COVID conversations, battling misinformation – Times Record

Steve Barnes| Fort Smith Times Record

Next stop, Mountain Home.

Likely it was planned that way. Surely it wasnt 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 surging coronavirus caseload. I didnt ask Gov. Hutchinsons press office; either way it doesnt matter. 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. Hes already hit Texarkana, Cabot and Forrest City.

You might call them town hall meetings, or road shows, or rallies. If 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.

Thats a polite noun, exceedingly so in the instant case, but a convenient catchall. 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 todays public square, then by all means wish 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 inpatient 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. COVID-19 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.

Pattersons message, and Hutchinsons, 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%of Americans aged 18 and older are now fully vaccinated; Arkansas lags at 45%.

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 variants impact. The overall test positivity rate is now at 20%, 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 regions 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 borderin Springfield, Mo. Powering the outbreak there are the very same components that have Arkansascoronavirus 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.

Steve Barnesis the host of "Arkansas Week" on Arkansas PBS.

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COVID conversations, battling misinformation - Times Record