201222_COVID-19 Press Briefing
JJeremy MayJan 7, 2021 at 8:34 pm38min
Unknown Speaker
Afternoon, Eddie, good to see you.
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00:18Governor Asa Hutchinson
Thank you for joining me for today's weekly COVID. Update. And I first want to wish everybody a good holiday under challenging circumstances. And sometimes it's easy to forget that this is an important season of the year for families for communities. And it's been changed this year. So let's just remember each other, whether it is by zoom or whether it is in prayer, or whether we have the opportunity be in person, I want to thank Dr. Romero for Department of Health for being with us here today. Troy wells, CEO of Baptist Health Systems, we'll have some comments IV Pfeffer, representing the Department of Education and Secretary Johnny key. And AJ Kelly, our Director of emergency management, who's really done a great job of planning, of looking at the future and helping us guide us through this pandemic. First, I want to give the overall case report for today. So if you could show the first graph, it'll give you a picture as to where we are today. And this in terms of total cases, we have an additional 1941 new cases of COVID-19 that combines both the confirmed cases and the probable cases, the confirmed cases as an increase of 1110. And the increase in probable cases by antigen testing is 831 for the total of 1941 new cases. Now obviously, this is up from yesterday, it is down from a week ago, which we measure it because there is a trend, day by or week by week, day by day. The active cases are down 179. very sadly. And it's troubling to me that we have 43 additional deaths. And that number remains way too high for us. very concerned about that. But it's a result of increased cases increase hospitalizations. We actually increase cases that we've seen even our hospitalizations has been fairly flat over the last couple of weeks. In terms of the hospitalizations, we did have an increase of 25. From yesterday, we'll talk more about that. We've had the testing was very high on the antigen tests of 4010. Our PCR test was 7869. We only had one county that was over 200 cases. Pulaski Washington followed that with Benton, saline and White County. I was speaking to the mayor McGill of Fort Smith yesterday and they they follow Sebastian county and they just said they're glad they're out of the top five. And so if you remember Sebastian county has been up there and I started noticing that they dropped down again in illustration that you can make progress. And I applaud them for moving out of that top five. With that, let me come back based upon those cases and make some comments. First of all, the hope for the future is the vaccines. And I'm delighted that we have the vaccines that are coming in for our nursing home residents and our staff and the nursing home. Rachel bunch showed me a picture of one of the staff members I believe it was and Batesville getting a vaccine and a long term care facility that's going to continue. They said their big rollout is going to be next Monday in terms of a larger scale vaccination and they will be training between now and then. So that's happening at this present time. Of course, our focus has been on our health care workers and we now have as of this morning 12,969 health care workers that have received the vaccine been given the vaccine since we started getting that distribution a little over a week ago. We've have received our allocations for next week in terms of the vaccine. And in terms of Pfizer. We will be receiving 23,400 new doses of the Pfizer vaccine and that will be in addition to what They will ship us for the second dose of those that have already received the first dose of the Madonna vaccine, which will go to our pharmacies to utilize for our long term care residents. That is, we'll be receiving 17,700 of those doses that will be utilized for long term care residents. This is all great news. I know everybody's asking the question, when is my turn? When will we as an essential worker, be able to do it? Dr. Romero and his team are working very diligently with Dr. delahaye. on making, making sure we have it just right in terms of our priorities, and who will be in category one, B, and who will be in one C. And we want to make sure that we hear from everybody as we finalize those priorities. But for now, we're still in one A, which would be the health care workers, the long term care residents and staff, and then the emergency service workers as well. We'll be vaccinated. I did want to talk about hospital capacity, because as you can see, we're up 25. Now, in our conversations, everybody actually expected the hospitalizations to be higher than they are right now. And that we are in better, we are better than expected position right now. Now, I say that because our cases have gone up significantly, our hospitalization has not gone up at the near the same rate. And so it's illustrated by the fact that our Veterans Hospital, as you recall, I authorized 30 days of utilization of our VA hospital space, which gave us an additional eight beds, only two of those beds have been utilized. And so our existing capacity has been able to manage the current caseload. But we don't know, with 25. More today, we don't know what the rest of