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Then hello again everyone and thanks very much for joining us.

The coronavirus in Arkansas is there room for optimism?

Definitely yes.

Is there also room for alarm?

Very definitely yes.

And in a moment we'll have an update on the outlook from a state health agency that has been painfully accurate in its projections of infection and death on a monthly basis.

First, the task that comes every ten years, drawing new districts for state legislators.

It falls to the governor, the Attorney general, and the Secretary of State, sitting as the board of apportionment to literally map out the boundaries for senators.

And representatives it is a closely watched process, not just by the legislators at the moment the work is primarily at the staff level, led by board coordinator Betty Dickey, a former Chief Justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court.

She joins us now, as does Shelby Johnson, the state Geographic Information Officer to the both of you.

We thank you very much for coming aboard and we should advise the audience that in order to get this broadcast on the air, we're preparing it just.

Literally minutes after the new maps were disclosed, Madam Chief Justice will begin with you.

Secretary Thurston, said John Thurston, Secretary of State Thurston, said a moment ago there are no perfect maps.

There will never be a quote.

Perfect map, because I don't know if that even exists.

How imperfect or how perfect would you would you describe this one?

Well, that's correct.

There's there.

There's no such thing as perfection in mapping, but.

We accomplished more.

As far as transparency, as far as the historical.

Choice of of.

Minority majority District that is Latino or Hispanic.

Added minority African American district.

And accomplished and kept counties more.

Can't almost twice as many counties hold as we're done in 2011, so we feel like we came as close as has ever been as far as perfection in terms of the next balloting.

Anyway, it's my understanding now that they are in terms of their no Senate incumbents.

Who would be compelled to run against one another and only three districts in the house?

Am I correct presently occupied by two Republican incumbents and one Democratic incumbent, is that?

Am I correct there basically correct?

It's one district with three two Republicans and one Democrat running against each other based on the commitments of the current incumbents to either run for other offices or for to not run for reelection.

We have no incumbents in the Senate and only one in the House.

And of course this is driven much of it is driven by the phenomenal growth in Northwest Arkansas and to some extent in in the Northeast and the out migration from roughly.

The first Congressional District and the and the 4th correct that.

How did that complicate it?

Shelby Johnson.

Well, see the when you look at some of the counties in the state where you had declines.

Population decline that declined by 5-6 thousand.

We had a few of those counties where that population declined by that much.

And when you look at an average house district, the House District needed to have 30,115 persons to have equal representation and so when you have counties that decline by 5 and 6000.

And that makes it challenging.

And then, conversely, the growth that you've seen some in central.

But also in Northwest Arkansas and then in the Paragould and Jonesboro area.

That complicates it quite a lot.

So you've got that population shift and as a result, those legislative districts have got to shift with it.

In all of the incumbents, certainly, but particularly the Democratic incumbents will be looking at the map to see to what extent their district lines shifted.

Are we likely to see?

Other than Northwest Arkansas some significant shifts there.

Well, I think in a lot of a lot of the state you're going to see distinct shifts.

I haven't had an opportunity to study the maps to the degree that I could make really great comments about the magnitude of shifts that you'll see, but just my knowledge of the population change, you'll see a fair amount of shifting of those lines across Arkansas.

Any but with with specific regard to the Democratic incumbents.

Just Justin Sticky will.

I'll direct that to you.

Not that that I'm aware of, and again we haven't studied that.

That part of the map, but there are no Democrat incumbents pitted against each other.

Only this one race that I mentioned in Southeast Arkansas.

Yes, ma'am, I understand.

But in in the existing district lines where they adjusted in such a in a in a significantly in a significant way to a significant extent, how many were affected?

Well, yes, the districts were were significantly changed because of the migration.

You know to the urban areas, right as you mentioned.

Not as far as any partisan.

Redistricting yeah rule to urban areas, right?

There is enormous table shift toward an urbanization that's going to be reflected in in.

It's already reflected in the General Assembly.

It's inevitable.

Is it not?

In the next decade?

Yes, and it was greater than predicted for this this election cycle.

