Category: Covid-19

The staffing crisis in health care reached a farcical extreme last week when ThedaCare, a health system in Wisconsin, filed for a temporary restraining order to block a number of its employees from leaving their jobs and moving to another nearby hospital.

The hospital argued that, because the pandemic had created a shortage of health care workers, it needed the court to block the employees from leaving at least until it was able to come up with a staffing plan.

As medical workers burn out, isolate due to Covid-19, and leave for other professions, the ensuing staffing shortage has gotten so severe that ThedaCare turned to the courts to try to fix it. It was a striking example of how the pandemic has turned the health care labor market upside down, putting nurses and doctors in higher demand than ever even as they must face the most grueling working conditions of their careers.

The workers and the hospital that hired them, Ascension Northeast Wisconsin, countered that ThedaCare could have matched the offers made by Ascension, but didnt. By declining to match and then failing to come up with a plan before the workers were to set to leave, they argued ThedaCare was attempting to punish the workers for its own shortsightedness.

It appeared for a moment that ThedaCares gambit might work: A local judge granted the temporary injunction. But the judge changed course a few days and lifted the order, allowing the workers members of an interventional radiology and cardiovascular team to start work at their new employer.

It was all bizarre. I talked to several health care economists and none of them could remember a situation in which one hospital had sued another to prevent their employees from leaving. It runs counter to the way the US has set up its health care system, which largely treats medical workers as free agents, able to pick where they will work at will. If anything, before the pandemic, the opposite happened: Nurses had sued hospitals, arguing that they were colluding to depress wages.

But the pandemic has changed the dynamic. The demand for health care services has grown dramatically but the supply of labor is relatively stagnant. That has allowed health care workers to command better salaries, with many moving to traveling nurse agencies that place workers in high-demand areas for salaries much higher than they would normally make in standard full-time employment.

What we have seen is a very rapid shift in the balance of power in hospital labor markets, Hannah Neprash, a health economist at the University of Minnesota, told me. This is a pretty extreme example of a health system acting out a bit in the face of this totally shaken-up labor market.

On its face, there was nothing unusual about Ascension hiring seven members of ThedaCares interventional radiology and cardiovascular team. According to the workers, it was not even a case of poaching; one employee saw the job listing, applied and received an offer, and other members followed suit because the pay and benefits were better.

But even if they had been poached hired all at once away from their prior employer that is just how the game is played. Health systems will sometimes recruit entire teams because they have built a rapport with one another that is essential to good medicine. Hospitals will often market themselves as having good teams in a specific area of treatment stroke care, for example and they justify the claims based on the amount of experience the workers have together.

Thats not new behavior in any way at all, Joanne Spetz, a health economist at the University of California San Francisco, told me. The poaching and recruitment of full teams happened pre-pandemic.

But in the last two years, when Covid-19 cases soared, so did the demand for medical workers. In some areas, the number of jobs for certain specialties, such as ICU nurses, increased by more than 300 percent early in the pandemic, according to one study on the health care labor market during Covid-19.

Even with demand soaring, the supply of health care workers couldnt keep up. In fact, there was some downward pressure on supply. Many medical workers left the profession in the pandemic, burned out by the most difficult working conditions of their lives. There were also new restrictions on medical workers migrating into the United States during the public health emergency, cutting off another source of new workers to meet the demand.

As a result, the market had to compensate as best it could. Hospitals facing the greatest strain were willing to pay the highest rates to meet their demand. Many hospitals resorted to traveling nursing agencies to fill their short-term needs. Because of this extraordinary demand, those positions were being paid salaries exponentially higher than the typical full-time employment salary.

One way to accommodate that demand is temporary workers moving to where theyre needed at the moment. The wages for these temp workers has gone through the roof, Joshua Gottlieb, a health care economist at the University of Chicago, told me. That is normal supply and demand. In the short term, its hard for quantities of workers to adjust, so prices have to adjust.

This effect has been felt most acutely in the practice areas most strained by Covid-19 itself: ICU workers, ER nurses, etc. As Gottlieb and his co-author Avi Zenilman noted in the paper on labor market elasticity, the pandemic had not had appreciable effect on, for example, the wages of labor and delivery nurses.

