ARKANSAS, USA — The governor and top doctor with the Arkansas Department of Health issued warnings to people as they announced another day of triple-digit increases in positive coronavirus cases in the state.
While the numbers are not being directly blamed on efforts to reopen the economy, Governor Asa Hutchinson called for citizens to wise up if they have any hope of moving to the next phase of loosened restrictions.
"The direction that we go from here totally depends on the discipline and the commitment of the people of Arkansas to avoid circumstances in which they will contribute to the spread," the Republican governor said at his daily briefing Tuesday.
The direction right now is up, with 151 new cases Tuesday with only one coming to a person in a prison. The THV11 tracking of cases shows big spikes on days when huge numbers of test results came back from prisons, but even leveling those out, the 14-day rolling average is trending higher than it's ever been since the start of the pandemic.
In the past week, cases have jumped in industries, especially the poultry industry and its workforce of mostly Hispanic laborers.
"As of yesterday, we had a total of 301 cases, who were employed by poultry businesses," said Dr. Nate Smith, the state Secretary of Health, who also announced that he will be moving on to a job with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta at the end of August.
New cases means more people are going into the hospital. The 107 announced as hospitalized Tuesday is just a couple patients shy from a record in the state. The governor's biggest worries have been hospital capacity, but after seeing dire model predictions fail to materialize two months ago, he says they won't make an economic mistake they made in March.
"We stopped all the other activities in our hospitals with elective surgery and other procedures," the governor said. "They lost hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. I can assure Arkansans that we have plenty of hospital capacity."
But with stories of "swim parties" in northeast Arkansas and sandbar bashes on Lake Hamilton caught on social media, Dr. Smith went way beyond the numbers with a story about one case to deliver a clear message to everyone about where we are in the fight.
"One of our recent deaths is a woman who was infected at a Mother's Day gathering," Dr. Smith said. "That's tragic. That's not what anyone wanted when they gathered for that."