Governor Mike Dunleavy announced that the state is working at reopening the health care sector, lifting restrictions on elective medical procedures in what the Governor described on Tuesday as a step toward reopening segments of the economy affected by COVID-19.
Health Mandate 5, issued in March, aimed to limit the number of procedures being performed in hospitals to open health care beds for anticipated COVID-19 care and preserve personal protective equipment. The mandate generated some controversy by including surgical abortion among the procedures to be limited and delayed.
Governor Dunleavy now feels that re-opening the health care sector of the economy is an important step towards a return to normalcy, and that the time is right: “We shut down, we stopped, elective procedures and we did that for a couple of reasons. One is, we needed the protective personal equipment – the masks, the gowns, the gloves, etc., because when this virus started, we didn’t know how quickly it was going to spread, how big of a spike we were going to get, how many people were going to get sick. We were pretty sure that it was going to be tough to get this equipment because all the other states and countries across the globe were scrambling to hang on to this PPE, as we call it. We feel we’re at the point now that we’re getting a handle on the PPE and that’s one of the reasons why we’re going to be opening up that sector – that’s elective procedures. Life-threatening procedures were always still in-place for clinics and hospitals to perform, but what we had frozen was the elective approach.”
He warned Alaskans about assuming this is an all-clear, but he said that this is an appropriate step, given where the current numbers are: “We believe we’re at the point where where we can open that up, allow health care providers to do what they do, but we’re going to keep an eye on it. When we open this up, and for a few days, we’ll graph it and watch it, and if we don’t see a spike, if we don’t see an outbreak in a clinic or a certain area as a result of this activity, then we know that people are following the protocols, that our testing is working, that our approach to this virus is working, and that our re-opening of the economy for that small sector is working. We’ll keep an eye on it.”
Stay tuned to KSRM for further updates to the Governor’s Health Mandates.
