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Medicine

How is Alaska Leading the Nation in Vaccinating Residents? With Boats, Ferries, Planes and Snowmobiles. (washingtonpost.com) 58

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Alaska, the state with the largest land mass in the nation, is leading the country in a critical coronavirus measure: per capita vaccinations per capita vaccinations. From a report: About 13 percent of the people who live in Alaska have already gotten a shot. That's higher than states such as West Virginia, which has received a lot of attention for a successful vaccine rollout and has inoculated 11 percent of its people. But the challenge for Alaska has been how to get vaccines to people across difficult, frigid terrain -- often in remote slivers of the state? "Boats, ferries, planes, snowmobiles -- Alaskans will find a way to get it there," said the state's chief medical officer, Anne Zink, 43. Alaskans are being vaccinated on fishing boats, inside 10-seater planes and on frozen landing strips. Doctors and nurses are taking white-knuckle trips to towns and villages across the state to ensure residents are protected from the coronavirus. Contributing to Alaska's quick speed in getting the vaccine to its residents is a federal partnership that allows the state, which has more than 200 indigenous tribes, to receive additional vaccines to distribute through the Indian Health Service.
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How is Alaska Leading the Nation in Vaccinating Residents? With Boats, Ferries, Planes and Snowmobiles. More

How is Alaska Leading the Nation in Vaccinating Residents? With Boats, Ferries, Planes and Snowmobiles.

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  • Hmm ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @05:39PM (#61032390)

    How is Alaska Leading the Nation in Vaccinating Residents? With Boats, Ferries, Planes and Snowmobiles.

    ... and apparently a distinct lack of anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories, Or maybe the bears and wolves just ate the anti-vaxxer missionaries when they ventured into the woods to look for Alaskans to convert to the religion of stupid? ... I hear the polar bears in particular are suffering form a lack of sea lions to eat, I'm glad they found an alternative food source.

    • Re: Hmm ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by peragrin ( 659227 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @05:53PM (#61032450)

      Alaskan's have a unique perspective. They have watched how a single cold can devaste an isolated winter settlement. It is part of every communities yearly life. Simple things like the flu can cause havok.

      So they see for themselves how vaccines are effective everyday. That attitude helps. Also knowing contact tracing that this person brought this cold to me on this day s easily established.

      My wife's NH nursing home outbreak of 30 cases and 2 cases who are struggling all started from a republican new years party worn without masks. The people who went to that party don't feel the least bit of guilt. Even though the first 6 cases are all traced to that one event.

      • Re: Hmm ... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Xylantiel ( 177496 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @07:43PM (#61032768)

        Or special treatment at the federal level. According to the CDC data [cdc.gov] Alaska got 35,100 in the first allocation for a population of 700,000. Delaware got 8,775 for a population of 900,000. That's one for every 20 people in Alaska and 1 for ever 100 people in Delaware. So it would appear that the feds assumed that it would be more difficult to distribute in Alaska and prioritized them in the timeline. Even to date Delaware has received only about 2/3 as many vaccines as Alaska, despite having a larger population. And West Virginia has only received half the per-capita allocation that Alaska has.

        But this reporter clearly needed to tell a compelling story rather than an honest one.

        One of the biggest slowdowns has been that the states' initial plans for how to do prioritization wouldn't work after the feds revised the numbers that the previous administration had given earlier on. Looks like Alaska maybe didn't get cut as much and so was able to proceed more with the original plans. Also I would expect their plans to be more flexible because the low population density already required it to be more fine-grained. One of the big problems is that there was no provision made to break up big shipments into smaller ones because that wasn't supposed to be needed -- and is hard due to refrigeration requirements. So the reduced allocations were really hard to deal with in some places.

    • Don't worry, there's plenty against it up here, or at least the "you go first" types. I work in a little grocery store and about half just got covid. I worked with a lady in the same room for 5 days, definitely no 6 foot separation, and some how she got it and I didn't. None of the 5 who got it got terribly sick. Loss of smell and taste though.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by sphealey ( 2855 )

      See Iditarod, History of

    • Well when you have one of the smallest populations, pretty easy to swing the percentages. The big question is why isn't DC, Vermont and Wyoming ahead of Alaska? All Alaska has to do is get Anchorage done and they have roughly 40% of their population vaccinated.

