Alaska coronavirus news

The COVID-19 federal health emergency ends Thursday, though it will be months before some of the special emergency benefits end and most Alaskans won’t notice a drastic change.

Shots: COVID-19 vaccines will still be available at multiple locations. There’s no cost to most people, through insurance — including Medicare and Medicaid — and through a children’s vaccination program.

Tests: Private insurance plans no longer have to cover COVID-19 testing at no cost. Free testing for uninsured people will continue, though the testing locations may change, the state Department of Health says.

Treatment: COVID treatments, like Paxlovid, will still be available. Medicaid recipients can get the medication at no cost until at least October of next year. Those with private healthcare and on Medicare may be subject to copays and deductibles.

Telehealth: Some changes brought by the pandemic are more lasting. During the health emergency, Medicare loosened the rules for telehealth. That flexibility will continue until at least the end of next year. Meanwhile, in 2022, the state Legislature passed a bill to permanently lift some restrictions on telemedicine delivery.

On Jan. 31, 2020, with six confirmed cases of a new coronavirus in the U.S., a group of federal health officials gathered somberly at the lectern at the White House and declared a public health emergency.

“Beginning at 5:00 p.m. EST Sunday, February the 2nd, the United States government will implement temporary measures to increase our abilities to detect and contain the coronavirus proactively and aggressively,” announced then-Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

More than three years of social disruption, at least 6 million hospitalizations, and 1.1 million U.S. deaths later, that declaration is due to expire this Thursday. Some, including Republicans in Congress who pushed the Biden administration to end the declaration, say it’s about time. Others remain concerned about the virus and worry that the end of the declaration could mean relaxing measures that allow the virus to create new disruptions.

“COVID 19 is still a significant problem, but emergencies can’t go on forever,” observes Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “I think we’re living in a place where we’re treating COVID similar to flu.”

Professor Howard Markel, a physician and historian of infectious diseases, is in the camp that’s still concerned. “History says that all pandemics end,” he says. “But we have never had an infectious event like this – ever.”

Concrete changes coming

In the early months of the pandemic, for a brief time, there was remarkable bipartisan unity in quickly marshaling federal resources to fight the new virus. That included major investments in vaccine development, new laws that allowed people to stay on public insurance programs without interruption, and free tests and vaccines for all. Those rules allowed for things like drive-through mass vaccination campaigns, where no one asked for your insurance card, and free curbside COVID-19 testing kiosks.

What is left of many of those programs are now being dismantled. Here’s what’s changing and what’s staying the same, for now.

Vaccines and tests no longer free — now covered by health insurance

The federal government will no longer buy up tests or vaccine doses or treatments to give out to the American public for free. The health insurance system will take over — patients will have to go to the doctor, get a prescription, perhaps pay a copay when it comes to COVID tests and treatments, just like they do for all other illnesses.

It’s important to note vaccines will still be free for practically everyone. People who are insured are required to get vaccines with no cost sharing because of the Affordable Care Act. The White House says people without insurance will still be able to get free COVID-19 vaccines — and treatments like Paxlovid — through 2024.

COVID data tracking gets scaled back

For people used to relying on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for guidance on how much virus is circulating in their community, there are big changes ahead. The CDC announced it will sunset some of its COVID data tracking efforts, including tracking and reporting new infections. It will continue to track COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths, do genetic analysis to identify worrisome variants, and monitor spread through wastewater surveillance.

“We will continue to keep our eye on the COVID-19 ball,” Dr. Nirav Shah, the CDC’s principal deputy, told reporters last week. He pointed to a recent CDC analysis of the new approach showing it will be effective.

The changes to how CDC collects and shares COVID-19 data “comes as no surprise at all but is further evidence that these investments were always temporary and not part of a long term strategy to be better public health data stewards,” Beth Blauer, who helped run a highly respected COVID data tracker at Johns Hopkins, told NPR.

Telemedicine access to remain in place

Some popular changes to health care brought by the COVID-19 pandemic will remain in place, at least for a time, including more flexibility with telemedicine, access to controlled substances and hospital-at-home programs. The Drug Enforcement Administration has not said how long it will allow telehealth prescribing of controlled substances, but most of the other measures have been extended to at least the end of next year.

