Before the fall UAMS projection suggests late-year surge in numbers

Even as the numbers of covid-19 cases in Arkansas get scarier, restrictions intended to control the disease’s spread are easing. How can that make sense?

Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced last week that the state was ready to move to Phase 2 of reopening, which involves further relaxing limits on how many customers restaurants, bars, movie theaters and other businesses may serve.

They had been restricted to one-third capacity in Phase 1 of the plan. On Monday, they were allowed to go to two-thirds, while still practicing social distancing and other safeguards against the spread of the coronavirus.

Businesses that had been struggling to keep their doors open with fewer customers got that good news last Wednesday, when the number of covid-19 cases in the state stood at 10,368.

That was the total reported since the March 11 start of the coronavirus outbreak in Arkansas. Too many, but still comparatively few, of the virus’ victims here have died. Most recovered and some remain ill, including some on respirators. The numbers change constantly.

To his misfortune, in the days since Hutchinson announced the state would move to Phase 2, the governor has coincidentally reported ever-climbing numbers of covid-19 cases: 448 more on Thursday, 731 on Friday, 548 on Saturday, 406 on Sunday and 416 on Monday.

Ask the question again. With that surge, how does it make sense to draw more people into contact with each other?

The governor’s answer is that “there’s no evidence of a correlation” between the lifting of restrictions and the rise in the number of positive tests.

By the time Stage 2 actually arrived on Monday, with its lessened restrictions on businesses, the total number of covid-19 cases reported in Arkansas was just shy of 13,000. And more than 2,500 of them had cropped up in just a matter of days.

Northwest Arkansas is now the hardest hit part of the state, with a significant number of recent cases discovered among poultry workers in Benton and Washington County.

For now, the state strategy to address the spread includes more testing and stepped-up contact tracing to identify anyone who has been exposed to the virus.

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has sent in a team to help with the surge in Northwest Arkansas cases.

But the scary numbers Arkansas is seeing now could seem insignificant if a projection from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences

College of Public Health proves accurate.

As many as 1,200 new cases could be added in Arkansas each day by the end of September, according to the calculation. That’s almost triple the average daily cases in the past week.

What’s worse is that more than 3,000 covid-19 patients could need to be hospitalized in Arkansas at one time in October. Just over 200 covid-19 patients are hospitalized in the state now.

Those are just projections. They may or may not come true. Whether they do will depend on a lot of factors, many of them in the hands of individual Arkansans.

Individuals decide whether to venture out to public places and for what reasons.

Individuals decide whether to wear face masks, socially distance themselves from others, self-quarantine after potential exposure to the virus or get tested if they have symptoms of the disease.

It is that sort of “social responsibility” that Gov. Hutchinson is expecting from Arkansas people to keep themselves and others safe from the virus.

Meanwhile, he is bound and determined to get the state open to commerce and to help businesses and health care workers survive the economic strain the pandemic has caused.

Working with Republican lawmakers, who had been asking for a special session, Hutchinson on Monday used his emergency power to provide immunity to businesses and health care providers from coronavirus-related lawsuits.

Importantly, they can’t have immunity if they willfully or recklessly disregard public health guidelines intended to control the virus.

They’re still obligated to try to protect their workers, but the governor also extended workers’ compensation benefits to employees who get the virus on the job.

The protections are contained in three separate executive orders. All were effective immediately and all will remain in place, Hutchinson said, until the pandemic ends.