Conversations
Next stop, Mountain Home.
Likely it was planned that way. Surely it wasn’t a response to that New York Times article of a few days ago, the one that used Baxter County as the focal point of Arkansas’s surging coronavirus caseload. I didn’t ask Governor Hutchinson’s press office; either way it doesn’t matter. Mr. Hutchinson is back on the road next week, with the latest of his “Community Covid Conversations” taking him first to the Ozark foothills, then down to the Delta and a stop at Dumas before turning north again for Heber Springs and then Siloam Springs. He’s already hit Texarkana and Cabot and Forrest City.
You might call them town hall meetings, or road shows, or rallies. If Mr. Hutchinson prefers “conversations” and “discussions,” they nonetheless are designed not so much for actual dialogue than as forum for dialectic: They are “critical,” the governor says, “to ensure people have the facts and science” about the vaccines that are free to the populace and available in abundance, but of which fewer than half of his constituents have availed themselves. The community gatherings that his administration has organized, he says, have helped to counter “misinformation.”
That’s a polite noun, exceedingly so in the instant case, but a convenient catch-all. It encompasses political demagoguery and political timidity, class resentments, racial fears, cultural biases, social unease, innocent ignorance and alt-right media manipulation and – and just plain nuttiness. Fearsome obstacles, all of them. If conversations can outdistance conspiracy theories and discussions can neutralize the acid and alkali of today’s public square, then by all means wish Mr. Hutchinson well, for the reports of viral impact in Arkansas are a dismal daily reminder of the needless sacrifice. There were those few weeks of encouraging numbers, leading many of us to hope the infection curve had truly, finally, been flattened. But then arose the new Delta variant of Covid, fearsome in its communicability, sending the various indices sharply higher. Confirmed infections. Hospital admissions. Ventilator utilization. Deaths. And a new concern, concurrent with the new variant: The age of those requiring in-patient care, including intubation, has dropped noticeably.
After days of steadily increasing Covid diagnoses across the state, the message posted by Dr. Cam Patterson, chancellor of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, could scarcely have been more stark. “The (UAMS) hospital… is full. Covid19 numbers increase every day. We are staffing inpatients in the ER and recovery room. No space for transfers. Running out of caregivers (nurses, clinical technicians), other. Support health care workers. Mask up. Get vaxxed.”
Patterson’s message, and Mr. Hutchinson’s, may be getting through, but so far not at the velocity required to bring immunizations in Arkansas to something resembling the national percentage. Almost 60 percent of Americans aged 18 and older are now fully vaccinated; Arkansas lags at 45 percent.
New research from UAMS confirms what was assumed from the start and statistically indicated: that people of color – Blacks, Latinos, Pacific Islanders – would have Covid test positivity rates far in excess of Whites. But yet another report, the latest coronavirus modeling from the School of Public Health, provides startling new evidence of the Delta variant’s impact. The overall test positivity rate is now at 20 percent, say the scientists, who offer nothing but grim projections for the coming month: more than 1,200 new cases per day, about 170 of them expected to be youngsters 17 and younger. Children.
Public and private schools, day care centers, colleges and universities – classes resume in mid-August.
The aforementioned Times piece datelined Mountain Home: It was a deeply reported, richly detailed account of how skepticism and nonchalance – variants, one might call them, of “misinformation” – about Covid-19 have stressed to the snapping point the region’s largest and most sophisticated hospital, Baxter Regional Medical Center, and all but overpowered its clinical personnel. Several days prior to its publication the newspaper carried a story on an essentially identical theme, this one involving the Covid surge just across our northern border, in Springfield, Missouri. Powering the outbreak there are the very same components that have Arkansas’s coronavirus case count (and its death count) registering alarming increases. The two stories had a special resonance for your columnist, a first cousin of whom had, short months ago, relocated from Mountain Home to Springfield, to be nearer family. He had recently retired after a long career. In the funeral industry.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Steve Barnes is a columnist with Editorial Associates in Little Rock.)