At Tuesday’s meeting, Anchorage Assemblyman Chris Constant described his recent vacation adventure to Las Vegas, where he said face masks are the norm and the Covid case counts are zero. No one complains about masks and everyone wears them when indoors, he said.
Constant said that Las Vegas, Clark County a county of 2.2 million residents, had zero cases of Covid on Oct. 9. Same on Oct. 10 — zero cases.
He noted that in Anchorage, a city of 287,000 people, there were 391 cases of Covid on Oct. 8, and 277 cases on Oct. 10. By Oct. 11, the Anchorage cases were halved, down to 181. Constant could not find the number for Oct. 9, a Saturday (there is no report on the State of Alaska dashboard for that date.)
“In Clark County, in early September they passed a mask mandate and they were able to crash their numbers down to basically zero,” he said.
Constant was fudging the numbers.
From the reporting, it’s clear that Clark County skipped two days of reports on the weekend and caught up the third day, on Oct. 11, when 1,237 cases were reported.
Why? The State of Nevada has stopped updating its dashboard on the weekend, and it they are piling those weekend numbers into the weekdays.
Case counts in Clark County show cases actually growing, if the 7-day average is accurate.
Constant was trying to bolster his case for voting in favor of AO 2021-91, the compulsory mask mandate for Anchorage, which is currently on the agenda for a special meeting on Wednesday.
Nevada’s test positivity rate dropped last week, but Clark County’s positivity rate increased.
AO 2021-91 is the subject of intense debate in Anchorage and across the state, where Alaskans have been both fascinated and appalled at the amount of rancor the ordinance has created in Alaska’s largest city.
