Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Health board offers help with opening schools
City’s public health officer plans to draft letter of recommendations
FAYETTEVILLE — The city’s board of health has school openings on its mind.
Marti Sharkey, a pediatrician with a private practice and a background in infectious diseases, joined the board for the first time Wednesday via Zoom after being selected as the city’s public health officer. She said she had two concerns with schools opening.
Contact tracing and quarantining could become a nightmare if cases emerge at public junior high and high schools, Sharkey said. She recommended significant block scheduling, such as four classes per semester.
Private schools opening five days a week at full enrollment will need to be monitored closely, Sharkey said. She offered to draft a letter for schools to use with some recommendations and information.
Fayetteville Public Schools will allow parents to choose either online-only classes for their children or a hybrid of in-person and online instruction. In the hybrid model, students will go to school two days per week with three days online, attending school from home.
Gov. Asa Hutchinson has said Fayetteville’s strategy strays from the state’s Ready for Learning plan, which calls for students to attend in-person classes daily.
Board Chairman Hershey Garner, physician with Highlands Oncology Group, said sending the letter to the School District should be top among the list of Sharkey’s duties as the newly appointed public health officer. The City Council affirmed her appointment Tuesday.
Garner expressed concern over testing capacity once students return to class.
“In a few weeks, we’re going to have the university ramping up and school systems ramping up, and the demand is going to follow that,” Garner said. “I don’t see how we’re going to manage that.”
The university has developed a partnership with a private laboratory in Little Rock to potentially test hundreds of students a day, said board member Huda Sharaf, medical director at the Pat Walker Health Center. The hope is to be able to test anyone in the university community, she said.
“They key is to be able to test asymptomatic students,” Sharaf said. “We wanted to be able to have robust enough testing to be able to offer that.”
Gary Berner, chief medical officer at Community Clinic, and Lenny Whiteman, vice president of managed care at Washington Regional Medical Center, both said results can take close to two weeks to come back for asymptomatic patients. Results for priority patients, meaning those showing symptoms or at high
risk, typically take one or two days.
The good news, Whiteman said, is hospitalizations appear to be dropping in Northwest Arkansas. Washington Regional, for instance, had 41 cases a week ago, but dropped to 29 Wednesday, he said.
“We certainly hope that’s a trend that continues,” Whiteman said.
Hospitalization time varies for each patient, he said. The average stay for a covid patient has been about a week, although Whiteman said he’s seen patients have to stay for 20 days or more.
Washington Regional is well supplied with personal protective equipment, but that could change with a surge in cases, Whiteman said.
Stacy Ryburn can be reached by email at sryburn@nwadg.com or on Twitter @stacyryburn.