The state of Arkansas has reached a cumulative total of 16,083 COVID-19 cases as of today (June 22).
Gov. Asa Hutchinson reported 522 new cases at his daily press conference with the most new cases coming from Washington, Hot Spring and Benton counties.
Washington County had 124 new cases, Hot Spring County had 85 and Benton County had 77.
“The rest were under 20 and that really shows where the challenge is, but also the rest of the state seems to be holding its own,” he said.
Crittenden, Faulkner, Johnson, Pulaski and Yell County each had between 10 and 20 new cases.
In terms of the number of hospitalizations, it has decreased by seven so there are 237. There have been two additional deaths, bringing the total number of related deaths to 227.
Secretary of Health Dr. Nate Smith provided an update on the active COVID-19 cases. There are currently 5,063 active cases with 4,315 in the community, 642 in correctional facilities and 106 in nursing homes.
Smith said that 2 percent of the active cases reported visiting a restaurant, another 2 percent reported attending a church, 0.4 percent reported going to a barbershop, another 0.4 percent reported going to either a motel or hotel and 0.2 percent reported going to a gym.
“We are going to continue to monitor that, just to make sure we’re not having any clusters associated with these types of businesses that we haven’t opened up further recently as we go into phase II,” he said.
The number of cases in correctional facilities across Arkansas is increasing.
“In our correctional facilities and jails, we’ve had a number of cases that are coming in,” Smith said. “We’ve had some positives in the Ouachita Unit in Malvern. When the governor mentioned Hot Spring County being one of the top counties in terms of new cases for the last 24 hours, most if not all of those 85 are associated with the Ouachita Unit there.”
There have also been 188 total positive cases at the Benton County Jail. Smith noted that all inmates and staff members at the Ouachita Unit will be tested over the next few days.
“We are still gathering information on the Ouachita Unit. We did learn over the weekend of symptomatic patients, so made the decision to go ahead and be very aggressive in testing over the weekend,” he said. “As of noon today, we had tested about 800. We still have many more today. Results are just starting to come in. We will know more as we go along, but again this is an evolving situation that we are taking a very aggressive approach with it…”
The state exceeded its COVID-19 testing goal for June yesterday with 120,053 tests conducted so far.
READ MORE: Testing Goal Met for June, Hutchinson Plans to Announce July Goal Soon