent of last year’s total catch, according to a report filed with federal regulators in April. It owns six vessels that catch and process fish onboard, five of which carry more than 100 crew, and the company’s primary investor is a New York-based private equity firm called Bregal Partners.

After American Seafoods first announced its positive tests, industry observers and medical experts quickly identified the company’s quarantine procedure as a possible weakness that could have allowed COVID-19 to slip onto its trawlers.

Other seafood companies have required employees to quarantine for 14 days before they’re tested and cleared them for work, since, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the incubation period for the disease can run that long.

But though American Seafoods tested workers before they were allowed to board vessels for the hake fishery, its minimum quarantine in advance was just five days.

Just as it can take 14 days for infected people to show COVID-19 symptoms, it can also take that long for the virus to be detectable in a test, said Dr. Geoffrey Gottlieb, an infectious disease physician and virology researcher at the University of Washington Medical Center. He described a five-day quarantine as “cutting corners.”

“From a public health, medical, virology, testing rationale, it doesn’t make sense,” Gottlieb said. “You might get away with it some of the time. But if enough boats or if enough industries are doing this kind of thing, it’s certainly likely that at least at some point, that strategy is not going to work.”

Asked why American Seafoods chose the five-day quarantine period instead of two weeks, Lagoni, the spokeswoman, wrote that the company “closely monitored” information from the CDC and worked with state and local health departments “to establish initial screening and testing protocols.” Last week, she added, American Seafoods extended its quarantine to 14 days.

The 14-day quarantine period is actually a requirement for fishing companies operating in Alaska, and Lagoni said the company will be following all of the state’s mandates for fishing.

The Alaska officials leading the state’s response to COVID-19 are having discussions with the CDC and Washington Department of Health about what happened on the American Dynasty, said Incident Commander Bryan Fisher.

“We’re going to obviously learn a lot based on the investigation,” he said. “And we’re just going to use that to strengthen our processes and protocols up here.”

In Washington, as fishing vessels prepared for the spring hake season there, the industry received very little support and guidance from state and county public health agencies, said Paine, who heads the United Catcher Boats trade group.

Companies and trade groups developed protocols with the help of a maritime medical service, Discovery Health MD, he said. But it was “all voluntary,” and each company was on its own, Paine added.

“We didn’t have a group of expert epidemiologists that know viruses telling us exactly what we needed to do. There was zero support,” he said. “We didn’t know what was going to work.”

Gottlieb, the University of Washington virology researcher, said that if companies can put appropriate quarantine procedures in place before boarding, fishing crews stand a good chance of remaining uninfected with COVID-19, largely because of vessels’ isolation at sea.

But if an infected person is allowed onboard, he added, the risk is “exceedingly high,” with the resulting spread mirroring what’s been observed on cruise ships, meat processing plants and American Seafoods’ vessels.

“The virus is going to do what the virus does,” Gottlieb said. “If folks aren’t doing what needs to be done from a public health point of view, and what we know needs to be done from a medical and testing point of view, it’s not surprising that this kind of thing is going to happen — and this is a prime example.”

Alaska recorded 13 new cases of COVID-19 Thursday, eight in Anchorage and five on the Kenai Peninsula.

Eleven of the new cases are in Alaska residents, and two are in nonresident workers in Anchorage — one from the seafood industry and the other from the tourism industry, according to data reported Friday on the state’s COVID-19 hub.

No new hospitalizations or deaths were reported.

A full round of tests for patients and staff after an outbreak at Providence Transitional Care Center was completed, resulting in four more positive tests on Friday, according to spokeswoman Katie Marquette. That brought the total number of positive cases associated with the facility to 29, 14 of them residents and 15 caregivers. It was not clear how many of those new cases were included in the state’s tally.

Thursday was the fifth day since late May that the state reported more than 10 cases of COVID-19, following more than a month in which daily new case counts remained below that number.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has moved swiftly to reopen the state’s economy in recent weeks, saying the state’s health-care providers are now prepared to handle a larger number of cases.

In a normal fishing season, Dan Martin would fly straight from the Pacific Northwest to the Aleutian Islands, where his pollock trawler, the Commodore, would be waiting for him to take the wheel.

But this year, the veteran skipper is stepping onboard in Seattle, where he, four crew and two federal fisheries observers are taking COVID-19 tests and hoisting a quarantine flag. Then they’ll squeeze onto the vessel for a week-long voyage to Alaska’s biggest fishing port, Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands.

