While active COVID-19 cases declined on Monday, hospitalizations and ventilator usage saw a slight uptick.
According to the Arkansas Department of Health’s latest report, there were 1,603 fewer active COVID-19 cases on Monday, compared to Sunday. This brought the total active case count down to 17,792. In total, there are 12,921 confirmed active cases and 4,871 probable active cases.
Despite the drop in active cases, the hospitalizations rose by four to 1,084. Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been 13,312 total hospitalizations. The more significant increase was for ventilator usage, which rose by 17. There are currently 187 individuals on a ventilator due to COVID-19.
There were 636 cases added to Arkansas’ overall case count, bringing the state’s total to 284,702.
Arkansas’ death total increased by 44 on Monday. There were 20 confirmed deaths and 24 probable COVID deaths, raising the total death toll in Arkansas to 4,650.
“While we saw a significant decline in new cases, our testing was also lower. An additional 44 deaths and a slight increase in hospitalizations remind us of the challenge we continue to face with this pandemic and what happens if we don’t follow health department guidelines,” Gov. Asa Hutchinson said in a statement.
Vaccinations rose by 2,649 for a total of 214,617 vaccinations given out to date. This is 63.6 percent of the 337,350 doeses that have been allocated to the state of Arkansas.
The long-term care vaccination contract from CVS and Walgreens is still lagging, only giving out 14.1 percent of doses so far. There have been 49,400 vaccines allocated and only 6,985 given out. On Monday, only two vaccinations were added to the list.
Combined, there have been 386,750 vaccine doses allocated in Arkansas with 221,602 given out.
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