You may not have heard much about the Southeast Alaska fishing town of Pelican over the past year, or the Indigenous Aleutian Island village of Atka.

Those places have stayed out of the news because they’re some of the few Alaska communities that have made it through the whole pandemic so far without a single confirmed case of COVID-19.

And as Nat Herz with Alaska Public Media reports, some of those communities have vaccinated enough people to be close to reaching herd immunity.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

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