Remember COVID? It’s seeing another local summer surge

Severity and number of cases aren’t even close to pandemic highs, but federal cuts make tracking virus trickier, officials say

An update about an increase in COVID-19 cases at Bartlett Regional Hospital is provided during a board of directors meeting Tuesday, July 22, 2025, by  Kim McDowell, the hospital’s chief nursing officer and chief operating officer. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Independent)

This story has been updated to clarify the local halt of wastewater monitoring for viruses is a temporary logistical disruption and is expected to resume soon.

The tracking dashboards, free test kits and restrictions are largely gone — along with the public’s attention and concern — but the COVID-19 virus is still out there and making yet another summer surge in Juneau.

An increase in cases at Bartlett Regional Hospital is now common each summer — hardly a surprise due to the mass influx of cruise ship tourists — and that was again the case in a report presented during a board of directors meeting Tuesday night.

"We do have a COVID patient in house," said Kim McDowell, the hospital’s chief nursing officer and chief operating officer. "We’ve had five staff out recently with COVID (and) eight in the last 30 days, so it is going around again."

An increase in local positive tests has been occurring since the end of May, said Charlee Gribbon, Bartlett’s infectious disease preventionist, in an interview Wednesday. She said there’s also been an uptick in flu cases, and about 20% of people testing positive for either illness are being admitted to the hospital.

The number and severity of COVID cases isn’t anywhere near comparable to the peak pandemic period, Gribbon said. But because of that there’s also less monitoring and less concern among people about an illness that can still pose a serious health risk.

"A lot of things have trickled away and we're not tracking as much as we did," she said. "And there's a lot of reasons for that. One is COVID isn't causing as severe of an illness anymore in certain populations. But we in the hospital have a defined population of patients coming in with symptoms and so we can track that. And I report weekly numbers to the CDC about our overall census — how many patients are admitted, and then how many patients have been admitted with COVID, flu or RSV."

Functions of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been greatly scaled back by the Trump Administration since January, including firing one-fourth of its staff, ending recommendations for children and pregnant women to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, and removing much of the infectious disease tracking data from its website.

"It’s definitely difficult to find where things are placed on the CDC anymore," Gribbon said. However, she said data that Bartlett and other medical facilities are reporting is still accessible through a national respiratory dashboard at the site.

Another means of tracking such illnesses — monitoring viruses in wastewater — is not currently occurring in Juneau, although it is ongoing in Anchorage and some other Alaska communities. That monitoring is conducted by the Alaska Division of Public Health through funding provided by the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS).

Chad Gubala, the city’s utilities production and treatment manager, stated in an email Friday the city "had temporarily suspended its NWSS programming due to a shipping logistics matter and we expect to resume our surveillance monitoring shortly."

Skepticism about vaccines and other COVID-prevention measures has been prominent among Trump administration officials and supporters, and Gribbon now discusses flu and COVID side-by-side when assessing local infectious disease risks. But she said there still needs to be an awareness that certain people face a serious health risk if infected and act accordingly.

"The people at risk are those people that don't have the ability to fight it off as well," she said. "So we're seeing people over age 65 and people immunocompromised are definitely getting sick with COVID, and they can get really sick and to the point where their life is at risk and they're intubated and then respiratory failure. So it is, and will always be — flu and COVID and RSV — a major part of hospital assessment and readiness."

• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.