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Most people don’t go to Alaska to visit cities.
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Which means they are in places being visited by lots of other people who might bring the virus with them. If you are the one carrying the virus, you will infect an entire community where there are even fewer health care facilities to treat people when they catch it from you.
For most of us in the United States, outside of New York, the "epidemic" is a media show. We don't personally know people who have a confirmed case of the disease That is almost certainly going to change if you look at New York or what has happened elsewhere in the world. There are plenty of small hot spots around the country where the virus has spread, but they are small communities with few people and never hit the media headlines. And places around the world that thought they had it under control, like Singapore, are suddenly having major outbreaks.
Frankly the danger of locking the country down to prevent an epidemic is that it doesn't work. It just delays the epidemic and when you actually need people to isolate you can't sustain it. Its fine to talk abstractly about "lowering the curve" but we may be widening it beyond what is sustainable if everyone who doesn't get the virus now gets it later.
I need a haircut now and since the virus is not spreading in my community it would be safe for me to get one. I will need it worse in two months, but by then its not unlikely the virus will have spread to my community and it will be dangerous for me to get one. OK, so I can survive without a haircut. But all those businesses that are closed and people who are out of work can't survive in that way forever.
For those of us anxious to get back on the road we might want to consider Churchill's quote during world war II: "Now
this is not the
end. It is not
even the beginning of the
end. But it is, perhaps, the
end of the beginning." My guess is we are not even there yet. The real question is "Alaska next summer?" The answer is "very doubtful". It will take a "miracle", in the words of one expert, for a vaccine to even be available a year from now, much less enough people immunized to resume normal travel.
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