Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
State holds off on 2nd phase
130 new cases counted in day, governor opts for caution
Asa Hutchinson said Thursday that Arkansas is not yet ready to enter the second phase of relaxed restrictions on businesses as the number of coronavirus cases in the state’s official count rose by 130.
The increase included a record 113 among people who are not prison inmates, the second time this week such cases rose by a record amount.
Arkansas’ overall case count increased to 4,366 and the death toll from the virus rose by one, to 98.
One of the dead was the “blue light rapist,” convicted of raping two women in eastern Arkansas in 1997. Robert Todd Burmingham, 54, who was serving a life sentence, died Wednesday, officials said. He became the eighth inmate at the Cummins Unit in Lincoln County to die of covid-19.
Meanwhile, a former inmate at Cummins who had tested positive after being released on parole was back in state custody Thursday. Officials said he violated a state order to isolate himself from other people.
Although health officials are studying the reason for the spike in cases, the increase indicates it’s too early to enter the next phase of lifting restrictions on businesses and social interaction that were imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Hutchinson said at his daily news conference.
The first phase, which has included lifting some restrictions on businesses such as restaurants and barbershops and will allow entertainment venues to reopen Monday, started May 4. The second,
which would relax the restrictions further, could have started as early as Monday if the cases were on the decline.
“We’re not prepared to go into Phase Two next Monday, so in that sense, it does delay us,” Hutchinson said. “As to what day that will be, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
CASES INCREASE
The increase in non-inmate cases that were added to the state’s official total Thursday broke the previous record of 100 such cases that were added Tuesday. Before that, the record was 81, on April 29.
The number of hospitalized covid-19 patients rose for the second-straight day on Thursday, to 69, up from 64 a day earlier and 59 on Tuesday. Ten of the patients were on ventilators Thursday, down from 13 a day earlier.
The state Department of Health didn’t announce any new cases among inmates on Thursday, but 17 cases that were announced earlier were added to the state’s overall total as information from laboratory reports were entered into a state database.
Of the non-inmate cases that were added to the official statewide tally, the largest number, 21, was in Union County.
Craighead County had the next-highest number, 14; followed by Pulaski County with 13; Jefferson County with 11; and Sharp County with 10.
Health Secretary Nate Smith noted that he and Hutchinson were in El Dorado in Union County on Monday, when Hutchinson held his daily news conference there.
“We encouraged them to do additional testing, so I’m glad that they did,” Smith said.
He said the department hadn’t yet determined whether any of the new cases were related to one another.
He said that can take a few days as the department contacts people who tested positive and asks them about their contacts.
The number of new cases added to the state’s total each day has fluctuated, he noted.
On Sunday, for instance, just 28 cases were added, including 23 that were not inmates.
“I think this is a testing phenomenon,” he said. “As we get more and more testing out there, then we should see some stabilizing of our numbers and get a better idea of whether these day-to-day variations are true increases in infection or whether they’re increases in detection.
“We’re watching it very carefully.”
Hutchinson said the recent increase in cases and hospitalizations is “not encouraging for a quick movement into Phase Two, but we will evaluate it a little bit further as we get more information.
“Obviously when you see two days of increase in cases and two days of increase in hospitalization, that causes you to pause and say we’ve got to make sure we remind everybody to be careful, not to take this for granted and not just to assume that we’re going to be at Phase Two in 14 days, because we’ve got a lot of work still to do,” the Republican governor said.
NURSING HOMES AFFECTED
Both Sharp and Union counties have nursing homes where, according to Health Department reports, several residents have tested positive recently.
As with cases among prison inmates, those among nursing-home residents can show up in the state’s total count of cases days after they are added to its count of nursing-home residents.
Health Department spokesman Meg Mirivel said the cases are added to the count of nursing-home residents when the Health Department gets a report from the home. But the case doesn’t show up in the statewide or county totals until the laboratory information is entered into the state database.
At Courtyard Rehabilitation and Health Center in El Dorado, the Health Department reported Thursday that 15 residents and seven staff members had tested positive.
That was up from no residents and two workers the department reported as testing positive as of late last week.
Over the same period, the number of residents who were listed as testing positive at Ash Flat Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center, in Sharp County, increased by 23 to 30, including two residents who died, and the number of cases among staff members increased by five, to nine.
Statewide, 928 of the state’s cases were considered active, meaning the person had not died or recovered. That was up from 862 a day earlier.
The number of active cases among prison inmates increased by 10, to 305, while the active cases among nursing-home residents increased by 11, to 101.
Among other Arkansans, the number of active cases grew by 45, to 522.
PAROLEE ARRESTED
In Carroll County, Jad Perkins, 40, was arrested Tuesday on a parole violation after officials said he disobeyed a Health Department order to isolate himself after he tested positive for the coronavirus.
He was paroled April 20 from the Cummins Unit, where infections among 900 inmates and 60 staff members have been reported in an outbreak that began just over a week earlier.