But the pandemic may have still indirectly contributed to the circumstances that led ThedaCare to make such an extraordinary gambit to try to block employees from leaving the interventional radiology and cardiovascular team, which focuses on minimally invasive procedures for heart- and blood-related conditions.

Hospitals have on the whole fared okay during the pandemic, Spetz told me. There was a dramatic drop in elective procedures in the spring of 2020, but hospitals have largely been able to keep those services operating during subsequent waves. The federal government also provided substantial financial relief to the industry. That is not universally true some hospitals have been forced to close as a result of Covid-19, concentrated in rural areas that were already struggling before the pandemic but taken as a whole, the industry has not been as battered as much as was originally feared.

There are exceptions, but one does not look at the hospital industry and say this is an industry thats in big trouble, she said. Its doing just fine from a profitability standpoint.

But the government relief has since run out and the omicron variant put new unexpected pressure on hospital systems, forcing some to cancel or postpone more lucrative lines of services once again. Hospitals might be feeling the financial squeeze now more than ever, unless Congress appropriates another round of financial support.

And this kind of care interventional radiology in particular tends to be a moneymaker for hospitals, Neprash pointed out to me.

They are doing the stuff that is really lucrative, she said. She wondered what would have happened if members of the labor and delivery or the inpatient psychiatric teams, two less lucrative areas, had walked out. It would not have put the institutions revenue on the line.

The gambit failed. But that they attempted it at all is just a sign of the times for the US health system.

More:

The ThedaCare lawsuit shows how Covid-19 disrupted the nursing labor market - Vox.com

WASHINGTONPresident Biden took office with a detailed plan to battle Covid-19 by accelerating vaccinations, reopening schools and selling a massive stimulus proposal to help embattled state and local officials rein in the virus.

The course of the pandemic has repeatedly forced the administration to deviate from that initial script.At times, administration officials have been able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. But in other cases, by their own admission, they failed to anticipate how the virus would evolve and how Americans would respond.

Read more from the original source:

Biden Had Strategy to Beat Covid-19. Then Variants Arrived. - The Wall Street Journal

Below is the full COVID-19 report for Jan. 27.

LAS VEGAS (KLAS) Case counts, test positivity rates and hospitalizations are all trending downward as the weekend begins all signs that the COVID-19 numbers will continue to decline in Clark County and across the state.

Hopes that the omicron variant has reached its peak continue to see evidence in the numbers released today. The delta variant remains as a source of concern after several weeks that brought soaring numbers of omicron cases.

Deaths often reported days or even weeks after they actually occur will continue in the wake of the latest surge. In todays reports, of the 39 deaths reported statewide, 33 occurred in Clark County.

COVID-19 patients in hospitals declined by 68 in Clark County (now 1,524 total) and by 69 statewide (now 1,797 total).

Clark County reports 2,566 new COVID-19 cases about 250 fewer than yesterday while the state reported 3,999 new cases. Omicron accounts for 99% of the cases statewide, with the remaining 1% caused by the delta variant.

Test positivity rates continue to fall, with Clark County reporting 34.3% and the state reporting 34.0%. Its a long way to the states goal of 8% (or lower) test positivity, but the rate has now dropped for five straight days.

The lower infection rate doesnt mean the virus isnt still circulating. The omicron variant is highly contagious, and vaccines have proven to reduce the chance of severe illness. Health officials emphasize the importance of getting vaccinated and wearing a mask indoors in public places.

In a report on breakthrough cases, the Southern Nevada Health District said that the delta variant not omicron is responsible for 94% of all breakthrough cases. Omicron hasnt caused any hospitalizations or deaths, SNHD said in a recent report, and it is causing only 1% of breakthrough cases to date.

The graphs below show the test positivity for the state (first image), followed by Clark Countys test positivity rate.

A total of 15,339 tests were reported in the county, and 20,242 across Nevada. People can now begin ordering four COVID-19 home tests from the post office for free delivery (https://www.covidtests.gov/). At-home tests are not even counted in the states figures.

Information from the Nevada State Public Health Laboratory indicates that 100% of the recently tested samples in Clark County were from the omicron variant. Omicron accounts for 99% of the recent cases across the state. About 5% of all tests are analyzed to determine which strain of COVID-19 is present, according to the labs website.