December is going to be like, we don't know what January is going to be like because we don't know what Christmas is going to be like. And with the Thanksgiving spike in which I thought everybody tried real hard. But Christmas, we're trying hard. But if we are not successful, then we're going to see another spike after Christmas, and we have to be prepared for it. And so for that reason, today, I am announcing that I have authorized an alternative care site to be constructed to be built out, as in in addition to funding additional bed space, through a partnership with Baptist Health Systems. This will provide 124 new beds. Some of those will be ICU beds, some of those will be regular hospital beds that can be utilized. And this will be in Van Buren and in Central Arkansas, this will be managed by our COVID comm systems so that we can allocate to this additional space patients that are in need, because of COVID from across the state, this build out will cost $7.4 million. We hope that FEMA will cover 80% of that. And we're prepared to cover the 20% of our cost share by the state as well through previously funded appropriations to our emergency management team. This is important because even though it's going to take some time to build this out, we have to be ready for whatever comes in January, it is my hope that we will build this out. And we will not have to utilize those bands for COVID patience. But it is prudent upon me as governor to make sure we have that adequate space if the need arises. And so knowing how challenging this time is, we want to make sure that we take that step to build out that additional space. And with that, Troy, let me thank you for your partnership and help and doing this. This is one of the recommendations of our winter COVID task force that Troy serves on. They all support this. And this partnership. Troy Why don't you elaborate.
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09:34Troy Wells - Baptist Health
Good afternoon. Thank you, Governor. We're happy to be working with the governor's office, the Arkansas Department of Health and Department of Emergency Management on this project since the beginning of the pandemic, you know, we've had several challenges present us as a healthcare community, whether it was PP our testing capacity or bed capacity. We've talked about nursing resources in the past and we've solved many of those challenges throughout the course of the year. For more With the state, and all the health care systems in Arkansas, and today we're here just talking about one more step, one more challenge we're trying to solve and that is bed capacity. Obviously. The This is not the only thing that we are at least studying considering the winner task force will continue to look for other alternative care sites should the need arise. We think that this opportunity that we're talking about today, gives us some more runway gives us some more capacity. Before we have to make any further decisions or recommendations on expansion around the state. Let me just speak briefly about the two sites that we're talking about today. The john Gilbert conference center as a conference center on the Baptist Health Little Rock campus that will be converted into 50 patient beds, they'll all be negative air, and we'll be able to accommodate COVID-19 patients. That project will take about four to five weeks to complete. But that work began last week, once we had verbal agreement to move forward. The Van Buren facility. When we acquired this facility in 2018, it had limited inpatient capacity, but it was licensed for more beds need some work some renovation to create the negative airflow capacity that we need for treating COVID-19 patients. That project will take a little bit more time six to eight weeks, perhaps but it will be phased in such a way that if we need the beds sooner, we'll have some of those units up and running. And that expansion of 74 inpatient beds will also include a critical care or ICU beds, the benefits of working on these sites for this project, really the biggest benefit, it's it allows us for the easiest means for scaling all the ancillary services and other clinical services that are needed when you have hospitalized patients. So it's one thing to find nurses, which we still have to work on our plan to do that that's actively being worked on. But it's another thing to provide pharmacy and respiratory care, nutrition and food services, environmental services, lab diagnostic imaging, all those services, being co located with these expansions, will really help us provide that much more easy rather than try to recreate that in an offsite locations. So that's the main benefit from doing it this way. Governor, I'm happy to hang around for any questions that might come up.
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12:14Governor Asa Hutchinson
That might be the case. Troy's so thank you. And I'll ask Dr. Romero to come now. Before I go through more slides in terms of our our cases, but Dr. Romero, first of all, we're very proud of your work on the CDC advisory committee that set a national recommendation in terms of immunization priorities. And he's been a national leader in that regard, but also a great partner here as we're managing through this pandemic. And Dr. Mayer, won't you come and make your comments?
