Two months ago, local leaders in southwest Alaska’s Bristol Bay, a 250-mile-long inlet in the Bering Sea, begged the state’s governor to consider canceling the commercial sockeye salmon season. They feared that Covid-19 would spread through the region’s small villages, which have scant health resources. Now, preparations for this fishery, which starts in a matter of weeks, are barreling ahead as fishermen and seafood processing-plant workers descend on the region, and the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases shoots up across the state. As of June 9, Alaska had more than 600 cumulative cases.
In March, Governor Mike Dunleavy was quick to respond to the Covid-19 crisis, shutting schools and restricting intrastate travel in hopes of reducing transmission and keeping the virus out of rural communities where hospital beds are few or non-existent, and some people live without basic sanitation services like running water. But he declared the commercial fishing industry, which operates in numerous remote areas, critical infrastructure and began rolling out a slew of protocols aimed at protecting both public health and this $5.2 billion industry.
The mandates require newly arrived fishermen to quarantine for 14 days, to monitor themselves for illness, and to limit their contact with local communities. The state produced an additional 10 pages of enhanced protective measures for seafood processors. Companies are urged to follow CDC guidelines for meat and poultry processing plants and required to submit public health plans to the state. Processors can quarantine workers before travel to fishing communities, or at the plants themselves, and workers must test negative for the virus before being released from quarantine.
Each summer, sockeye salmona healthy run of 49 million is forecast for this summerthrong into Bristol Bay’s tributaries on their way to spawning grounds, attracting some 10,000 commercial fishermen and processors from across the state, the United States, and the globe. Commercial fishing will open here in late June and run for about a month. But with the salmon season underway in other parts of the state, these protocols are already being put to the test.
In early May, a week before the opening of Alaska’s first-of-the-year commercial salmon fisherythe famed Copper River runan out-of-state processing plant worker tested positive for the virus in Cordova, a community of about 2,200 people that had been virus-free. The Bristol Bay region had zero cases until mid-May, when processors began prepping for the season, and another worker from outside the state tested positive. Thirty-six more Covid-19 cases have been identified among seafood workers throughout the state, including 11 in a single plant in Whittier, which handles some of the state’s early run of salmon. Among the state’s 49 non-resident positive cases, the majority work in the seafood industry.
According to officials, the state is tracing contacts of all confirmed cases, and there are no documented instances of out-of-state workers transmitting the virus locally. That doesn’t allay community fears. About 90 percent of my village are at risk, said Lorianne Rawson, tribal administrator for the Native Village of South Naknek, where the commercial salmon industry has had a foothold since the 1890s. She worries about village elders and those with underlying health conditions, she explained.
I’m just hoping we don’t go on limits, said fisherman Joe Trotter. He dreads the possibility that Covid-19 outbreaks will force processors to operate with smaller crews or shutter slime lines as the production lines are known completely. That would slash the number of fish that seafood companies buy and force fishermen to reduce their catch.
2020 Food & Environment Reporting Network, Inc. All Rights Reserved.