A look at current COVID-19 numbers:

As of Jan. 20, the Southern Nevada Health District reports there are 282 breakthrough deaths (+12), 919 breakthrough hospitalizations (+23) and 50,443 breakthrough cases (+11,342). (Increases are compared to numbers reported on Jan. 13.) Breakthrough cases now account for almost 42% of all new COVID-19 cases.

SNHD notes that the delta variant accounts for 86% of all breakthrough deaths, 92% of breakthrough hospitalizations and 94% of breakthrough cases. Omicron hasnt caused any hospitalizations or deaths, SNHD said, and it is causing only 1% of breakthrough cases to date.

*NOTE: Daily lab data from DHHS and SNHD reports is updated every morning for theprevious day.

The test positivity rate in Clark County is at 35.0%, which keeps the county on the states watch list for elevated transmission risk. The rate must be below 8% and a separate measure of the countys case rate currently high at 702.7 cases (per 100,000 population over the past seven days) needs to drop below 50 for two straight weeks before the mask mandate can end.

In todays report, all of Nevadas 17 counties are flagged for high transmission.

Clark Countys case rate (4,427 per 100,000 over the past 30 days) and test positivity rate (34.3%) are flagged in data reported today. Testing (639 tests per day per 100,000) is within the states acceptable range.

Thestates health department reports4,184,649 dosesof the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in Nevada,as of Jan. 27.

As of yesterday, 55.70% of Nevadans currently eligible for the vaccine are fully vaccinated, and 66.33% of the eligible population has initiated vaccinations. Clark County reports that 55.08% of its eligible residents are fully vaccinated.

NOTE: The state is not updating hospitalization dataonweekendsor holidays.

According to the statesDepartment of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the number of hospitalized patients in Nevada wasdown (-69) since yesterday. The number of patients dropped by 68 in Clark County.

The current number of hospitalizations is1,797 confirmed/suspected cases statewide. Hospitals reported 325 of those patients were in intensive care units, and 169 were on ventilators.To give some perspective, the state set a record high for hospitalized patients on Dec. 13, 2020, with 2,025 patients.

A weekly update from the Nevada Hospital Association notes that the sheer volume of omicron cases has overwhelmed hospitals in Clark County.

While omicron appears to be less virulent than other variants, the sheer volume of cases is stressing the hospitals combined with employee illness and required isolation days, NHA said.

The graphs below show hospitalizations in Nevada (first image) and in Clark County:

The number of people who have recovered from the virus in Southern Nevada continues to increase. The latest county update estimates a total of 430,339 recovered cases; thats 91.7% of all reported cases in the county, according toSNHDs latest report.

Nevadareopened to 100% capacity on June 1and social distancing guidelines lifted, helping the state return to mostly pre-pandemic times, with some exceptions.

The CDC reversed course on July 27, saying fully vaccinated Americans in areas with substantial and high transmission should wear masks indoors when in public as COVID-19 cases rise. Most of Nevada falls into those two risk categories.

Nevada said it would adopt the CDCs guidance with the new mask guidelinethat went into effect at 12:01 a.m. on July 30. Thisoverrides Clark Countys employee mask mandate, which went into effect in mid-July.

On Aug. 16, Gov. Sisolak signed a new directivethat allows fully vaccinated attendees at large gatherings to remove their masks, but only if the venue chooses to require everyone in attendance to provide proof of vaccination. Those who have just one shot and are not fully vaccinated would still be allowed to attend, as would children under 12, but both would need to wear masks.

Masks still must be worn when required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules and regulations, including local businesses and workplace guidance.

State approval for vaccinating children 5-11 years old was given on Nov. 3, with plans by the Southern Nevada Health District to begin vaccinations on Nov. 10. The Pfizer vaccine is the only vaccine approved for children at this time.

SEE ALSO:Previous days report

Originally posted here:

NEW: COVID-19 numbers trending lower in Clark County headed into the weekend - KLAS - 8 News Now

Vehicle wait in line at the Capstone Clinic drive-thru COVID-19 test site at the Alaska Airlines Center parking lot on the UAA Campus on Monday, Jan. 10, 2022. (Bill Roth / ADN)

Alaska reported rising virus hospitalization numbers Friday and the highest case rate in the nation as the omicron variant continues to snarl staffing at health care facilities that have had to adapt to the ups and downs of the pandemic.

