ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska's surge in COVID-19 cases may be plateauing, but the next week and a half will determine whether that trend continues after weeks of pandemic-high case counts, the state's top health official said this week.
"Here in Alaska, you can see that we're starting to maybe plateau-ish," Dr. Anne Zink, Alaska's chief medical officer, told reporters Thursday while she pointed to a graph of new cases in the state. Cases are not rising sharply the way they have for the past few weeks as the highly contagious omicron variant fueled the current virus surge.
Nationally, cases are declining, and health officials say Alaska can sometimes lag a few weeks behind the national case trends. At the moment, Alaska's seven-day case rate is leading other U.S. states, even with Alaska reporting a 27% decrease in cases compared to the previous week, according to a CDC tracker.
