KYUK News Director Anna Rose MacArthur and St. Mary's City Manager Walton Smith talked about enforcing travel restrictions and practicing social distancing in order to protect rural communities.
Traffic in the Lower Yukon River community of St. Mary’s has lessened since Gov. Mike Dunleavy issued his statewide mandates on March 27, which is good news for St. Mary’s Cty Manager Walton Smith. He has been worried that the traffic would risk further exposing the mini-hub community to the coronavirus.
“Fortunately, thankfully, it’s dropped off quite a bit. It’s dropped off significantly,” Smith said.
After the statewide order on March 27, which called for people to stay at home as much as possible and limited air travel to essential needs, Smith says that there are fewer flights into the community and fewer people outside.
The city and tribe joined forces to put a notice at the airport asking those transferring to flights to other communities to stay at the airport and not come into the village, but the city does not have anyone there to enforce it.
“The problem with us is limited manpower right now,” said Smith.
St. Mary’s also has limited capacity to enforce the state’s quarantine and shelter-in-place orders. They only have one village police officer on duty.
“There seem to be a large number of people who think that quarantine is for others, not for them,” Smith said. “I am so frustrated with that. We have one VPO on. He can’t get everybody to stay home.”
Smith was particularly frustrated by a call he got from a local resident wondering what the city would do if a person who had returned home from Anchorage did not self-quarantine as required by the state mandate.
“I said, 'You got to be kidding me,” said Smith, recalling his conversation with an Aniak resident. “You’re telling me that they basically don’t intend to follow the quarantine restrictions, and they want to know what I can do and how much I can fine them and whatever. And I said, 'You know, please make sure and tell them that I’m really upset that people would ask such a question, first. And secondly, that we’re following the state mandate, and if we have the ability to recognize that they are out and about after coming in from Anchorage, we’re going to report them. That’s all there is to it.'”
Smith noted that it would only take one infected person to spread COVID-19. He added that cities can’t force people to quarantine, and he is afraid that residents won’t understand the necessity until it is too late and the virus has a foothold in the bush.
“I don’t know what it’s going to take. I hope it doesn’t take having the virus get here and start spreading, and all of a sudden people are going to say, 'Yeah, we better quarantine.' It’s a little bit late by that point. I’m really, really, concerned about this.”
He would like to see even less inter-village travel to and from St. Mary’s, but Smith does not see that happening unless the governor limits air travel to rural communities. He says that air freight would still be necessary, but passenger travel could be more restricted.