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12:57Dr. Jose Romero
Good afternoon. Thank you, governor for those kind words. So I want to focus today on pre emptive steps for trying to keep our senior citizens out of the hospital if they are infected. And again, I want to go back to what we've talked about in the past. That is we have a large supply, a ready supply of monoclonal antibodies available for use in the community outside of the hospital in it. And this will allow us to prevent admission to the hospital and may actually benefit the patient significantly. So for those patients that are of the right age 65 or older and have medical conditions, and are diagnosed with COVID, they should reach out to their providers early in their disease and contact them to see if they're eligible for these therapies, we are going to try to make these available through other venues that other than just an emergency room or an infusion center over the next few weeks. But these are there, they have been shown to be effective. And we want to have the public know about it and we'll be reaching out to the physicians, our vaccine rollout and I'm gonna change a little bit to vaccines. Our vaccine rollout has gone well, you know, we have not had any major glitches. The uptake looks about right. We're taking the doses that were received last week, about 51% of them have been already administered. We will be receiving as the governor said more vaccines. I want to stress to those health care providers and those individuals that are eligible for this because they are either working in a long term care facility or a residence in a lawn care facility. These vaccines have been studied well. They've been shown to be safe and efficacious. And I want you to consider receiving these vaccines sooner rather than later. We are continuing to follow the safety of these vaccines. Post administration we know that we are seeing some cases of allergic reaction as of last Sunday, this past Sunday, six such reactions occurred in this country. Those individuals all recovered And we're watching for them very, very carefully. And lastly, then just the usual admonition, we are entering into the holiday season, that season in which we tend to gather with our family and friends, I really encourage you to limit your gathering to family to the nuclear family, and not bring in individuals. And avoid large crowds use the mask even when indoors. Okay, so wear the mask, continue to social distance, we're seeing a lot of transmission in these small gatherings in these homes. And of course, wash your hands. So with that, I'll turn it back over to the governor. Thank you, sir.
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15:39Governor Asa Hutchinson
Long that line, today, the Department of Health will be posting the directee for indoor venues in which we've talked about this for a couple of weeks, we want to get it right. And I want to emphasize that this simply reduces from 100 to 10. The size of a crowd that will trigger prior approval or a plan to be submitted and approved by the Department of Health. This is to go after though the indoor venues to make sure they're safe. Let me emphasize a couple points. This does not mean that we can't have indoor venues as larger than 10 people, it just simply means you have to have a good plan approved by the Department of Health to make sure it's safe. And that you have your distancing, you have your master requirements, and the other things that are necessary to make sure that venue is safe. And then secondly, just we want to make sure it was clear that this does not apply to places of worship, retail businesses, community or school sponsored sports, restaurants and bars, residents, residences, all of those things either are not regulated, or they're covered by another directive. And so restaurants, for example, has their own directive. But this is those for the commercial venues. That might be having an indoor gathering of more than 10 people just have your plan approved by the Department of Health. Because this is new, we want to make it effective. On January 2, it'll run through March one. But we want to be prepared for first of the year, and make this plan to give everybody an opportunity to make sure they can adjust toward that. With that. Let me take it through the slides very quickly. You can see the trend line that we again, you can see where we are today compared to a week ago is better. It's up obviously from yesterday. Next, and this is week over week, this week, or this most preceding week, we were up over the preceding week. And so we hope that it goes down this coming week and we think we have a chance for that hospitalization. As you can see, we're actually at the largest number of hospitalizations because of COVID. Since the pandemic began, PCR test, we came down a little bit and so I'm hopeful that you'll see the positivity rate for our PCR tests go down. But that's something we have to watch carefully. We're above the 10% mark, which we don't like. Next is our antigen test. And of course, that's a seven day rolling average is much higher people are utilizing that they have a higher positivity rate for those that take an antigen test. Next, we want to show you how we're testing where 263,000 PCR tests have been given, taken this month, along with the next slide, which is the antigen test to 59,000 which means we're not even through the month we've done well over 300,000 which is one 10th of our population in one month. We're testing robustly. It helps us to identify isolate the positive cases.
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