Dave Stieren, an anti-government government employee, is a regular fountain of misinformation about COVID-19. regularly spouting off with complete assurance even when he is delivering nonsense.

Stieren, a private sector champion, gets $135,000 a year from the state to tell Alaskans that Gov. Mike Dunleavy is doing a great job.

Stieren has given plenty of bad advice on Facebook recently on his private account, telling Anchorage residents to go out and party before rules took effect closing bars and restaurants to inside service as hospitalizations rise and the COVID-19 crisis escalates.

“Monday night, go to your favorite bar and party like it’s New Years Eve. Dress up. Uber. Whatever. Do it,” said Stieren, a former right-wing radio talker.

He complains about “woke scolds” who want him to “live in fear” and recycles the old line from the Vietnam war about the Anchorage shutdown: “The only way to save the village is to burn it to the ground.”

“If you own a business in Anchorage woke culture wants you closed and attacks anyone encouraging people to support you. The death of your dreams and future is a small price to pay for their moral superiority. Go to Twitter, Check it out. I’ll wait,” said Stieren.

Dunleavy’s office says that whatever Stieren says on his private social media accounts is irrelevant to his state job. It’s relevant because Stieren’s comments show an inability to assess or understand the scale of the health crisis in Alaska.

On March 2, Stieren mentioned a news story that said 10,000 people had died of the flu. “This is why I yawn over the beer virus,” said the Dunleavy spokesman.

What is clearly not irrelevant is the misinformation that Stieren dispenses when he is doing his job as Dunleavy’s mouthpiece. Dunleavy hired him for his ability to entertain an audience, but the state job comes with more responsibility.

Stieren falsely claimed in a radio appearance in Juneau on Nov. 25 that COVID-19 hospitalization numbers are being unintentionally misrepresented and inflated by Alaska news organizations. The Alaska news organizations are using state documents that Stieren isn’t reading.

“Let’s say today, I don’t know what the numbers are. Let’s say today 10 people are hospitalized. And the newspapers are gonna report that 192 or what have you Alaskans have been hospitalized in COVID. Now average folks would hear that and go dear, we’ve got nearly 200 people with COVID in the hospital. Well no, because people who were in the hospital have gotten out of the hospital.”

“People who were in the hospital for a day for something else have been out of the hospital. So when we say that we’re managing COVID case numbers via hospitalizations, it’s more of a real-time day-to-day methodology.”

“I don’t think they’re intentionally misreported,” Stieren said of the hospitalization numbers.

“It’s just easier to say, ‘Well, we have 12 more people hospitalized today, bringing the total number of Alaskans hospitalized to 200.’ Well, we don’t have 200 Alaskans with COVID hospitalized today. The number is somewhere probably around 18, of which 14 of those are there because somebody had a stroke, somebody was in a car wreck, somebody had a heart attack, somebody is in for cancer complications.”

Listen to the interview here. He launches into his false claims about hospitalizations after 5 minutes.

He delivered this gibberish on Nov. 25, a day on which the state reported 136 people hospitalized with COVID-19 and 9 others with suspected cases. There were 22 COVID patients on ventilators that day.

As Stieren downplayed the hospitalization numbers with his phony claims, the Anchorage Daily News reported that hospitals were under stress and "one has opened an overflow unit and delayed some procedures and another has a temporary morgue at the ready."

His years in right-wing talk radio have given Stieren the ability to sound convincing and informed when he is making things up. Alaskans deserve better than this during a public health emergency.

On Wednesday, the state said 150 people were hospitalized in Alaska with COVID-19 and 14 other patients are suspected to have the disease.

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