The Arkansas Department of Health reported 851 new covid-19 cases on Saturday along with 14 additional deaths, raising the total number of deaths related to covid-19 in Arkansas to 600, according to a tweet from Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
The new-case increase on Saturday represented a spike compared to recent days, when the number of new daily cases remained consistently below 800.
"As we're less than one week away from school starting, we must do our part to bring new cases down & slow the spread," Hutchinson wrote on Twitter. "Students need school, so let's make sure we do everything we can to help."
Of the new cases, 140 were in correctional facilities and 711 were in the community.
The number of active cases in state increased from 6,359 on Friday to 6,487 as of Saturday.
In an interview on Saturday, the Health Department's deputy chief science officer, Dr. Austin Porter, said the state recently contracted with a third-party vendor to clean up the state's data on covid-19 infections.
Porter said the vendor worked to remove individuals from the data who were tested in Arkansas but have been identified as residents of other states. The update would be reflected in Saturday's new numbers, Porter said.
The state will be "reducing the number of positives that we have been reporting," Porter said.
The change to the data could be seen in the Department of Health's reduced cumulative number of infections in the state. As of Saturday, the total number cases since the start of the pandemic was listed as 51,992, a decrease of 400 compared to 52,392 on Friday.
Additionally, the state has been assigning county information to individuals who were tested but for whom the state was missing their county of residence, Porter said.
According to Health Department spokesman Gavin Lesnick, one previously reported death was removed from Friday's total of 587 for being a duplicate or out-of-state resident.
The number of hospitalizations decreased by two from the previous day for a new total of 464 patients. The number of individuals on a ventilator also declined as of Saturday, down five to 108 compared to Friday.
The state received results from 5,744 tests on Friday, according to the Health Department of Health.