“We might have to eat in shifts,” Martin quipped. “Because I don’t know that we can fit that many people at our galley table.”

There’s no hospital anywhere in the Aleutians, and Dutch Harbor has not yet seen a single confirmed case of COVID-19. Martin says the industry’s biggest fear is bringing the virus in with them.

That fear is not theoretical: A different vessel that fishes for Bering Sea pollock, with an onboard processing plant, returned to a Washington port last week with at least 86 people infected with the disease. And in Alaska, 14 nonresident seafood industry workers have already tested positive for COVID-19.

In Dutch Harbor, Martin and his crew will sit on the boat for another week to finish out their 14-day quarantine. Then, during their months-long season, the only time they’ll get off the boat is for outdoor recreation with each other — no trips to the town swimming pool or dinners at the Norwegian Rat Saloon. Martin said he’s girding himself for a long summer on the boat’s tight quarters.

“If you have the guy who squeezes the toothpaste in the middle, versus somebody who rolls it up from the bottom — that might be something that tips somebody over come the end of the August, and you’ve just been shut in with these people for three months,” he said.

Alaska’s seafood industry sprawls across dozens of communities and thousands of miles of coastline. But one common theme is that this summer’s fishing season represents uncharted waters.

With hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fish still available for harvest, thousands of fishermen and processing plant workers are set to arrive in coastal Alaska communities from Outside, where COVID-19 infection rates are much higher. But seafood companies, fishermen and local leaders say they’ve set up systems to limit the risk that the visitors could spread infection and overwhelm rural Alaska’s limited health-care infrastructure.

“I feel calm. I feel prepared. We have put a lot of work into this plan,” said Melanee Tiura, chief executive of the nonprofit that runs the sole clinic in Unalaska, the island community that includes Dutch Harbor. “Our solid processes and our good relationships between industry, with the Coast Guard, with our medevac planes, with the city — I think that we’re going to do very well.”

Tiura said her organization expects to see cases over the course of the summer, but is far better prepared to handle them than at the start of the pandemic. It’s secured multiple testing units and helped set up a quarantine site, where people with COVID-19 can recover without the risk of infecting their colleagues or co-workers, she said.

But a major local outbreak would still present serious challenges: Unalaska’s clinic has just three ventilators for the community’s 4,500 people.

For state officials, the goal this summer is to keep COVID-19 from spreading from industrial settings into surrounding communities, said Bryan Fisher, incident commander for Alaska’s response to the pandemic.

The state has mandated quarantines and other precautions for independent fishermen, and required fishing and processing businesses to draft protective plans that, in many cases, include requirements for testing and strict lockdowns at plants. There are also new recommendations aimed at keeping the disease from spreading on processing plant floors, given problems in Outside meat plants, Fisher added.

So far, the state’s efforts appear to be succeeding, even as workers have tested positive for the disease in some isolated coastal towns, Fisher said.

“We haven’t seen, to date, any community transmission spread with those cases associated with the fishing industry,” he said.

Tests inside and outside Alaska

In most coastal towns, the salmon season is still weeks away. But after two months of negotiation between seafood companies, fishermen, local governments and state officials, plans for the movement of thousands of seasonal workers are finally coming to fruition.

Those plans vary between different areas of the fishing industry, and independent fishermen who own their own boats have to follow a special mandate imposed by Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

But there are similar themes involving widespread testing and quarantining. Take the plan adopted by Silver Bay Seafoods, which operates processing plants in Sitka, Prince William Sound, Bristol Bay, Kodiak and the Aleutians.

Before flying to Alaska, seasonal workers must quarantine themselves for two weeks, with twice-daily checks for symptoms, then test negative for COVID-19, Abby Fredrick, a Silver Bay spokeswoman, wrote in an email.

After flying to plants in Alaska, workers will go through another, monitored two-week quarantine, with a final test at the end.

So far, the company has tested nearly 200 people outside Alaska, with one positive result, Fredrick said. More than 200 employees have been tested inside the state without any positives.

Other companies have slightly different protocols: Trident Seafoods, one of the country’s largest, is flying workers to Anchorage, quarantining them in hotel rooms under the watch of security guards for two weeks, then testing them at the end of that period. Once they’re cleared, they’re flown to remote processing plants on chartered planes to minimize exposure.

Trident wouldn’t say exactly how many of its workers have tested positive. But it’s finding cases in less than 2% of employees at the end of the quarantine period, said spokesman Shannon Carroll.

