State agencies are working with local and federal authorities to contain and prevent the spread of COVID-19, commonly known as the coronavirus, Gov. Mike Dunleavy told reporters Monday morning.<\/p>\n
In a teleconference with Department of Health and Social Services Commissioner Adam Crum and Dr. Anne Zink, chief medical officer for the State of Alaska, Dunleavy said the state was consulting with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a> to provide for testing even though there have been no confirmed cases in Alaska.<\/p>\n “We got this. We started to develop protocols in January,” Dunleavy told reporters, referring to when a plane carrying American citizens who had been in the area of Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak, landed in Anchorage.<\/a><\/p>\n State agencies were watching the spread of the virus in other communities throughout the U.S. and communicating with those municipalities, Dr. Zink said. The state was ramping up its testing capabilities she said, and had two testing facilities in the state located in Fairbanks and Anchorage.<\/p>\n “We should expect more cases,” Zink said. “We’re acting as if we have cases now.”<\/p>\n The state has the capacity to test up to 500 people, but so far had only tested 23. It was important, Zink said, to be strategic in determining whom the state should test because the testing process is resource-intensive.<\/p>\n “You have to have the personnel, it has to be sent to state (or private) lab,” she said. “None of our local hospitals can do it.”<\/p>\n Results from the test can take anywhere from two to four hours once the samples have arrived at the lab. Though the state has seen an increase in testing, Zink said, that has not resulted in a “bottleneck” at the labs which hold up testing.<\/p>\n