Kotzebue has recorded its first positive case of COVID-19, according to the regional health care provider, the Maniilaq Association.
The positive case came from someone who traveled to Northwest Alaska community on an Alaska Airlines flight Tuesday afternoon, according to Kotzebue City Manager Jeff Congdon.
Congdon said the individual arrived at the Ralph Wien Airport and was on the way to a village community in the region.
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“(The individual) voluntarily took the COVID-19 test at the airport and tested positive and has been quarantined in Kotzebue,” Congdon said.
There are other passengers on the flight who may have interacted with the individual who tested positive, Congdon said, and they are also quarantining in Kotzebue.
“Maniilaq is doing tests and monitoring those individuals and also doing contact tracing on the individual who tested positive to find out any other information that they can,” Congdon said.
Contact tracing is a term from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that means identifying who an infected person may have had contact with.
The Northwest Arctic Borough was set to amend its local health mandate to slowly open up the borough from its previous “hunker-down” mandate on Tuesday evening.
After the first positive COVID-19 case occurred, the Borough announced that it was retracting the latest mandate, and amending and extending its “hunker-down” mandate to last through May 31.
Included in the extended mandate is a borough-wide curfew from 12:01 a.m. to 6 a.m.
Northwest Arctic Borough Mayor Lucy Nelson said that the person who tested positive is not a resident of the borough. She said the fact that a resident of the borough has not yet tested positive shows how effective the borough’s health mandates have been.
“When we put this hunkering down into place, it was to slow and prevent this disease from entering and growing,” Nelson said. “So it’s really important that people follow these practices of distancing, of wearing masks, washing your hands.”
This is the first positive case of COVID-19 in the Northwest Arctic Borough, and one of roughly 400 positive cases statewide. The borough has about 7,600 citizens from Kotzebue and ten smaller village communities.
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May 20, 2020 at 07:47AM
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