Perkins tested negative before his release, but positive later and was ordered to isolate himself, Department of Corrections spokesman Solomon Graves said.
Graves said Perkins violated the Health Department order, and thus the terms of his parole, and was arrested Tuesday in Carroll County.
Carroll County sheriff’s office Maj. Jerry Williams said Perkins was booked into a solitary wing of the jail Tuesday and released to the Division of Community Correction the next afternoon.
None of the other 65 inmates or staff members at the jail have tested positive, he said.
Smith spoke about Perkins at the governor’s news conference Thursday, saying that officials will conduct “aggressive” contact tracing surrounding his activities.
“We’re taking that situation very seriously, and we will do our best to track down all the contacts of this individual,” Smith said.
Health Department spokesman Gavin Lesnick said a parolee being investigated by the department tested positive “around the third week of April and was considered noninfectious around the first week of May.”
“We are still investigating, but we believe the parolee’s contact time with anyone was brief,” Lesnick said in an email. “We consider close contact as 30 minutes within 6 feet.”
In 2018, court records show that Perkins pleaded guilty in Benton County Circuit Court to a felony charge of fleeing in a vehicle. He was sentenced to three years in prison.
Graves said Perkins’ release was part of ordinary parole consideration, and not among the hundreds of early releases approved in recent weeks as part of the Department of Corrections’ response to the pandemic.
He said all inmates eligible for parole are screened for symptoms of the coronavirus before release. Those with symptoms may be tested by the Health Department, he said, and if they are positive they will remain in prison until they recover.
Inmates at the end of their sentences also are screened, Graves said. Those who test positive may be held for 72 hours while prison officials work with the Health Department to obtain a quarantine order, he said.
Graves declined to say where Perkins was being held other than he was in the custody of the Division of Correction, which runs state prisons.
TRACING DETAILED
At his news conference, Hutchinson used the 64 non-inmate cases that were added to the state’s total Saturday as an example of how the Health Department’s contact investigations work.
Health Department nurses had contacted 49 of the people as of Thursday.
One of the others had died; one was hospitalized; one was a nursing-home resident; and two lived outside the state.
Nurses were still working to contact the other 10.
Smith said that, in many cases, a doctor has already told the ones who tested positive that they should isolate themselves at home until they recover.
The Health Department nurse will then ask the person to make a list of people the person has come into contact with while they would have been contagious.
A contact tracer later calls the person to gather that information and begins calling the people who may have been exposed.
Those contacts are then told to quarantine themselves and to get tested if they begin to have symptoms.
From the 64 cases from Saturday, the department had identified 127 contacts, and had reached at least 21 of those, Smith said.
Increasingly, he said the department is testing the contacts, even if they don’t have symptoms. That way, if they test positive, the department can begin investigating their contacts.
He said the department also directs people who have tested positive to call the contacts themselves to let them know they’ve been exposed.
“Time is not on our side, which is why we’d like to have a more robust contact tracing system in place,” he said.
He said the department hopes to use money from federal coronavirus relief legislation to increase its staff involved in the effort from 200 to 350, replacing people who are temporarily assigned to the job now with employees hired specifically for that job.
Up to about 100 volunteers, such as college students, also could aid in the effort, he said.
BENEFITS IN WORKS
Commerce Secretary Mike Preston said at the news conference that the state expects to begin paying out federal unemployment assistance to self-employed workers next week.
The state’s Pandemic Unemployment Assistance system went live earlier this month but hit a snag when a system error made inaccessible the supporting documents uploaded by 30% of those who signed up during a test period.
The 5,673 applications are still active, but those seeking benefits must resubmit copies of the documents. Applications filed on or after May 6 aren’t affected.
About 30,000 Arkansans have applied for the aid, Preston said.
With other state and federal unemployment benefits programs, he said Arkansans have received $357.9 million so far during the pandemic.
Of that, $109 million came from the state’s unemployment benefits trust fund.
Preston said $778 million remains in the trust fund, which he said means the state is in a “good situation.”
MASKS DONATED
Also on Thursday, Hutchinson and Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin announced that Taiwan had delivered 100,000 surgical masks to Arkansas.
The donation was part of the 2.28 million masks Taiwan announced May 5 that it would distribute to American states “hit hard by COVID-19,” the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Houston said in a news release.
Griffin said in a news release the donation “will provide our frontline workers with the equipment needed to help keep them and our communities safe and healthy.”
He also called on the World Health Organization to restore Taiwan’s status as an observer at the health agency.
“A report by Congress’ U.S.-China Economic Security Review Commission indicates that Taiwan’s exclusion from the WHO during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak led to critical delays and increased deaths due to COVID-19,” Griffin said in the news release. “The entire world would benefit from Taiwan’s conscientious leadership.”
According to a Bloomberg News report, China allowed Taiwan to participate in the health agency’s assembly meetings as an observer between 2009 and 2016 but changed its stance after Taiwan’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, was elected. China claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan. Information for this article was contributed by Nyssa Kruse of the