Gov. Asa Hutchinson on Tuesday stood by his plan to have schools reopen to in-person instruction next month even as a state group representing pediatricians advised against doing that in many of the state's counties.
Hutchinson said he's discussed the issue with teacher associations, superintendents and principals.
"Everybody is together in going back to school and going back to school safely, and we do want to be able to do that," Hutchinson said. "That's why we're working very hard, from a mask mandate to trying to reduce the number of cases, hospitalizations, doing our contact tracing, so we can be in a better position as we go back to school about a month from now."
The Republican governor spoke as the state's count of coronavirus cases rose by 728 -- the sixth-straight day the number increased by more than 600. The statewide count of cases, starting from March 11, rose to 34,655.
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The number of cases that were considered active fell by 169, to 6,998, as 886 Arkansas were newly classified as having recovered.
The state's count of virus deaths rose by 11, to 374, while the number of patients hospitalized with covid-19 increased by 17, to 488.
The number patients on ventilators fell by one, to 110.
In a statement Tuesday, the Arkansas chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics said it "cannot support a statewide return-to-school decision for Arkansas in August."
"While some counties may have extremely low rates of spread, others have growing numbers of positive cases or consistent positive test rates hovering around 30%, indicating that community spread is uncontrolled and testing is not yet sufficiently reaching all infected people," the group said.
"Additionally, safety policies and resources are not standardized across the state, leading to inequitable protection for children, teachers, and families. These disparities are especially detrimental to Black, Latinx, Marshallese, and other minority and low-income individuals who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 in Arkansas."
The group recommended opening schools only in counties that meet the White House guidelines for states on moving from one phase of reopening to the next.
Those call for a "downward trajectory" of cases or percentage of tests that are positive over a two-week period.
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The pediatrician group also called for all students in K-12 schools be required to wear masks, with "strong consideration given to requiring them" for 3- and 4-year-olds in preschool.
The group said school districts need "clearer guidance on how to achieve social distancing and smaller, consistent cohorts of students."
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"This will likely require fewer students to be in school buildings at any given time," the group said in the statement. "Districts should be granted approvals to allow them to expand into space in community centers or to use creative scheduling to allow for social distancing when they open."
It also said the state should purchase protective equipment and cleaning supplies for schools, including "full medical" protective gear for school nurses, first responders and teachers and paraprofessionals in special needs classrooms.
The group also recommended consulting with experts on ways to improve ventilation in classrooms to prevent airborne transmission of the virus.
DELAY REQUESTED
At Hutchinson's daily news conference on the pandemic, he and interim Department of Health Secretary Jose Romero, a pediatrician who specializes in infectious diseases, said they hadn't yet studied the pediatrician group's statement.
"Remember this is a moving target," Romero said. "Covid does what it wants, and we need to be flexible and adjust to the circumstances as they present over time.
"So any recommendations that are made today may not hold true in a week, a month or two months."
The Arkansas Public Policy Panel and Arkansas Citizens First Congress said in a statement that the state should delay the start of in-classroom instruction until all the state's school districts can meet guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
They said the state also should delay the start of virtual instruction "until we can ensure that every student has access to a quality virtual learning opportunity."
Among other recommendations, the CDC guidelines call for desks in classrooms to be spaced 6 feet apart when feasible, while the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends spacing of 3-6 feet.
Both sets of guidelines also recommend keeping students and teachers in groups, or "cohorts," and minimizing interaction between members of different groups to curb the virus's spread.
The Public Policy Panel says on its website that it "advances social and economic justice through respect for human dignity, diversity, empowerment and an inclusive, fair and transparent political process."
The Citizens First Congress describes itself as a "multi-issue and non-partisan coalition of organizations who work together for progressive changes in state policy."
Hutchinson on Tuesday also rejected a proposal by the state-controlled Little Rock School District's teachers union to start the school year with at least two weeks of online instruction, with in-person instruction phased in as the growth of cases slows.
"We welcome anybody's input into how we open schools, but it is very important that as we open schools across Arkansas on the week of Aug. 24 that Little Rock School District is not excluded from that opening," he said.
"It's very important that the children in Little Rock get the education that's needed, and in-classroom instruction is very important for that."
Arkansas Education Secretary Johnny Key added that school district officials have been regularly communicating with the Little Rock Education Association and have incorporated suggestions from the union into the district's reopening plan.
"As far as that specific request for a phased-in [opening], we have established the expectation that school will start in August, and we'll have in-person, in-class, on-campus offerings," Key said.
At the news conference, Hutchinson also played a clip from a July 12 NBC news report in which five pediatricians said they would be comfortable sending their children to school.
