June 12, 2020 — COVID-19 has spread quickly in recent weeks on the Kenai Peninsula, which now has a per capita infection rate that’s three times the one found in Anchorage and 62 active cases as of Tuesday, according to state data.
While the Kenai transforms into a tourism and fishing hub during the summer, officials there don’t blame the high case rate on any particular factor — though they say some cases are tied to residents who continue to gather in group settings in spite of public health recommendations against that.
In recent weeks, state health authorities have been forced to enlist workers from other parts of Alaska for the painstaking work of tracking and monitoring the close contacts of sick people on the Kenai, said Leslie Felts, a state nurse manager. As of Wednesday, the state was monitoring 300 people there, she added. (That number includes both confirmed cases and the “close contacts” of those people.)
“Early on, Ketchikan had a lot of activity when we first started down this road with COVID,” Felts said. “Then there was some activity up in the Fairbanks area. Now, it seems like it’s our turn down here on the Kenai Peninsula.”