Vaccines, tests and treatments emergency use can continue

Another thing that won’t change for now is access to numerous COVID-19 vaccines and tests and treatments that were allowed for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration. That authority comes from a different declaration, which hasn’t ended yet — the timing of that is up to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.

The great Medicaid unwinding

A key provision in one of the first COVID relief laws gave states extra federal funding for Medicaid — the public health insurance program for low income people — but required states not to disenroll anyone for as long as the public health emergency was in effect.

Liz Adams, a stay-at-home mom in Plant City, Fla., says it was very important to her and her family to know they had Medicaid throughout the pandemic without having to worry about getting recertified. “It was there — you knew it was there,” she says. “I didn’t have to worry. I could take my kids to the hospital when they got sick and not have to stress it.”

Medicaid grew to be bigger than it’s ever been, with an estimated 95 million beneficiaries, which is more than 1 in 4 Americans. This provision actually ended a bit ahead of the public health emergency — states could start disenrolling people as of April 1.

Although the head of the health agency in charge of Medicaid, Chiquita Brooks-Lasure, has said many times that federal officials are “laser focused” on helping ensure that people who are eligible don’t lose coverage, a recent estimate from health research group KFF suggested that as many as 24 million people could lose Medicaid, including millions who are still eligible but fall through administrative cracks.

Adams thinks that’s what happened with her kids’ Medicaid coverage. Her son, who survived leukemia, recently had a follow-up biopsy appointment canceled because he was no longer insured. Adams is now working with navigators at the Family Healthcare Foundation to get coverage back.

Navigators, who help people sign up for health insurance for free thanks to federal grants, have extra funding this year to help people who find themselves without Medicaid coverage. (Navigators strongly suggest Medicaid enrollees make sure their contact information is up to date with their state Medicaid office so they don’t miss a notice about their coverage.)

Will we be prepared for future threats?

The end to America’s public health emergency declaration comes on the heels of the World Health Organization making the same determination last week.

In the U.S., the bipartisan willingness to marshal resources for the pandemic began to fall apart as the years wore on. The White House and federal health agencies have requested more funding to continue managing COVID-19 and prepare for the next pandemic threat, but Congressional Republicans questioned the need for it.

“One of my biggest worries is that we are losing time in preparing for the next pandemic,” Dawn O’Connell, the head of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response told senators last week. “It’s the reason why the administration requested $88 billion last year to advance the American pandemic preparedness plan.”

That funding never came, despite the fact that many experts believe the next pandemic may come sooner rather than later.

Pien Huang, Rob Stein, and Yuki Noguchi contributed reporting. Editing by Carmel Wroth.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The World Health Organization has lifted the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) for COVID-19.

In a press conference on Friday, director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “COVID-19 has been so much more than a health crisis, disrupting economies, travel, shattering businesses and plunging millions into poverty.”

He went on to state that for more than a year the pandemic has been on a downward trend and “this trend has allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19.”

Then he made the pronouncement: “Therefore, with great hope, I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency.”

He also spoke of “the painful lessons we have learned,” emphasizing that “the investments we have made and the capacities we have built must not go to waste. We owe it to those we have lost. To leverage those investments, to build on those capacities, to learn those lessons and to transform that suffering into meaningful and lasting change. One of the greatest tragedies of COVID-19 is that it didn’t have to be this way.”

The end of the emergency declaration comes more than three years after Tedros announced it on Jan. 30, 2020. At the time, there were fewer than 10,000 cases of the virus, most of them in China.

Nearly seven million deaths from COVID-19 have been reported to WHO, Tedros said. More than 1 million of the deaths were in the United States alone. But Tedros emphasized that “we know the [death] total is several times higher, at least 20 million.”

During that time, the disease “turned our world upside down,” he said. But the landscape has changed dramatically. While new variants may still pose a threat, vaccines and boosters have helped reduce the death rate.

WHO has issued the public health emergency declaration seven times since 2005. The designation triggers a series of rules that guide response to threatening disease outbreaks, including the fast-tracking of tests and medicines.

The declaration for COVID-19 was the first time the WHO announced an international health emergency since an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2019.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

The state of Alaska’s data on COVID-19 shows a much calmer picture of the pandemic now than at any point since it began.