They were identified in the news report as Shilpa Patel of New Jersey; Jennifer Lighter, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at NYU Langone in New York; William Raszka, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at the University of Vermont's Larner College of Medicine; C. Buddy Creech, an associate professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.; and Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at Stanford University.
"That's just a short snippet," Hutchinson said. But he added, "It means something whenever they understand the importance of their children being in school, and that that is important for their emotional health as well as their education."
PROJECTIONS UPDATED
Also on Tuesday, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health predicted in an updated set of projections, dated Friday, that the state's hospitalizations from covid-19 will peak at 2,591 on Nov. 26 under the most likely scenario.
Two weeks earlier, the same model had predicted a peak of 2,794 hospitalizations on Oct. 29.
The predicted peak number of intensive-care patients fell by 61, to 777, while the number predicted to be on ventilators fell by 43, to 543.
The number of active infections in the state was predicted to reach 103,651, down from the 111,776 predicted in the earlier projection.
Those figures include infections predicted to be confirmed through tests as well as asymptomatic, undetected infections, Mark Williams, the college's dean, said.
He said the projections "will vary over time as the data changes and we have more data, and the more data we have, the better the projections will get."
"We just know if nothing else changes it's going to be a much bigger number than it is now," he said. "We do know that we can say that with confidence."
Another model predicts the number of new infections peaking in late October to early November at more than 9,000 per day "with no mitigation practice and increased mixing during the holidays."
If Arkansans refrain from holiday gatherings, that would drop to a peak of about 6,000 cases per day. If half of all Arkansans wore masks in public, new infections would have already peaked in late June, according to the projection.
Similarly, it projects the number of deaths will rise to more than 20 per day in November if Arkansans are lax in following public-health guidelines or drop to two per day with widespread mask use.
Williams said he's hoping the statewide mask requirement that went into effect Monday will prompt a "major change in people's behaviors in Arkansas, and at some point that will be reflected in the models."
"We are at a time period in Arkansas in which we will learn whether we can gain some type of control over the covid-19 epidemic in the state," the researchers wrote in the college's forecast report. "It was clear from earlier and current projections Arkansas is on the verge of [losing] the ability to effectively contact trace because of the high number of daily cases.
"To be effective, tests results must be reported and cases notified and contacts traced within 24 to 48 hours."
LATEST CASES
The cases added to the state's total on Tuesday included 110 in Pulaski County; 62 in Washington County; 46 in Crawford County; 45 in Benton County; 30 in Sebastian County; 29 in Jefferson County; and 24 in Saline County, Hutchinson said.
The state's count of cases among prison and jail inmates rose by 122. Such increases can reflect new cases as well as ones that were reported earlier but not immediately classified as being from a jail or prison.
At the Department of Corrections' Wrightsville complex, 216 inmates have tested positive, said Solomon Graves, chief of staff to department Secretary Wendy Kelley.
That was up from the 176 inmates who were listed in a Health Department report a day earlier as having tested positive.
The cases as of Tuesday included 10 women and 89 men at the J. Aaron Hawkins Sr. Center and 117 men at the Wrightsville Unit, Graves said.
Among workers in the poultry industry, the number of cases increased by five, to 3,660, from Friday to Monday, according to Health Department reports.
A Walmart in Batesville was listed in a Health Department report among the non-poultry businesses in the state with at least five active cases.
According to the report, the store had five employees who have tested positive. All the infections were active as of Monday, according to the report.
"We have had a few associates receive positive tests in the Batesville area," Walmart spokesman Scott Pope said in an email.
"I can tell you that all of those associates are currently at home, and we are wishing them a speedy recovery. Our records indicate that none of the associates that have reported positive tests have been at work in the last week.
"Additionally, we have protocols in place for informing associates that worked closely with those that tested positive, and we have made sure to take the necessary measures to support them. Those measures include reiterating the leave policy that is available if they are uncomfortable coming to work and conducting a deep cleaning of the areas where the sick associates work in the facility."
Other businesses with five or more active cases as of Monday, according to the Health Department, included ConAgra in Russellville, which had 91 cases among workers, including 31 that were active.
Evergreen Packaging in Pine Bluff had 36 cases, all but eight of whom had recovered. Producers Rice Mill in Stuttgart had 12 cases, including four who had recovered. Adams Fertilizer in DeWitt had eight workers, including one who had recovered.
Meanwhile, a report from the Saline County coroner's office identified an inmate from the Ouachita River Unit in Malvern who died of the virus last week as 70-year-old Charles Johnson.
Johnson died July 13 at Saline Memorial Hospital, according to the report.
According to court records, he was serving a 35-year sentence from Ouachita County for first-degree murder.
According to the Health Department, five inmates at the prison have died from the virus.
Information for this article was contributed by Serenah McKay, John Moritz and Eric Besson of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.