Fairbanks (Alaska) Memorial Hospital has hit a record number of COVID-19 hospitalizations, with the city's positivity rate doubling since March, according to The New York Times.
In the two weeks before the May 2 article, the number of new COVID-19 cases in Fairbanks' borough had grown by 253 percent. The borough has seen its positivity rate double from 5 percent to about 10 percent since March, according to the Times, which cites numbers from its database. Fairbank's metropolitan area has nearly 100,000 people in it.
At a monthly COVID-19 briefing in April, Barb Creighton, MD, an internist at Fairbanks Memorial, said, "this place is on fire with COVID."
Several factors are contributing to the surge, including a low vaccination rate. Only 29 percent of the population in Fairbanks has been fully vaccinated, according to the Times. The population being hospitalized is also younger than at the start of the pandemic, according to the Fairbanks Daily-News Miner.