COVID is blamed for just 1.8% of hospitalizations in the state, according to the Health Department’s numbers updated Tuesday, and COVID-related deaths are down to levels not seen since the virus reached Alaska in March 2020.

And yet, Alaskans are still getting COVID and, in some cases, trying to navigate life after testing positive. So what are people supposed to do with that information now?

Alaska’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Anne Zink says that depends. COVID, she says, is still a part of our lives, and she’s not ready to declare victory just yet.

Listen:

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Anne Zink: But the reality is it’s a very different virus now than it was three years ago. And so when we see people get it, it tends to be more like we would see with other viral illnesses, where someone might be older, immunocompromised, they’re more likely to get sick and associated with it. If they’re young and healthy, they tend to bounce back pretty quickly. And there’s always exceptions within that, but in general, it’s causing much less, just in general, harm for individuals, as well as in what we’re seeing in the emergency department.

Casey Grove: So what are people supposed to do at this point? And I guess the example I’m thinking of is, you know, in the past, if you had known contact with somebody that had tested positive, and they let you know, that you would then go get yourself tested, and there was kind of like a pretty routine set of protocols that people were doing that maybe now they’re not, is that fair to say? And what should someone in that situation do now in May of 2023?

Anne Zink: Yeah, that’s a great question. I like to pull it back to kind of where we’ve been in the pandemic as a whole. So whenever you have a new virus, a new challenge, it’s kind of three basic steps that you want to do. The first is really delay the entrance of that virus into the community to be able to move into phase two, which is prepare for what that looks like. And then the third is to mitigate and to mitigate the response. So really, we’re in that mitigation strategy right now. And so, you know, it really depends on who you’re around and what your risk factors are. If you have a runny nose, cough, congestion, in general, taking care of your health, sleeping more, seeing how you feel, those things make a big difference, particularly if someone’s older or immunocompromised. It’s really important to get tested, because we have good treatments for COVID. So that’s the real reason to get tested right now, is to make sure you don’t spread it to someone who’s symptomatic or who’s vulnerable and could really get sick, or to be able to get treated if you’re older and immunocompromised. But you have to really start it within the first five days. So if someone’s older, immunocompromised, please get tested and consider treatment, because it can really reduce your risk of hospitalization and death.

Casey Grove: And then for somebody that maybe comes in contact with a known case, maybe they’re not going to be in contact with an elderly or, you know, at risk person, should they still get tested? Again, I ask that because it kind of disrupts their lives, right, to have a positive test, or it might, so should someone in that scenario get tested?

Anne Zink: Yeah, it’s always this risk-benefit (analysis) of what happens. So, you know, I get exposed to someone who I know has COVID, again, I’m not gonna go see my mom right away without testing. And I might choose to work virtually if I can, versus not, or wear a mask when I’m around other people. So using that, and you can add a test as an additional tool, but everyone’s life is different. Some people really can’t remote work. Some people really can’t not go see the elderly, because they’re working with them on a regular basis. So if I am, you know, seeing people who are at risk and vulnerable, and I’ve been exposed, then I wear a mask, and I test as well. In the emergency department, I take care of persons all the time who are COVID positive. And so I’m constantly being exposed one way or another. And so I always wear a mask when I’m in that setting and that situation. And then if I become symptomatic I test, but I don’t test every time I see a COVID-positive patient, because I’ve got that level of protection. So it depends on, like, what your exposure looked like, how long you were exposed, what sort of additional protection you may or may not been using at that time.

Casey Grove: Gotcha. That just made me think of something. How many COVID tests do you think that you’ve taken?

Anne Zink: A lot. I have no idea how many I’ve taken, and, knock on wood, I have never tested positive. So I have tested a lot. You know, before and after travel. A lot of federal government meetings required testing before and afterwards. I’ll test after I go to a big conference, and I’m presenting, a lot of people in the room where I’m presenting without a mask. And so low exposure in that space. I’ll test if I get, you know, a runny nose or cold or don’t feel well. But yeah, who knows? My husband’s tested positive, but somehow my girls and I have never tested positive. So yeah.

Casey Grove: So every indicator that is available for Alaska seems to, you know, if not indicate a downward trend, that we’ve reached a point where it’s maybe flattened out? And should we think about this like it’s just the common cold or the flu? And I mean, what do you expect in the near future? When can we kind of declare victory and say, “We beat this thing,” or it’s at least gone enough into the background that we don’t have to think about it as much?

