A remote processing plant on the island of Kodiak reported an outbreak of 37 new cases of COVID-19 this week, adding to a string of large outbreaks in Alaska’s seafood industry.
The Anchorage Daily News reported the workers who tested positive were being transported to Anchorage for isolation and treatment, while the plant had been temporarily closed down for cleaning. According to the newspaper, the remote plant in Alitak, on the southern part of Kodiak Island, is an isolated facility, making risk to the community minimal.
The processing plant is run by OBI Seafoods, a joint merger involving Ocean Beauty Seafoods and Cooke Inc. OBI previously had an outbreak of 139 employees at its plant in Seward, Alaska, and reported several cases at a plant in Bristol Bay, Alaska earlier this summer.
Health officials and the seafood industry, however, breathed a sigh of relief last week in Bristol Bay, where the season wound down without reports of major transmission despite pre-season fears of an outbreak in the rural western Alaska outpost. But crowded processing plants and at-sea processors in other areas are not faring so well. American Seafoods suffered an outbreak of 85 workers on a trawler last month, following a similar outbreak in June after one of its ships had been fishing for Pacific whiting off the West Coast. Recently, plants in Juneau and Anchorage belonging to Alaska Glacier Seafoods and Copper River Seafoods saw outbreaks of 62 and 76 employees, respectively.
The state’s coronavirus dashboard was reporting over 3,000 active cases of COVID-19 as of Friday, 7 August, with nearly 20 percent of those non-resident cases.
And while the industry scrambled to the keep coronavirus at bay, fisherman struggled in several parts of the state, with low run numbers in fisheries from the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers to the Chignik District to the Copper River.
The Daily Sitka Sentinel reported this week that the Southeast troll fishery would be shut down for eight days on a light coho run, which sat at just 340,000 fish harvest last week, 65 percent off last year’s pace.
In his weekly salmon report for the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, McDowell Group economist Garrett Evridge said keta salmon (also known as chum salmon) harvest was down nearly 10 million fish on the five-year average. Meanwhile, the sockeye salmon of 44 million fish was on par with long-term averages, while pink salmon will need a strong August to reach the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s pre-season forecast of 61 million fish.
Bristol Bay, Kodiak, and the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands were the regions with the strongest fishing on the season.
Photo courtesy of Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association