Positive tests prove the system “is working”

In addition to the 14 nonresident seafood industry workers who have tested positive for COVID-19 inside Alaska, one particular company has caught more 10 infected workers before they’ve even flown to the state, said Fisher, the incident commander.

“Each of those cases that were discovered, whether it was out of state or in state, is proof that the system we put in place is working — to make sure that we’re not spreading the virus in a processing plant, or on a fishing boat, or more particularly in communities where the fisheries are happening,” Fisher said in a phone interview.

The state has also made strong recommendations about how seafood companies will manage the floors of their processing plants, to keep COVID-19 from spreading there, Fisher said. The disease has infected thousands of workers in meat processing plants outside Alaska.

The state’s recommended precautions include segregating employees into self-contained working groups, which would make it easier to track and isolate them in the event that someone tests positive. Other recommendations include avoiding close contact, using personal protective equipment and installing physical barriers between workers, Fisher said.

Those measures are not required, he said. But companies have gone “above and beyond,” he added.

“What industry has told us is they understand the need to keep the communities safe that they’re working in,” Fisher said. “They understand the implications of what it would mean to have a widespread community outbreak coming from one of their plants.”

Once processing workers arrive at their plants for the summer, many won’t be allowed to leave for the duration of the season, as a number of companies are putting their properties on lockdown.

To keep workers from going stir-crazy, Trident has invested in ping-pong and karaoke at one of its plants, and it’s offering streaming yoga and other workout classes, and video games, during quarantines.

Silver Bay bought extra gym equipment, movie and gaming centers, books and billiards, Frederick said. It’s also helped arrange English classes for employees who were stuck between seasons at an isolated plant in the Aleutians, and in Sitka, residents donated an array of games “to show their support for Silver Bay’s commitment to isolate from the community,” she added.

In Valdez, the local government is paying for a security checkpoint on the road that connects processing plants with the rest of town. Designated “runners” from the plants can pick up mail and supplies in town, but they must be segregated from other workers, with private living spaces and non-communal meals, according to agreements that Valdez’s two major seafood companies have signed with the city.

“Everybody wants this to succeed,” said Mayor Jeremy O’Neil, who’s also the administrator of Valdez’s hospital. “From the get-go, the work with the fish processors, the fishing fleet, has been very collaborative.”

O’Neil acknowledged the power of COVID-19 to throw “wrenches” and “curveballs” at the city’s plans, adding: “The jury’s still out on what lies ahead over the next couple of months.”

“It’s going to be a long summer,” he said.

Waiting for the fishermen to go home

Uncertainty also persists in Bristol Bay, which has seen some of the loudest outcry over the Dunleavy administration’s plans to proceed with the sockeye fishery.

On the east side of the bay, which is home to most of the region’s major processing plants, Samaritan’s Purse, the evangelical Christian relief organization, flew in equipment Monday for a 30-bed field hospital that can be used if an outbreak develops.

Dan O’Hara, mayor of the surrounding Bristol Bay Borough, praised seafood companies for drafting and executing plans to keep their summer workforce isolated from local residents.

“They’ve done an excellent job of taking care of what they said they were going to do,” he said.

O’Hara said the borough is taking its own precautions, including hiring “safety monitors” to make sure fishermen and processing workers are abiding by state and company health mandates. But if cases of COVID-19 become unmanageable, the borough Assembly can also shut down fishing by cutting off access to its dock.

That could cost the borough millions of dollars in revenue, but it has enough set aside in savings to survive for a year or two, O’Hara said.

“We’re not beholden to anybody,” he said. “I don’t care what the governor says: If this comes to a place where we feel that this is a threat to our elderly people and our citizens, that dock will be shut down in a heartbeat, I guarantee you.”

On the west side of the bay, anxiety has been more acute in the hub town of Dillingham. With fishermen starting to arrive, Jamie O’Connor, a spokeswoman for the local government, said the city is still waiting for Dunleavy’s administration to send security contractors to help enforce state health mandates.

Health Commissioner Adam Crum, in an email Monday, said the contract was being finalized, though he would not provide details.

Robin Samuelsen, a Dillingham Native leader, said he’s pleased that seafood companies have been testing plant workers and catching cases that way. He was also happy to see three city policy officers greeting new arrivals at the airport Monday, he said.

But the impending arrival to Bristol Bay of thousands of independent fishermen, who aren’t subject to seafood company policies, is still making him nervous, Samuelsen said.