The state on Friday reported 5,897 cases of COVID-19 over the past two days and a seven-day case rate of 2,360.4 cases per 100,000 higher than any other U.S. state, according to a CDC tracker.

Meanwhile, cases and hospitalizations in many other states and countries continued to fall. Alaskas omicron surge began a few weeks after other states, which is likely why cases here have not yet begun to slow, Dr. Anne Zink, Alaskas chief medical officer, said Thursday during a call with reporters.

Alaska, Oklahoma and Washington are currently leading the pack, she said, while many of the East Coast states such as Maryland and Washington, D.C., have really started to come down significantly after these large peaks. So just different places at different times with this virus.

The latest case count included 5,699 cases among Alaska residents and 198 among nonresidents in the state.

[Coronavirus Q&A: Facts and tips for Alaskans as omicron drives up case counts]

Around the world, omicron surges have been marked by less severe disease in many cases, along with fewer hospitalizations and deaths. However, in Alaska, a combination of staff shortages and rising patient counts are continuing to strain the states health care system.

By Friday, there were 156 COVID-positive patients hospitalized up from 129 reported Wednesday and 139 reported Monday, but still well below the more than 230 hospitalizations reported during a peak last fall. About 15% of all hospitalizations in the state involved people with COVID-19.

At Providence Alaska Medical Center, the states largest hospital, there were somewhere between 80 and 100 staff members who had called out on Friday due to illness or possible exposure, according to Mikal Canfield, hospital spokesman. Just one ICU bed remained available by Friday at noon.

One hopeful sign, Canfield said, was that it appeared as though staff callouts at the hospital had somewhat plateaued by the end of week they were neither decreasing or increasing.

At Alaska Native Medical Center, our COVID inpatient numbers have gradually increased, but we do have beds available, said Fiona Brosnan, a hospital spokeswoman. She said that staffing continued to be challenging with high numbers of callouts.

Despite the surge in cases and hospitalizations, Zink said she thinks that in some ways, Alaskas pandemic response feels smoother this time around.

Unfortunately, we had a bad delta surge here in this state, and what happened was the team got really good at being able to record a lot of cases quickly. The health care sector started to meet on a regular basis, she explained. We figured out how to get additional nurses.

[At-home COVID-19 tests that freeze in transit are likely still usable just make sure theyre thawed out]

Other states hit less hard by delta are now very underwater trying to figure out how to respond during omicron, she said. So I think we just have to use a lot of caution when we look directly at state-to-state comparisons, to have a full sense of whats happening.

Public health officials continue to emphasize vaccination, as well as social distancing and masking, as the best ways to combat the omicron variant. As of Friday, just over 61% of residents over 5 and military members or veterans had completed their primary series of vaccinations. Only about a quarter of eligible residents had received booster shots.

The national average for fully vaccinated people is 63%. Alaska ranks 33rd among states for its vaccination rate.

Alaska on Friday also reported four more deaths from the virus, all involving Anchorage residents: three men in their 40s, 60s and 70s, respectively, plus a woman in her 70s.

Since March 2020, there have been 1,052 COVID-19 deaths among Alaska residents and 33 nonresident deaths.

View original post here:

Alaska's COVID-19 case rate is again the highest in the nation as hospitalizations tick up - Anchorage Daily News

COVID-19 is already throwing a wrench into plans for Team USA, a week before the 2022 Winter Olympics begin.

Multiple members of the United States bobsled and skeleton team have tested positive for the virus, Yahoo Sports reported on Friday night.

Bobsledder Josh Williamson announced Wednesday in an Instagram post that he had tested positive for COVID-19 last Sunday, but he is reportedly not the only one. There is at least one other athlete, in addition to multiple coaches and support staff, who tested positive, according to Yahoo. A team official confirmed to the website that there were multiple positive tests but did not specify details.

Its all a nightmare, one athlete told Yahoo Sports.

Williamson said in his Instagram post that while he was not able to fly to Beijing with Team USA, there were later flights that he could get on once he returns multiple negative tests. The Olympics officially begin Friday but bobsled training runs dont begin until Feb. 10.

