19 school districts deemed high-risk for virus
Nineteen school districts in Arkansas are considered at high risk of coronavirus outbreaks based on the number of cases among residents within the districts’ boundaries over a recent two-week span, according to information released Thursday by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement.
The center’s president, Joe Thompson, unveiled the data at Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s daily news conference on the pandemic as the state released a new guidance document on how districts can respond to outbreaks once classes start next week.
Hutchinson and Education Secretary Johnny Key said the data and new guidance don’t alter the expectation that schools will offer on-site instruction each day they normally have classes or the option for schools to shift to virtual instruction in response to outbreaks.
“This is not meant to change any of the plans for Monday starting school or whichever day of next week that a district is opening,” Key said. “This gives them a tool to help planning moving forward.”
The announcements came as the statewide count of coronavirus cases rose by 549, fewer than the 729 cases that were added a day earlier but still higher than the rises of just over 400 cases on Monday and Tuesday.
The state’s death toll from the virus, as tracked by the Arkansas Department of Health, rose by 10, to 641, while the number of people hospitalized in the state with covid-19 remained 499.
The hospitalized patients included 108 who were on ventilators, down from 114 a day earlier.
After rising Wednesday, the number of cases in the state that were considered active fell by 253, to 5,666, as 792 Arkansans were newly classified as having recovered.
The state’s cumulative count of cases, including those who have recovered or died, rose to 54,765.
SCHOOL DATA
According to the Center for Health Improvement, 83 cases among residents living within the Booneville School District’s boundaries were identified during a two-week span ending Monday.
That translated to a rate of 112 cases per 10,000 residents, the highest rate among the state’s 238 school districts.
Thompson said some cases are linked to the Booneville Human Development Center.
According to a Health Department report, 89 residents and 69 staff members at the center for people with severe developmental disabilities had tested positive as of Thursday.
The data on school district cases excludes nursing home residents and prison inmates but includes people who live in other institutional settings, such as the human development centers.
Thompson said the outbreak at the Booneville center could also help explain the number of cases in the adjacent Magazine School District, which had 90 cases per 10,000 residents within its boundaries.
“There are some important local interpretation factors,” Thompson said.
On its website, the Center for Health Improvement used colors to label districts according to risk.
Districts with 50 or more cases per 10,000 residents during a two-week period were labeled red, indicating the highest risk level.
Key said clusters of cases may explain some districts’ high-risk label.
For instance, he said some cases within the Cutter Morning Star district’s boundaries in Garland County are associated with “a couple of residential treatment centers.”
Meanwhile, he said, cases associated with a church revival may explain the Hector and Dover school districts’ high-risk label.
“Those are things that districts and superintendents can take into account, not to discount that risk, but to know that it’s isolated,” Key said.
A Health Department report Thursday listed 25 cases among residents and 13 among staff members at Shalom Recovery Centers in Hot Springs, which houses people with substance abuse problems.
The department has identified about a dozen cases associated with the Scottsville Word of Life Assembly near Hector, which held a revival in late July and early August, department spokeswoman Danyelle McNeill said.
In a memo posted to the Cutter Morning Star district website Thursday, Superintendent Nancy Anderson said the district had two staff members test positive for the virus over the summer, and both have recovered.
“One of those two members was not present on campus,” Anderson said in the memo. “To my knowledge zero students have tested positive.
“The state has determined our area to be a hot spot due to cases in the community boundaries, not the school district specifically. We plan to continue with the start of school Monday, August 24th and are so excited to see our students. We are following recommended CDC cleaning guidelines and can assure you our campus will be sanitized and as safe as possible.”
The Batesville, Blytheville, Centerpoint, De Queen, Dermott, Hamburg, Hazen, Marked Tree, Monticello, Rivercrest, West Memphis, Warren and Trumann school districts and the Lakeside School District in Chicot County were also labeled as high risk.
The Center for Health Improvement’s website also includes information for earlier 14-day periods going back to the one ending July 27.
During that two-week span, 26 districts had 50 or more cases per 10,000 residents.
During the two-week period ending Monday, the number of cases identified per 10,000 residents was 19 within the Little Rock School District’s boundaries, 15 in the Pulaski County Special School District, 22 in the North Little Rock School Dis- trict and 17 in the Jacksonville North Pulaski School District.
Hutchinson said school districts can use the data, along with other information, in consultation with the departments of health and education, to decide what steps need to be taken to prevent infection.
“If it’s a high-risk area in the community but there’s no cases in the school, and you’ve been operating for a couple weeks, well, there’s not any need to adjust, to go to a different modification, because you’re managing it within the school environment, and you’re making decisions based upon that,” he said.
“If you have a couple cases that arise within the school, then you have to say, all right, how should we handle this in context of what’s happening in the community?”