Anne Zink: Yeah, I think that we’re definitely at a point where it is not impacting our healthcare system in the same sort of way. And definitely during the Delta (variant surge), we pushed the hospital capacity for sure. But we are now at a point where we are not pushing our hospital capacity because of COVID. So from that sense, I do think that we are at a very different place, we have “flattened the curve,” and that since we’ve built up hospital capacity, and the cases are consistently staying below any kind of threshold to surge and to hit the hospital. So I think from a society perspective, that’s important. The virus part is kind of a more steady phase. Now it’s kind of unwinding all these structures of healthcare and society that kind of built to helps support the pandemic. That’s going to be the next kind of phase of this. And then I think we really need to do more to braid healthcare and public health together, so that we are better prepared for when, you know, we get something else, a new variant of this, or some other disease that could make people sick. That’s the goal. Like if we had had rapid, widely available testing and a good understanding this virus earlier on, it would have been much easier to be able to respond. But we really had to build all sorts of infrastructure that we did not have, prior to pandemic. You know, we put National Guard into our state lab to enter one test into three different systems. Like the amount of, lack of, infrastructure to respond was really the huge challenge at the beginning. And so that rebuilding, responding, is our next phase. I oftentimes say how we rebuild and respond out of this pandemic is going to be as important, if not more important, than how we responded. And that’s this next phase that we’re entering into.

This weekend marks the third anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the global pandemic — and Juneau’s wastewater is awash with COVID.

Charlee Gribbon is Bartlett Regional Hospital’s disease preventionist. She says only about 3% of COVID tests are coming back positive in the hospital’s lab — but the city and state no longer track cases closely, so most public health data gives an incomplete account of how many cases there are.

“Anecdotally, I would say that there are more cases being talked about than they are actually being confirmed,” she said.

There is one metric Gribbon said the public can rely on: Juneau’s wastewater has more than four times the national average of COVID-19 in it.

“I definitely take more impact from this because you’re not relying on people to go get tested or tell you that they’re sick, or even know that they have any symptoms,” Gribbon said.

Gribbon says Bartlett has five employees out sick this week. She said healthy people may be infected and show only minor symptoms, like a headache, but the hospital is still admitting an average of one to three people weekly with COVID-19.

“COVID really is affecting people over age 65,” she said. “They’re getting really sick, and they’re hypoxic, and they’re taking a long time to recover.”

She said she thinks it’s worth wearing masks in public if it means sparing older people from serious illness.

Gribbon says prevention is best, but antiviral medication is a useful tool for preventing serious illness if you do get COVID-19. It’s available in Juneau with a prescription from your primary care doctor.

The COVID-19 pandemic emergency may have officially ended, but the coronavirus is still having an effect on the Alaska Capitol.

On Friday, the leaders of the Alaska Senate Finance Committee announced they will institute “voluntary” COVID testing for legislators and staff who work on the committee.

The announcement came after several legislators and staff tested positive for COVID.

Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, said that with all three committee co-chairs (including himself) calling for voluntary testing, it’s voluntary in the same sense that an Army sergeant asking for volunteers is voluntary.

“We’ve had too many hot cases of COVID in the building, and we’re worried about having the Senate Finance Committee slowed down or even stopped,” he said.

Elsewhere in the building, the chairs of the House and Senate rules committees issued a joint memo calling on legislators and staff to stay home if they are ill or test positive for COVID-19.

“It’s running through the building,” said Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage and the Senate Rules chair.

Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson, D-Anchorage and chair of the Legislative Council, said there have been no changes in the Capitol’s COVID policy so far.

Last year, legislators dropped an anti-COVID testing and masking policy in February and declined to reinstate it even after cases rose and lawmakers canceled some work.

Masking and testing remains voluntary for staff and legislators.

At least one member of the state House has been ill with COVID and away from the Capitol this week. A bill from Rep. Stanley Wright, R-Anchorage, was scheduled for a vote on the House floor this week, but that vote was postponed because of his illness.

A scheduled House floor session on Friday turned into a technical session, but that wasn’t just because of COVID absences, said Speaker of the House Cathy Tilton, R-Wasilla.

Many legislators had already gone to their home districts for the weekend.