Governor Mike Dunleavy held a press briefing alongside Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska’s Chief Medical Officer, to update Alaskans on the state of the COVID-19 pandemic on Monday night.
Dr. Zink is encouraged by the overall statistics in Alaska, saying that this is the phase where it’s largely up to Alaskans to make many behavioral decisions for themselves: “I think that it’s important to remember that this pandemic is not over and that it continues to exist, and the personal mitigation strategies that people do and the environmental mitigation strategies are incredibly important. The easy decisions are over, we only have hard decisions here on out. I think the more ways that we can be healthy and happy together, and the ways that we can have the individual personal responsibility and step-up our personal and environmental mitigation, the better off we’re going to be.”
She also believes Alaskans should cautiously expand their “social bubble.” As restrictions ease, Alaskans can slowly expand their support networks and keep them small and consistent. Continue to practice social distancing with those outside of the bubble. Dr. Zink feels this strategy will limit riskier social interactions.
Governor Dunleavy feels the state’s numbers are strong enough to ramp-up opening sectors of the economy, even saying that he feels the state is ready for Phase Three of his plan to Reopen Alaska Responsibly. Phase Three has not yet been adopted, but the Governor feels the metrics have the state prepared for that transition.
The Governor said that there will be more clarifications regarding advisories later this week: “We want to clarify things this week in the next broadcast. We want to clarify and make things simpler so that people understand. So, we’re going to condense advisories down to a number of advisories so you’re not looking through pages and pages and pages. It’s really going to be advisories about you as individuals, what you can do to stay healthy, and what you can do to ensure that others around you stay healthy. They’ll be advisories on our website for businesses so they can look, scroll down, take a look at what the advisories are. In the end, and I’ve always said this, we’re a free country – we’re a free state. Our numbers are low, the numbers don’t justify us continuing anything but opening up.”