Yeah, Shelby Johnson.

Yeah, one of the things that you'll see is that those rural districts in rural Arkansas, particularly in those pop population decline areas where you had some decline.

Those legislative districts by necessity, you're going to get geographically bigger.

They're going to have to grow to to gain population to become equal with their neighbors.

And then the opposite in those urban areas, you're going to see where that population is.

More concentrated those districts would shrink in terms of geographic size and as a result, what you are seeing in these new maps.

There's not.

I don't think I haven't studied them enough yet, but I don't think that there's any district that remained unchanged.

I'm compelled to ask.

Both of you.

Was there significant pressure on the staff you and the other staff members?

There was not on me.

She'll be shot.

Not not on me, but in general, as everyone I think knows the census data was behind schedule.

And so because the census data was behind schedule, it pressured from a time perspective, just the timeline that the board had to operate under.

As their partisan pressure on you are incumbent pressure, put it that way.

Did you have a lot of contact from members of the General Assembly?

Well, again, I didn't, but Shelby had published maps from the American.

Let the 2019 map that predicted this migration.

They knew what they were facing.

In fact, he also had published a A map that showed.

Of the incumbents that were in the red and blue areas?

Not.

That's not political.

That is those that were more grossly.

Out of balance in meeting the equal districts of.

30,000 people per district and one final facing.

And if they put pressure and I had.

Talked with the people who were doing the mapping about not having meetings.

You know?

They had pressure from constituents who made comments online on the website.

They had pressure, I'm sure from.

But you know from some incumbents, but I didn't.

And I, you know Shelby, didn't we weren't.

The drafters have to end up there because Justice Dickey and Shelby Johnson.

We are out of time.

We thank you very much for yours.

Thank you Steve.

R COVID Arkansas updates in a moment.

We are back and on the COVID front now.

It's easy to look at some of the viral trends in Arkansas and conclude the worst is behind us.

Perhaps it is.

Perhaps it is not.

It will not be behind us.

The medical community says if we ignore the warning signs and the latest modeling by the UAMS Public Health School, and not if we don't take full advantage of the vaccine, which includes vaccinating our children, those aged 5 and older, which a process which is imminent.

Now joining us, Doctor Mark Williams, Dean of the School of Public Health at UAMS, welcome back Doctor Williams.

Thanks very much for being with us.

Welcome, I'm really looking forward to it.

Well, we've had some of the signs are indeed encouraging hospitalizations down intubations down ICU.

Occupancy is down, vaccination rates are up.

But are we where you would have us be?

I would say not, and the reason for that is because.

The way that pandemics work is they tend to follow what's called a wave pattern, and we can see in history that pandemics have done this over and over again.

They will what we will see is a wave pattern with a wave cresting, which it did, for example, in August in September, and then it will reach a trough.

And right now I think we are in a trough.

However, what is concerning for us is that this trough is relatively.

Hi and so we are looking at about 500 new cases a day and which is considerably down.

Obviously from where what we were seeing in August in September, but it's still fairly high and it does indicate that there is quite a bit of Community spread and what the CDC is indicating Arkansas is in is what they call a very high rate of Community spread were still there and so.

If.

Uhm, a number of people, for example, are exposed.

Then we could see ourselves again in another wave pattern.

You and your associates conclude or or suggest that Arkansas is almost, you know or is unique, certainly in among the Southern states anyway.

In the pattern that that the virus seems to be following here, why?

It's timing largely, if you recall when the rest of the country, and I would say in the South, including Florida were in their first surge that was early in the pandemic, and it looked like Arkansas was going to be largely spared from what was occurring.

I mean, we had very low rates of transmission and hospitalization and death, however.

Last January, December, January.

If you recall, we really were in a surge while other parts of the country such as New York or not.

That was our first way.

The second wave came in August and September, and the difference is from some parts of the country.

Is that our lull or that trov between the waves was longer?

But once it took off, it took off, and Arkansas was probably the first southern state where we saw a state.

Wide surge if we can doctor, let's take a look at the at the aggregate numbers.

