Alaska health officials have allowed fishing companies’ workers to wait out a two-week post-travel quarantine in close quarters on their fishing boats, even after authorities denied a similar proposal by a North Slope oil company.
At stake is the health and safety of the hundreds of crew members who work onboard vessels in the Bering Sea. The protective measures vary from company to company, and the state has not explained its criteria for approving or denying plans across different industries, or even between separate fishing companies. It’s also refused to release mitigation plans to the communities affected by them.
In Unalaska, dozens of vessels plan to follow state guidelines and ask their crew to quarantine in their places of origin for two weeks before traveling to Dutch Harbor and boarding their boats. Once onboard, they’ll quarantine for 14 more days.
Those pre-quarantine plans are modeled off widely-disseminated guidelines suggested by the state.
Yet some health experts say pre-quarantining is riskier than asking workers to quarantine themselves after they travel to an isolated Alaska community.
While 14 days of isolation can protect workers from COVID-19 before traveling, there’s still a risk of catching the virus between their homes and their destinations. Many fishing industry workers come from outside Alaska and have to take more than one flight to get to Dutch Harbor.
After boarding, vessels often depart the harbor shortly after. And successfully quarantining and socially distancing at-seahundreds of miles from shore, on crowded vessels that can carry dozens of crewis very difficult, experts say. Crews risk contracting COVID-19 while fishing with anyone who has recently traveled.
Once you get on a planeor multiple planesand transport through airports, you have now increased your risk, said Megan Sarnecki, medical director at Iliuliuk Family and Health Services.
If one crew member catches COVID-19 while traveling, then gets on a boat, you’re all going to get it, she added. You’re all going to live with that.
In Alaska, only essential businesses can seek exemptions to a requirement that employees arriving from Outside observe a two-week quarantine at home. Essential employees are allowed to return to work during that two-week period, but their employers must submit plans explaining what protective measures they’ll take to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19 to other workers and surrounding communities.
For fishing companies, having the incoming crew self-quarantine on the vessel is a perfectly acceptable plan, Tom Koloski, a top state emergency management official, wrote in an email published by the Bristol Bay Borough.
In fact it is probably preferred, Koloski said. Once they are all on board, they can set sail and start fishing while still self-quarantining.
State health officials rejected a similar pre-quarantine plan from multinational oil company BP, which proposed to have its Outside workers quarantine in their homes before flying directly to the North Slope, bypassing Anchorage. Instead, all of the company’s Outside workers are required to spend two weeks in quarantine inside Alaska before flying to the remote North Slope oil fields.
Asked why the two industries are being treated differently, Health and Social Services Commissioner Adam Crum said the BP decision was based on the critical structure of where they’re at and what the rest of their peer groups were doing.
On the North Slope, Crum said, workers from multiple companies mingle in the same area.
You’re going to have a lot of different groups coming back and forth, said Crum. Alaskan residents and out-of-state workers together going back and forth. And we looked at that and realized that the best way to protect Alaskans was to quarantine everybody first in Alaska.
He added: In each one of these situations, we’re looking at what makes the most sense for the area, what’s our chance for cross contamination, and how are these groups going to actually work out together.
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