The team official told Yahoo that at this time, [the federation] still expect[s] everyone to go to Beijing. What could complicate matters is anyone who tested positive will need four straight days of negative PCR tests and a fifth-day buffer before they can depart for Beijing.

Team USA won the silver medal in two-woman bobsled in 2018. Elana Meyers Taylor, who won the silver with Lauren Gibbs, tweeted on Thursday that she had made it to Beijing and passed her first COVID-19 test.

More here:

US Olympic bobsled team already facing COVID-19 'nightmare' - New York Post

The Flathead City-County Health Department is planning on distributing free COVID-19 antigen tests Feb. 1 at the Flathead County Fairgrounds.

The tests will be available at the Expo Building from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. or until supplies run out. Test kits will be limited to one kit per individual per household. Each kit contains two tests.

Businesses can also request COVID-19 test kits, and the health department asks that businesses fill out and submit a form, after which businesses are asked to send someone to pick up their requested supply at the fairgrounds during the distribution event. In a press release announcing the test distribution event, the health department notes that allocations will depend on the number of employees and the current test kit supply, and that businesses will be allowed a maximum of one test kit per employee.

The tests kits include CareStart tests, which are self-administered and provide results in 10 minutes.

Health Officer Joe Russell told the Beacon recently that the health department had requested 5,000 kits from the state, which he said amounted to about a quarter of the test kits allocated for Flathead County out of the recent shipment.

The test distribution marks a turnaround from the testing shortage that has plagued the health department since Jan. 7. Up until that point, the health department had been requesting about 1,000 tests a week from the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services (DPHHS). The new testing kits are drawn from a shipment of 650,000 ordered by the state arrived this week.

In a press release announcing the distribution of the tests to county and tribal health departments, DPHHS notes that those entities are required to provide an information page with each test kit, and that Montanans can report positive tests to DPHHS by scanning the QR code located on that information page, or by going online and filling out a DPHHS COVID-19 at-home test result reporting form.

COVID-19 testing is also available elsewhere in Flathead County, including at Logan Health. Hospital representatives earlier this month told the Beacon they had seen an increase in testing demand. By midway through January about 90% of tests conducted at Logan were PCR tests.

See the article here:

Health Department to Distribute COVID-19 Tests at Fairgrounds - Flathead Beacon

A military medical team is coming to Maryland to support health care workers treating COVID-19 patients.

A military medical team is coming to Maryland to support health care workers treating COVID-19 patients.

The 40-person team from the U.S. Navy will help at the Adventist HealthCare Alternate Care Site in Takoma Park.

This comes at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is sending some 115 doctors, nurses and respiratory therapists in five teams to five states to support civilian health care workers.

Maine is also getting the beginning support of a 15-person team, while its being expanded in Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio, a U.S. Army news release said.

The Secretary of Defense approved the activation of 1,000 military medical personnel to support the federal COVID-19 response mission last December. The first five hundred became available earlier this month and the next 500 will be available at the end of January.

They will join 400 other military medical personnel who have already been activated to help civilian hospitals.

More Coronavirus news

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Read more:

Military medical personnel to support Md. health care workers treating COVID-19 - WTOP

WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) Health experts say they are seeing a new tendency, an increase in false-negative COVID-19 rapid tests. This week KSN News talked with a local advanced nurse to learn more.

Luisa Taylor works for Free State Health Care and says since winter break the spike in false-negative rapid tests has increased significantly.

What happens is patients go get tested at a health clinic or a local COVID-19 testing site. Those rapid tests come back negative, but the PCR test comes back positive within a few days. The negative part about this is some people continue socializing with others during their infectious period and increase the spread of COVID-19.

We have a little bit of everything going on not just COVID so it is hard to know when to isolate but I would air on the side of caution. If you are sick enough or symptomatic enough that you are going to test yourself even with a rapid test, I would go ahead and recommend quarantining yourself for the 5 days that the CDC recommends, Taylor said.

Taylor suggests people go back and get tested after 3 days with a PCR test if results were negative but they are still having symptoms of a cold, flu, or COVID-19.

See the rest here:

Local health experts see an increase in false-negative COVID-19 rapid tests - KSN-TV

Young woman faces amputation after COVID-19 complications

Josh Cascio reports

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Claire Bridges, a 20-year-old, bubbly kavatender at the Grassroots Kava House in St. Pete, is sitting in a hospital room facing the unthinkable reality that she might have both legs amputated after getting sick with COVID-19.