Now we're at the end of October and and we can look at where we are in and I would ask your assistance here.

In translating, we've got two sets of numbers here, both involving October.

Yes, they're both involving October and what I think it's difficult to recall is oftentimes when we see daily statistics, which is largely reported in the media, and certainly by 80 H. Is that we kind of lose track of what is the pandemic doing over a longer period of time, and that's why I chose the month about Tober.

As you can see from cases we had almost 15,000 cases from October 1st.

27 and then last week, the 20th Twitter 27th we had over 3000 cases.

Our hospitalizations were almost 1000 or October, or for the days that we have data for October and we lost about 700 people from COVID during the month.

You can see from last week it was almost 200 hospitalizations and almost 100 people passed away from the pandemic.

Now what this indicates is that if we compare the months to August and September, yes, we're down.

But we're certainly the pandemic is certainly.

Not over what is happening is, again, we're in that trough, but our trough is relatively high.

Our models are suggesting that we're going to see about 500 new cases every day, roughly.

Pretty forbidding well you and others in the clinical community have for some time now, cautioned that we are seeing a growing rural urban divide here in terms of diagnosis.

Case confirmations here and I think we have a graphic here that'll that'll help illustrate that.

Right and what the graphic is showing is the difference or the levels of COVID deaths by urban rural division.

Now we can discount that.

Spike, you might say on the far right hand center because that was simply the Department of Health updating its statistics.

But you can see from roughly August through most of October, rural area had more deaths from COVID, and what we can also say is rural areas had more cases than COVID.

Now these when we say this, what we mean are cases per one, 10,000 residents, and so you can see.

What this indicates to us largely is that two things access to health care is not as good in rural areas as in urban areas, so people are likely being treated later in the disease.

And if you're being treated later, you're more likely to be hospitalized or die.

The other thing is that vaccination rates in rural areas tend to be lower than in the urban areas, and so the lack of vaccination is also having an impact.

And the number of cases and the number of deaths.

We are also at a point now where youngsters 5 and above are going as soon as next week or toward the end of next week.

I don't have the latest, you know federal.

OK in front of me, but youngsters are going to be eligible for immunization and I would anticipate you're saying get it done.

Yes, absolutely.

Children are of course part of the population and more people who are vaccinated the better it is in terms of our overall population health and that is because I mean it's it's essentially like a forest fire.

The more would you have, the more likely it is the fire is going to burn through that.

Would you take away the wood?

The fire is not as likely to spread and.

Children being people, they're susceptible to the virus just like anyone else, and I think the delta virus has demonstrated that very clearly.

Children can get ill, they can get sick, and as importantly they can spread the virus to others adults.

So vaccination is incredibly important to stop the pandemic here, right?

And we haven't.

I think a graphic on that too, involving youngsters and COVID.

This one, yeah, is percentage of cases.

In children or children as a percentage of the overall caseload.

Right, and what this is clearly demonstrating is that children.

Are making up a larger part of the COVID caseload in Arkansas now than they were earlier in the epidemic, and this is largely for two reasons.

Partly it's because adults, particularly older adults, are more likely to be vaccinated than children, and here we know that 5 to 11 could not be vaccinated and those 12 to 17 had very low rates of vaccination.

So as we went into the surge in August.

Through September and even now into October, children are getting sick in larger numbers than adults by population.

So that we see sorry no, go ahead please.

I'm sorry doc.

So what we see is that children are making up a larger proportion of the caseload in Arkansas of of COVID patients.

In terms of vaccinating youngsters, and we have some survey results here from the Kaiser People, Kaiser Foundation, there continued to be significant reservations on the part of a significant number of parents nationwide.

This isn't just Arkansas, but it.

It's it's nationwide.

What we have up on the screen now in terms of parental concerns for the vaccine and their youngsters.

Almost three of every four surveyed were concerned about the long term side effects of the vaccine.

Almost that same percentage concerned about immediate serious side effects and about 2/3 were concerned that their youngster might later in life of course, have problems conceiving.

Yes.

