Alaska finds itself at 97 deaths per million making it 2nd in the country when it comes to COVID-related deaths, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
The project found that when it comes to COVID-19 data, state authorities often have been looking at decontextualized data, which is causing hysteria like children staying out of school and businesses shutting down.
Alaska’s deaths and hospitalizations have not followed the same path as case increases and, instead, the state has a spike in observed cases, and substantially lower deaths.
“Alaska is seeing a large spike in observed cases. But like Alabama (a 2nd wave state) it is seeing only a very mild increase in hospitalizations,” the commentary read. “Despite having 3x the number of recorded cases as Massachusetts, deaths are substantially lower, and hospitalizations only just exceeded Massachusetts’ current rate. Alaska’s success (not unexpected given its size) relative to Massachusetts and New York renders it hard to even present the data on the same scale.”
Since Sept. 15, there has been a significant increase in testing for COVID-19 at 55 percent, which has also led to an increase in positive cases, leading many to assume the country is heading into a third wave of infections and deaths.
Emily Burns with The Pragmatist writes that it’s important to put the new numbers into context so that people will make wise decisions regarding what to do about the pandemic. She writes that in May, cases were tracked at nearly the same as hospitalizations. She notes that deaths and hospitalizations are more reliable data when tracking than cases are.
With COVID-19 testing up 70 percent since the second wave, Burns points out that the surge in testing is responsible for the increased number of new cases seen across the nation, not an increased infection.
