BUSINESS FIRST: Governor Hutchinson, with Steuart Walton, head of his economic recovery task force, pushed business reopening over health experts’ caution about a rise in COVID-19. Now we pay.

Recommended reading: John Moritz’s report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about internal communications that show state health experts cautioned Governor Hutchinson about moving too quickly to reopen businesses in the state.

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There was concern about moving too quickly to a Phase 2 reopening (one health official noted it was largely academic given Phase 3 activities that had already been approved) and they noted the public resistance to wearing masks.

We know how it turned out. “These are not good numbers,” Hutchinson said yesterday after announcing a record day of deaths, a new high in hospitalizations and a continuing upward movement in the average of daily new COVID-19 cases.

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Arkansas moved too fast because business was more important than health to the governor and his Walton- and chamber of commerce-led economic recovery task force. (If only Arkansas had a health recovery task force.) By refusing to mandate tougher measures, Hutchinson effectively encouraged the widespread resistance to healthy practices such as mask-wearing and avoiding mass congregations of spit-swappers. States that moved quickly and stringently fared better. And people thought they were exempt somehow. (See Garland County, which thought it had dodged the COVID-19 bullet only to now be seeing an explosive rise in cases, the Sentinel-Record reports.)

Now the governor insists that public schools with better than a half-million students, teachers and staff MUST offer regular classroom instruction in less than a month as deaths and virus cases climb?

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Bill Kopsky had it right yesterday in an article about the dangerously inadequate plans for reopening schools (they boil down to trusting officials in underfunded local school districts to handle things, except in Little Rock where the Hutchinson administration calls the shots as it has incompetently for going on six years.) Kopsky wrote:

Our state and federal governments have had one job since March — contain the pandemic to keep people safe. They failed.

 

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