Claire was vaccinated, but due to a congenital heart condition, she developed a complication that could change her life forever.

"She wasnt getting circulation to her legs and, because of that, there was a lot of muscle damage," said her best friend and roommate, Heather Valdes.

Claire nearly died multiple times, but somehow kept her spirits up.

"Claire is just a positive ray of light and she's a wonderful woman," Valdes said."When she woke up and they told her about it, she was very calm and very peaceful and said, I want bionic legs," she noted.

Friends and family have raised tens of thousands of dollars through online fundraisers for her medical bills and future expenses.Though her prognosis is dire, her best friend says Claire's future remains bright, even if it seems dark in the moment.

"I think she's going to make the best out of this and have many opportunities to come into her life," Valdes said. "Just take [COVID] seriously and realize it is not a joke."

https://www.gofundme.com/f/care-for-claire4

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-for-claires-medical-and-ongoing-expenses

Link:

St. Pete woman born with heart condition faces amputation after COVID-19 infection - FOX 13 Tampa Bay

By Michael Savitt

Updated: 3 hours ago Published: 3 hours ago

FILE - This 2020 electron microscope image provided by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases - Rocky Mountain Laboratories shows SARS-CoV-2 virus particles which cause COVID-19, isolated from a patient in the U.S., emerging from the surface of cells cultured in a lab. (NIAID-RML via AP)

Good news, bad news. We have new therapeutics under emergency use authorization by the FDA for treating non-hospitalized people with the omicron variant of COVID-19, but they are not readily available. These medications are used in non-hospitalized patients, early in the illness, when they work best against viral replication to prevent hospitalizations or death.

As most folks know by now, there are monoclonal antibody treatments used to treat COVID-19. There are three different ones that have been widely used up until now. Bamlanivimab/etesevimab and casirivamab/imdevmab are not working against omicron. Sotrovimab is the only one that is, and it is in short supply. It is being used to treat high-risk, non-hospitalized patients with mild to moderate omicron infections. The National Institutes of Health has published risk group prioritizations based on four key elements: age, vaccination status, immune status and clinical risk factors. If you are having difficulty getting monoclonal antibody treatment, this is the reason. It is not lack of planning by the State of Alaska or Municipality of Anchorage.

Other treatment options include the antiviral medications Paxlovid and Molnupiravir, also under FDA emergency use authorization. These are also not readily available. Paxlovid has many drug-to-drug interactions that may limit its use, but when used judiciously, it has shown 88% reduction in hospitalizations or deaths. Remdesivir has been used in the hospital setting, given intravenously. NIH and Infectious Diseases Society guidelines have suggested its use for non-hospitalized patients. Molnupiravir, another oral antiviral medication, has shown a 30% reduction in hospitalization or deaths. The FDA emergency use authorization is only if other authorized treatment options are not available or clinically appropriate, due to concerns that it may cause human DNA mutations.

We expect to see more supplies of these medications become available in the next few weeks and months.

It is important to remember that vaccinations, while not 100% effective, are still important to prevent severe illness and death. Even with so many breakthough cases, unvaccinated patients and those with no prior COVID-19 infection remain the most vulnerable.

The CDC has modified its guidelines on isolation and quarantine. Non-pharmaceutical mitigation measures are still being recommended. New information on mask usage has changed as well. The most effective facial barrier is the N95 mask, followed by the KN95. Cloth masks provide very little if any protection. Surgical and medical masks are not much better. Hand-washing for 20 seconds or more, physical distancing now recommended at three feet, and adequate room ventilation with room air turnover at least two times or more per hour to prevent accumulation of aerosolized viral particles. These four measures must all be used together to be effective.

Keep in mind that omicron, though extremely contagious and spreading rapidly, is still less virulent than previous COVID-19 variants. We have more therapeutic tools at our disposal than ever before, with more being developed.

Michael B. Savitt, M.D., F.A.A.P., serves as chief medical officer for the Anchorage Health Department.

The views expressed here are the writers and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.

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Adapting to the changing reality of the COVID-19 pandemic - Anchorage Daily News