Alaska reports 13 COVID-19 deaths and 593 new cases Tuesday

The state reported 13 deaths in people with COVID-19 on Tuesday, one of them recent.

Another 12 of the deaths involved people who died less recently and weren’t reported until this week after a completion of death certificate reviews. It wasn’t immediately clear Tuesday when the deaths had occurred.

The people who died included a Fairbanks woman in her 70s; a Fairbanks woman in her 60s; an Anchorage man older than 80; an Anchorage man in his 70s; an Anchorage woman in her 70s; an Anchorage man in his 70s; an Anchorage man in his 60s; an Anchorage man in his 30s; a Soldotna woman in her 70s; a Homer man in his 50s; a Homer man older than 80 and a Homer man in his 50s.

The recent death reported Tuesday was in an Anchorage woman in her 60s.

In all, 419 Alaskans and eight non-residents have died with the virus.

Both federal and state data show that illness and complications from the virus are significantly less severe in people who are vaccinated than in people who are not.

In Alaska by Tuesday, 60% of those ages 12 and up had at least one dose of the vaccine while nearly 54% were considered fully vaccinated.

Those numbers have remained near stagnant all month. On the first day of August, roughly 58% of people in the state eligible for the vaccine had received their first dose, a number that climbed by only 2% over the last three weeks.

Over the course of the last several weeks, case counts and hospitalizations from the virus have surged, meeting levels similar to those during the state’s major surges in fall and winter, driven largely by the highly contagious delta variant.

On Tuesday, Alaska reported 593 new cases statewide.

Continued hospitalizations have put the state’s hospitals on a precarious edge, with a strained staff and few intensive care unit beds available.

There were 121 people hospitalized with the virus on Monday, which made up over 13% of total people in hospitals statewide.

On average over the past seven days, 6.47% of COVID-19 tests were returned positive in the state.