  • They went with the Warp Speed [wikipedia.org] program when it was set up. Instead of dithering around with TDS and keeping the allocated vaccines locked up until after January 20.

  • WHY ? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by AlexHilbertRyan ( 7255798 )
    If the residents are in a remote area, isnt being isolated the perfect prevention and bringing in MORE people a recpe for spreading ?

    • It may have escaped your notice that the virus is already there in Alaska, peaking at well over 500 new cases a day last Dec. So yes, they get vaccinated just like anyone else.

      Alaska is not as isolated as you might think. By its very nature, there's a lot of shipping to and from Alaska from the continental states, and a lot of non-residential workers coming and going for specialized or seasonal jobs. You're probably also forgetting that Alaska, being rather cold for a significant part of the year, people

      • > It may have escaped your notice that the virus is already there in Alaska, peaking at well over 500 new cases a day last Dec. So yes, they get vaccinated just like anyone else.


        No it was already in SOME places, it wasnt everywhere. Many isolated places would have done better to you know have a strict quarantine.

        You're probably also forgetting that Alaska, being rather cold for a significant part of the year, people spend a lot of time indoors, where the virus is easier to spread.
        Virus cant sprea
    • Communities gather, and sometimes people within a community travel to other places and bring it back. Lots of villages closed themselves to outsiders, but places like Bethel had very bad infection rates for a time. Also, most villages have a gathering place of some sort. Once a single case arrives, spread can happen very quickly.
      The people coming into the communities to administer the vaccine have already been vaccinated. Also, read about the Iditarod on Wikipedia. Using unusual methods to get medica
      • My point is isolation is often a good thing even better times. The problem is this constant travelling and movement of people leads to many bad conseequences from viruses, to extra pollution, and greed that follows and destruction of the environment.

    • Hospital access is poor, and you can find yourself easily cut off by the weather. Just due to distance, it can take more than a day to reach some places in good weather by ground.

      • Some good places ? Most people in those remote areas might not have traffic jams or cafes, but they have a real life and can do real things simply by walking out the front door. How many city folk even have time for that ?

  • Means it takes less people to make a higher percentage ... [wikipedia.org]

    Really, my CITY has several times Alaska's entire state's population and it's not even in the top 10 in the US.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Bodie1 ( 1347679 )

      Exactly!

    • Re:Super low population.. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @05:58PM (#61032476)

      Yeah but all your city's citizens can be reached much easier. The achievement for Alaska is that they organized the complex logistics involved, and still beat your city even though it has less complicated logistics requirements.

    • Remote communities in Alaska are at much greater risk so they are given higher priority. When you get sick in one of these communities there is no hospital and no doctors. Odds of survival are significantly lower then in a population center.

      So greater risk results in greater service. It is all about invested effort and people tend to cooperate and invest more effort when there are more lives on the line.

    • I'm in a small state (Delaware) with far easier access.

      We aren't in the top ten, but Alaska is number 45.

      It seems to me they simply got more doses per person.

      https://www.beckershospitalrev... [beckershos...review.com]

      • I don't know that there are more per capita doses, but the doses that are here are being given out very quickly. That is because of two factors:
        1. The vaccine is being distributed and administered by multiple agencies. The Alaska Native Health Service, the Veteran's Administration, the military and the by the state through hospitals, clinics, et c. A good buddy of mine who is Eskimo, with no health risks, is not a senior citizen, et c. has already received the first dose of a vaccine. (I'm glad he was
        • Alaska has TWICE as many allocated per capita as West Virginia. (cdc [cdc.gov]) I suspect this is intentional due to logistical considerations. So yeah, the guy given the head start is ahead. Not exactly a surprise even though they should be praised for making it happen in hard-to-reach places.
          • Thanks. . . .and to be clear, I wasn't trying to disagree. The page that you linked to tells why Alaska received more: ***Jurisdiction will receive a "Sovereign Nation Supplement" for American Indian/Alaskan Native populations that elected to receive vaccines through the state instead of Indian Health Service.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AvitarX ( 172628 )

          Based on the link I included:
          AK, 250k doses 750k people
          ND, 130k doses 750k people

          AK 145k administered
          ND 125k administered

          AK is not 49th of all the states in percent doses administered.