NEW GUIDANCE
The guidance document issued by the Education Department’s Division of Elementary and Secondary Education on Thursday is described as a supplement to an earlier document outlining how districts can respond to outbreaks.
According to the new document, moderate steps to prevent the virus from spreading could include serving meals in classrooms and barring visitors who are not conducting official business.
A district could also reduce the number of days when in-person instruction is offered, although on-site “learning options for grades PreK-5 and special education services should be prioritized.”
“Critical” restrictions include shifting to online classes “as the primary method of instruction.”
Such a shift could be triggered by multiple “cases confirmed within the school population due to substantial community or within-school activity spread, as determined by the number/rates of new or active infections and quarantines within the school district.
“At this level, the district percentage of staff and students affected substantially disrupts the delivery of onsite instruction and special services,” the supplementary guidance document says.
“Districts that meet this threshold will work with the [Education Department] and [Health Department] for long-term decisions.”
Key noted that at some school districts, “anywhere from 20% to upwards of 50% of their students have already opted for virtual learning” options offered by the district, so “not every district will have every student on campus next week.”
“If it becomes a situation where they find themselves and they say, ‘OK, a critical response is needed,’ that still doesn’t mean that they have to completely go to virtual,” Key said.
“That is an option they have. We’ve asked them for months to prepare for that. But they could still revert to smaller groups of students coming on site, more stringent screening procedures, more stringent social distancing, limiting the number of students in a particular classroom or in a particular setting.
“So those are all options, and that’s where we’ve refined the guidance to be able to give them that, the flexibility of the options there.”
TESTING RISES
The amount of polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, testing in the state as of Wednesday remained below the average of 6,129 tests per day that would be needed to meet Hutchinson’s goal of conducting 190,000 such tests this month.
But Hutchinson said Thursday that 10,358 antigen tests, which are generally quicker but less accurate, have also been conducted, surpassing his goal of 10,000 of those tests this month.
McNeill said 1,436 of the antigen tests have been positive.
Those test results aren’t included in the statewide count of cases.
On Wednesday, laboratories reported conducting 6,898 PCR tests of Arkansans, the highest one-day total in several days.
Since the beginning of the month, 115,915 tests had been conducted, or an average of 6,101 a day.
Hutchinson noted the state is still on track to test 180,000 people, or about 6% of the population, this month.
“This is a good, robust number of testing that we’re doing, and while we always want to increase it, we are at a strong level in terms of our testing,” he said.
NURSING HOME CASES
At Pleasant Manor Nursing and Rehab in Ashdown, a Health Department report Thursday listed 64 residents as having tested positive, up from 16 cases among residents that were listed in a report Tuesday.
Over the same period, the number of cases listed among workers at the home increased from 19 to 33.
Rachel Bunch, executive director of the Arkansas Health Care Association, said 12 residents at the home have died from the virus.
She didn’t know how the virus got into the facility and spread so quickly.
“The way we assume these things, people are contagious before they are symptomatic,” she said. “The elderly population is just very susceptible.”
One day in late July, every resident in the facility was tested, and 33 were positive for covid-19, said Bunch. The new cases didn’t immediately show up in the Health Department’s reports.
“Sometimes the information is delayed, depending on who did the testing,” Bunch said.
The home has 60 residents.
Bunch said five people, including the administrator and department heads, have stayed at Pleasant Manor 24 hours a day since July 27.
“They’re not going home,” she said. “They’ve been available in case other people got sick or miss shifts.”
She said the staff is trying to care for some of the infected residents at the nursing home instead of sending them to the hospital, if possible.
“Hospital transfers back and forth can be difficult, especially for older people,” she said.
Bunch said several of the coronavirus-positive patients at Pleasant Manor have been getting better and will “come off isolation” next Thursday.
LATEST CASES
Health Secretary Jose Romero said three of the 10 deaths added to the state’s total were among nursing home residents, and three happened in July but weren’t immediately reported.
The cases added to the state’s total Thursday included 51 in Pulaski County, 35 in Sebastian County, 29 in Jefferson County, 22 in Crawford County, 24 in Garland County, 21 in Craighead County and 20 each in Mississippi and Pope counties.
Among prison and jail inmates, the state’s count of cases increased by 50. Such increases can reflect new cases as well as ones that were reported earlier but were not immediately classified as coming from a jail or prison.
At the Department of Corrections’ Wrightsville complex, the number of cases among inmates increased by 19, to 598, according to a Health Department report.
Cases among inmates also increased by six, to 123, at the Varner Unit in Lincoln County; by four, to 45, at the Grimes Unit in Newport; and by three, to 27, at the Greene County jail, according to the report.
The report also listed one inmate at the Craighead County jail in Jonesboro as having tested positive.
At the Southeast Arkansas Human Development Center in Warren, the number of residents who have tested positive increased by five, to 14, according to the report.
The University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, reported five positive cases on campus for the week of Aug. 10, which was the first week of moving into dormitories.