“A lot of these fishermen think it’s the Wild West out here,” he said. “We can’t wait until we see them leaving.”

Alaska’s largest rural airline is scrambling to find a buyer that can keep the company intact as it emerges from bankruptcy, rather than seeing its planes sold off piecemeal through a liquidation process.

RavnAir Group flew to more than 100 Alaska communities before shutting down and filing for bankruptcy last month amid the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing some remote villages to charter planes to get residents medical care. Ravn is now running for-sale ads in the Anchorage Daily News and the Wall Street Journal, and a half-dozen potential buyers have signed non-disclosure agreements that allow them to review sensitive company data, according to court filings.

Ravn’s management is touting $30 million in federal COVID-19 aid that it says the federal government could grant — if a potential buyer is found.

But as the federal judge in Ravn’s bankruptcy case pointed out at a hearing Wednesday, that money “ain’t in hand, yet.” And the company still owes $90 million to an array of lenders represented by the French international bank BNP Paribas, whose attorney calls a sale a “Hail Mary” and is pushing to have Ravn’s planes sold off piecemeal through a liquidation process that would shut down the company for good.

“If it comes together that there’s somebody who’s interested in taking the (federal) money and funding a plan, that would be great news,” BNP’s attorney, David Neier, said at the hearing. “But we’re not giving up the liquidation process because there is no other path that has emerged that will work with this estate.”

Ravn is majority-owned by a pair of East Coast private equity companies, J.F. Lehman and Co. and W Capital Partners. Before the pandemic, the company operated 72 planes and had 1,300 workers, and its network extended across the state, from the oil-rich North Slope to the major commercial fishing port of Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, with dozens of other destinations in between.

The pandemic caused a 90% drop in passenger bookings over three weeks, and Ravn laid off all but 40 of its employees and filed for bankruptcy protection in Delaware.

Since then, Ravn’s management — led by chief executive Dave Pflieger, who collected more than $1.4 million in salary, bonuses and expense payments in the past year, according to court filings — has been fighting to find a buyer that could spare the company from liquidation.

Beyond its newspaper advertisements, it’s promoted petitions and tweeted at President Donald Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. It also worked closely with Alaska’s Congressional delegation to secure the possible relief money from the federal government, and it says it’s contacted 19 different entities about a possible sale.

The efforts to keep the company intact are aligned with the array of Alaska and other businesses owed millions of dollars by Ravn that are known as the “unsecured creditors” in the bankruptcy case. That means their claims rank behind the $90 million in debts to the “secured creditors” represented by BNP, the French bank.

Ravn estimates that a liquidation would raise no more than $41 million. That would not be enough to pay the claims of the unsecured creditors, which include Anchorage-based Petro Star, GCI and Northern Air Cargo.

So the unsecured creditors’ attorneys hope to see Ravn sold intact, which could allow it to start generating revenue again and make it more likely that the Alaska-based businesses and others are paid off.

At Wednesday’s hearing, an attorney representing the unsecured lenders, Robert Stark, said Ravn has not given itself enough time nor hired an investment banker to help find a buyer. And he argued that the secured lenders are pushing the company too quickly toward liquidation.

“We’re all puppets. And they’re the puppet masters,” Stark said. He added: “This company needs a chance to rehabilitate. It needs to heal, like every other part of this country..”

A spokesman for BNP, the bank that represents the secured creditors, declined to comment. At the hearing, Neier, the bank’s attorney, disputed the “puppet master” remarks and argued that Ravn’s sale efforts are not “illusory.”

“It’s more of a, ‘let’s see if we can do something better in the time we have allowed,’” Neier said.

Neier said that Ravn already faces a revenue shortfall and will need more cash to get through the bankruptcy process. But Stark asked the judge at the hearing, Brendan Shannon, to give Ravn an extra month to find a buyer.

Shannon instead agreed to extend the deadline two weeks, to July 9, saying that Alaska’s required two-week quarantine period for visitors has not given Ravn “a meaningful opportunity to really market these assets,” like its planes.

“By all reports, this company is healthy, profitable and operating,” Shannon said. “If there’s an opportunity to reorganize this, provide these services, save these employees’ jobs, I would be on board with that. I can’t make economic circumstances and I cannot create value, but I can provide opportunity.”

Shannon and Ravn’s attorneys both noted that there are still questions about whether or how the Department of the Treasury would allow a potential buyer to claim the $30 million in federal aid.