          This is not me saying AK is doing a poor job, they certainly have some hurdles to administration that don't apply to other states, but it seems sloppy to say they've overcome them to be the best. They have a TON of doses relative to other states.

      • Yep. How is Alaska leading? They have more vaccines per person. West Virginia, mentioned in the summary, has half the per-capita allocation of Alaska to date.

  • It's no wonder (Score:4, Funny)

    by bool2 ( 1782642 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @06:02PM (#61032490) Homepage
    They can just leave the vaccine outside whilst the rest of us need cryogenic facilities to store it!

    • It's funny to joke about the cold, but they aren't quite that cold. It's generally cold enough for the Moderna and other vaccines, though Pfizer would still need cold storage. You still have an issue that while it may be cold enough on average, temperatures are still widely variable, and may get too warm at periods. Use a well insulated container and keep track.
      -40 is a very cold day even up there.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        I imagine the biggest advantage Alaska has is when faced with something like this, they understand from the get-go that dealing with it is going to be a major project.

        Of course it's early days yet; we're talking about *first* shots. It'll be interesting to see how things pan out with tracking down people for their second.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by AK9oh7 ( 1867008 )
        I am an Alaskan and I approve this message.
      • Anecdotally, Fairbanks has been fairly warm this year. Mostly, it hasn't been colder than -20F, although I see -35F in the forecast. Amusingly, there are actually testing facilities that have very large cold freezers because winters aren't reliably cold.

  • I attribute this partly to one of the foundational events leading to the state of Alaska -- the famous 1925 dog-sled serum run to Nome, Alaska bringing life-saving diptheria serum during a deadly outbreak. This event is recalled now by the annual Iditarod Race over the same course.

  • Hardly anyone in Alaska gets by without stuff (at least ammunition and gasoline) delivered from the Lower 48 to a place near where they live, so there are already ways (mostly light airplanes) to deliver stuff to the villages. Shungnak has a gravel airstrip, like most villages in Alaska. Via Google Maps, it looks like it's approximately 1/2 mile from the airstrip to the village school. The village school is probably where the vaccinations were given. TFA has a photo at the top with this text: "An all-female
    • Huh! My immediate response on reading your post was that we don't import gasoline. It turns out that I was wrong. I found a 2016 article by the Alaska Business Journal that informed me that we import about 25% of the gasoline consumed in the state from the Pacific Northwest.
    • In the winter they would use a snow machine pulling a sled for most everything they need to haul because in the winter a snow machine can go ANYWHERE and is much, much easier to use. People are surprised to find cars (mostly trucks) in damned near any village even when there are very limited roads. But in the winter why would you plow roads when you can hop on a snow machine and instantly be headed wherever you want for WAY less initial expense and ongoing operating expense.

      In the summer going even sort d
  • If the article had been sourced in Alaska they never would have said "Snowmobile".
    In Alaska they call them "Snow machines".

  • Per Capita in this case.. (Score:3)

    by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Friday February 05, 2021 @08:58PM (#61033032)

    Is not the same as sheer numbers. While I applaud Alaska for vaccinating masses, the heavy lifting I have seen from some places, not burdened by demographics, tells me that someone in their chain of command was ex military. Mass inoculation is par for the course for them. When i hear stories of wasted and spoiled vaccines because rules were so limited they wanted to limit to just persons of a specific race, pisses me off. Thats a 14th amendment violation and more importantly WASTED VACCINIES. Stop playing fucking politics and if there are leftover vaccines going to spoil... get them into the next eligible arm ASAFP. EVERY watested dose is blood on those assholes hands.

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