What does the research tell us thus far about?

Those kids, I think parents of course are going to be concerned for their children, and certainly about anything that they are going to be giving to their children or having their administered to their children, but.

The science indicates that the vaccines are safe.

We've had millions of adults not just in this country, but elsewhere who have been vaccinated with very, very few.

Consequences or side effects whatsoever?

None of those side effects have been long lasting.

They've generally been short term over and 48 hours.

The clinical trials and children would indicate the same thing that children are not being adversely affected by the vaccines.

In fact, if anything, it's one of the safest vaccine that's ever been developed.

Now I've heard people say that, well, they rushed the development of this vaccine.

It didn't take.

In very long we don't know what it's about, but in truth, the way vaccine development works is that it builds upon science, overtime, and so we're now dealing with the SARS Cove.

Two virus there was a SARS Cove one and the scientific community started development of vaccines for SARS, Co V1.

More than ten years ago.

And so it's an accumulation of science.

Overtime that's led to our current vaccines and the clinical trials that were conducted in children were conducted with literally thousands and thousands of children.

These are large scale trials and they record and pay attention to what happens to those children and what we can conclusively say is the vaccines are safe.

Doctor, let me.

I don't know your family situation, but let me ask first if you have children or grandchildren would you have them take this vaccine?

Absolutely.

I think the risk of having COVID far outweighs any possible risk of having the vaccine.

What is oftentimes lost is if you succumb to COVID.

You don't just get sick in your over being ill. What else can happen is what's called long term COVID, and we know from children and adults who have been infected with the COVID virus about a third will have long term cognitive problems.

And about a third will have long term physical problems and by long term what we mean is literally months and perhaps even years of problems.

So so in the clinical community, the medical community there is a separate set of concerns regarding children and the absence of vaccine than what some parents anyway exhibit in terms of receiving the vaccine for their kids.

I would say not.

I would say with with children there's no separate set of concerns whatsoever.

The vaccines are safe, they're safe.

For adults it's they're safe for children.

Yeah, I put a phrase the question poorly after what I what I meant to say is that your concerns involved the absence of the vaccine.

For kids.

You're more concerned.

Yeah, in terms of long COVID and its long term effects on youngsters, right?

Right?

It's yes we are concerned about what happens after children are infected.

We know that they are susceptible to long term COVID just as well as adults.

And uhm.

With cognitive and possibly physical side side effects of the virus, right?

The chances of of children being ill for a long time are not inconsequential.

We have now surpassed and significantly surpassed 8000 deaths in Arkansas in less than two years, and in your last report, you and your colleagues said lamented that that seems to have elicited something of a statewide yawn that we are more or less reconciled to a fairly high.

Death rate are we lowering our guard here?

I would say one of the consequences of the pandemic lasting so long is that you know there is.

What's called pandemic fatigue is people just simply get tired of it.

You know, we want to go back to situations where we don't have to wear masks.

We don't have to socially distance.

We don't have to think about people being infected or what's going to happen if we go to a large event such as the football game in Little Rock last week, or to the fair.

So.

We just kind of get immune, uh, immune, or?

Used to uh, the nightly reports of COVID cases and deaths on the news, and so forth, and sort of the consequences of what is really happening is lost to us as the pandemic goes on.

And that's what I think we were thinking about when we wrote about the 8000 deaths, eliciting somewhat of a yawn.

That was 1000 deaths added to the COVID toll in 30 days.

Now if we as a state as as a citizen were experiencing 1000 deaths due to any other cause, we would be up in arms.

We would be concerned we would be demanding that government take care of whatever that problem was, but yet now we're just sort of sitting back for whatever reason.

And saying well.

Now we have 8000 deaths.

We'll probably have more, and you know, there's nothing I can do about it.

And that's what we were, as you said, lamented.

Well, we can keep reporting on it, and we hope you come back to assist with us.

Doctor Williams, thanks so much.

Thanks so much for being the pleasure.

Thank you.

And as always, we thank you for joining us.

See you next week.

Support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

The Arkansas Times and KUARFM 89.