“We haven’t received written confirmation, although we’re seeking it from Treasury that they understand that’s how we’re going to be using it and that it would be transferable,” said Jane Kim, a Ravn attorney.

The federal money, and the uncertainty around it, is a big factor in assessing Ravn’s value, according to a person affiliated with a potential buyer, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the bidding process.

“How can any potential buyer take that to the bank?” the person said. “The business itself has no value, unless and until (the chief executive) provides some kind of documentation to support their representation that a successor to Ravn would have access to this money.”

Ravn officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a rush on bicycles has stripped Goldstream Sports of much of its inventory.

The $500 entry-level mountain bikes are gone from the Fairbanks store’s shelves. There are no hybrids and just a few road bikes left. And with the pandemic disrupting Asian manufacturing, it will be months before new shipments arrive.

Owner Joel Buth has an of-the-moment metaphor to help baffled customers wrap their minds around the situation.

“Some people come in, and they just don’t get it when I’m saying we don’t have bikes and we can’t get them,” he said. “I’m like, ‘It’s like toilet paper. It’s just gone, nationwide.’”

As residents look for respite from stay-at-home orders and gym closures, Alaska bike shops are reporting a surge in demand — with an extra bump from the $1,200 COVID-19 relief checks issued by the federal government. Nationwide, bike sellers are struggling to keep up, as the coronavirus temporarily closed Asian factories and caused shortages in workers and parts.

Chain Reaction Cycles in South Anchorage was so “slammed” Tuesday that nobody had time to answer a reporter’s questions, said an employee who answered the phone.

At The Bicycle Shop, which has three stores in Anchorage, sales and repairs are both twice the normal level, said manager Nicholas Carman. For the first time in its 55 years in business, the company has had to turn away people who are asking for bicycle service, he added.

Customers who want to buy new bikes have filled out stacks of interest forms and are being called when there’s inventory available.

“People are just looking for bikes to get out and ride,” Carman said. “We hear lots of stories, but the general consensus is that they have more time.”

The pandemic has caused some disruptions for stores. The Bike Shop has been doing its business in a parking lot outside its Midtown outpost.

But bicycle commuters and enthusiasts were buoyed by Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz’s decision to allow bike shops to continue operating as non-critical businesses faced closures.

Carman and Buth both said that the crunch has hit their entry-level products the hardest, with $500 bikes selling out first.

But the shortage has gradually climbed up their inventories, and now the least-expensive bike available at The Bicycle Shop is $1,699, Carman said.

“The least expensive bikes disappeared first,” he said. “And then, quickly after that, $700 bikes, $900 bikes. At every step of the way, we all thought that it wouldn’t just continue to climb up the chain. But it’s basically just every bike that we could get from the brands that we work with is disappearing.”

Buth, in Fairbanks, said he doesn’t expect the problem to be fixed before the end of the season. He has some less-expensive mountain bikes arriving in the next few weeks, but most sizes will be gone within a few days, and any orders he places now won’t show up until October or November, Buth said.

Whether the pandemic will leave him better or worse off is still an open question, and he expects to have to cut his employees’ hours substantially below normal as he runs out of models to sell, he said.

“Right now, what I can definitely say is that I’m in much better shape than a lot of businesses,” he said. “What the ramifications are as we go through summer… time will tell.”

For Alaskans who can’t find new bikes at stores, employees there said that used models could be a good alternative, though it’s likely harder to find a good deal on Craigslist or elsewhere as demand has spiked.

In the meantime, bicycle advocates are thinking about how they can make the most of the pandemic cycling boom.

Bike Anchorage sent a letter this month to Berkowitz pointing out how increasingly busy trails and sidewalks are making it harder to stay socially distant.

And they note that with fewer people commuting to work, there are fewer cars on the road.

The group is suggesting dedicating some bikes-only lanes in busy avenues, like A Street and C Street, as well as restricting traffic in a few smaller streets to allow more recreational opportunities.

“There’s a lot of demand. There’s going to have to be supply by the government,” said Dev Barrera, Bike Anchorage’s director. “Creating other spaces for cyclists, it’s going to have to happen.”

A spokeswoman for Berkowitz didn’t respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

As Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz reopen the state and city economy, both say that their actions will be guided by data.

But both officials and experts caution that the decision-making around the reopening can be complicated and hard for the public to follow. There’s no single measurement that reflects the state’s overall progress in fighting the coronavirus, nor is there specific, centralized guidance from the federal government.

