In a May 5 interview with PBS's Judy Woodruff, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) bragged about how his state had never shutdown the way others did. While most states did mandate a stay-at-home order, Arkansas residents stayed home themselves and took precautions similar to the rest of the country. Now, however, things aren't looking good for the state.
Texas Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and Arkansas are all experiencing spikes in COVID-19 cases after grand reopenings over Memorial Day weekend.
On May 5, Hutchinson claimed that he wasn't doing the reopening all at one time so that he could look at the data and ensure that each phase of reopening was responsibly done. A little over one month later, it has become clear that it was an empty promise.
After reopening on May 18, Hutchinson has blown through phase one and is ushering in Phase 2 of reopening beginning Monday.
If Hutchinson was consulting the data and forming his decisions off of them, he wouldn't be moving to Phase 2.
"On Friday, the state reported that there were 731 new cases, a record increase," the Daily Beast reported. "Those numbers brought the cumulative total there to 11,547, of which 3,764 were active. At last count, 176 people had died from the virus."
In March, Arkansas diagnosed its first coronavirus case and has had "super-spreader" clusters and events in the subsequent months, however, it's only now that they are experiencing such a large uptick in cases.
"It's part of a broad pattern in the U.S. of resurgent infections that are sweeping across many states," the Daily Beast quoted public health expert William Haseltine, from the Harvard Medical School. "We're about to see hospital systems in states like Arkansas ... begin to experience what we did in New York, with facilities being overwhelmed by this epidemic."
