While Alaska officials said they have no current plans to close any of the state’s summer fisheries, more calls for stricter controls or outright cancelations have arisen lately due to fears that an influx in sector workers could contribute to the further spread of coronavirus.
In Bristol Bay, Alaska, a working group of major players wrote a letter last week asking Governor Mike Dunleavy to bolster measures or shutter the world’s largest sockeye fishery as a means to help contain the pandemic.
“The long-term cost of allowing a fishery to go forward would far outweigh the cost of forgoing one season. If the fishery is allowed to go forward without these measures, ignoring the warnings of public health experts and officials and the pleas of Bristol Bay communities, the consequences will be devastating and generational,” according to the letter, which was signed by the Bristol Bay Economic Development Corporation, Bristol Bay Native Corporation, United Tribes of Bristol Bay, and two other local organizations.
The area’s largest hospital has just 16 beds, with only four negative pressure rooms and no intensive care unit, the letter explained, with the closest ICU over 300 miles away. Neither of the area hospital’s two ventilators are equipped to treat COVID-19 patients.
“It is not an overstatement to say that there likely is not a worse place in the United States to be stricken with the COVID-19 virus than rural Alaska,” the letter stated.
For these reasons, local city officials in the Bristol Bay hub of Dillingham and several area tribal groups have asked the state to shutter the fishery for the season.
Alaska Department of Fish and Game Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang said that the state was keeping an eye on the Copper River salmon fishery before making a call on Bristol Bay.
"From that experience, which brings in an influx of fishermen into the Cordova area, we're meeting with the local representatives of the Cordova community as well as the fishing processing sector to figure out how to safely bring in processing workers to make sure that that fishery can occur. Right now, that's scheduled to occur. What we learn from that will inform us on how we manage the Bristol Bay fishery," Vincent-Lang told Anchorage’s KTVA last week.
Fishing usually starts on the Copper River in mid-May, while nets typically drop into Bristol Bay in mid-June. The fisheries offer major revenue streams for a state that was cash-strapped even before the coronavirus outbreak. A drastic downturn in summer tourist dollars and cratering oil prices – which had fallen below USD 11 (EUR 10.10) as of Monday, 20 April – are expected further deplete Alaska state coffers.
During a news conference last week, Dunleavy said Alaska had been preparing for the possibility of an outbreak in rural parts of the state since January 2020.
In an attempt to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, processors are rolling out plans to test non-resident workers and confine them to processing facilities, however, some of the plans have been criticized as inadequate. In Southeast Alaska, a local doctor qualified Silver Bay Seafoods’ protocols for bringing 450 workers into Sitka, Alaska, as “contradictory to medical reason.”
The Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce is encouraging unemployed Alaskans to take processing jobs to reduce the numbers of out-of-state workers.
The Anchorage Daily News reported there were 319 cases of COVID-19 as of Sunday, 19 April, with no cases reported in Bristol Bay or Cordova.
Photo courtesy of SevenMaps/Shutterstock