Dunleavy’s “Reopen Alaska Responsibly Plan” says the administration is watching 18 different pieces of data. They include the number of new COVID-19 hospitalizations and hospital bed capacity, the number of tests and the average turnaround time, and the number of people exposed to each confirmed case.

Berkowitz’s “Roadmap to Reopening” says eight different metrics must be met. They include the “ability and capacity to screen and test widely,” case counts trending downward, enough protective gear for health-care workers and the monitoring of all contacts of confirmed cases.

“There’s a lot of variables to this calculation, and I don’t think any single variable is going to determine what the course of action is going to be,” Berkowitz said in a phone interview. “If we saw something that was out of the norm, that was a deviation from the way things have been, that would give us cause to do further inquiry. And if we did further inquiry and had reason to be more concerned, we would change our course.”

While each administration has released specific measures it will watch, neither has published detailed benchmarks that, if reached, would cause the reopening process to move forward or backward — like a certain number of deaths, hospitalizations or confirmed cases.

Officials with both administrations have been hesitant to say that crossing one particular threshold would prompt them to resurrect stricter health mandates. Even the tally of new cases — which, on the surface, appears to be a straightforward metric — can be misleading, Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer, said at a news conference last week.

Infections associated with travel, she said, have different implications than those that stem from unexplained transmission within a community. And new cases in a small town might require a different response than if they’re in a large city.

“The type of cases matters,” Zink said. “Five cases, or 30 cases, or 100 cases in Anchorage would be very different than 100 cases in Juneau.”

As policymakers decide how to move forward, there are broad categories that they should be watching, said Janet Baseman, an epidemiology professor and associate dean at University of Washington’s School of Public Health.

Those categories, she said, include testing numbers, hospital space and the capacity of public health agencies to track the contacts of people — which are the same types of data that Dunleavy and Berkowitz say they’re following.

The Trump administration has released its own list of general criteria that states or regions should meet before moving to the next phase of their reopenings. But Baseman said there’s been no list of specific benchmarks handed down by the federal government — which leaves local leaders to develop them themselves.

“Everybody is trying to figure this out right now,” she said. “Absent that centralized set of specific recommendations, this is just taking time for people.”

One thing to keep in mind, Baseman said, is that if policymakers want to make informed decisions about how each phase of the reopening changes the data, they need to wait at least two weeks between them.

That’s because it can take that long for an infected person to start showing symptoms, and even longer to be hospitalized or die.

Dunleavy waited exactly 14 days between the second and third phases in his reopening. He said at a news conference Tuesday that he’s comfortable with that timing because not all businesses are reopening at once.

“We’re all feeling pretty good, we’ll watch it. And we’ll continue to report,” he said. “But we think it’s going to work out.”

Jeff Turner, a spokesman for Dunleavy, referred requests for an interview about the governor’s decision making criteria to the Department of Health and Social Services. A department spokesman, Clinton Bennett, responded to interview requests by sending a link to the state’s two-page Reopen Alaska Responsibly Plan.

That document lists the 18 criteria that the state is tracking, within four broad categories: disease activity, and testing, public health and health care capacity.

For reopening phases to move forward, disease activity, for example, must be “consistently declining or stable,” as assessed by metrics like the number of new cases and new hospitalizations, and their geographic distribution, the document says.

Anchorage’s system is similar, and the city maintains an online “dashboard” that currently shows each of its eight reopening criteria as a green light or yellow light. But it doesn’t show any of the numbers or specific thresholds that, if reached, would cause the colors to change.

Asked how the city is measuring its criteria and deciding what colors to show on its dashboard, a Berkowitz spokeswoman, Carolyn Hall, emailed a copy of a “risk assessment” that the municipal health department sends the mayor weekly.

The four-page memo, sent May 15 by the director of the Anchorage Health Department, breaks down the city’s performance against each of the eight criteria laid out in Berkowitz’s reopening plan. It includes daily COVID-19 case count trends — an average of .9 new ones in the previous week — daily testing rates, an assessment of health-care providers’ stocks of protective equipment and data on positive tests among people without symptoms.

Berkowitz said he reviews the numbers on a daily basis, working with experts to make sure he understands any variables that could be attached to the data. And he said that the public has access to “virtually all” of the same information.

“We’re making real-time decisions based on the best information that’s available to us, as well as the best understanding that currently exists about the disease,” Berkowitz said. He added: “The lack of comprehensive and coherent information at a national and international level is a factor in the decisions that we make. And so, there are unknowns that we have to account for.”