Second, support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

The Arkansas Times and KUARFM 89.

Hello again everyone.

Thanks very much for joining us.

Arkansas reached something of a milestone this week, though this week was later than most doctors and the governor had hoped half our states eligible population has now been vaccinated against COVID-19.

Not as many as most doctors and the governor had hoped.

More on that, plus the pandemic and Arkansas schools later in the program.

First, another element of the coronavirus era, the Biden administration's executive order mandating the nation's larger businesses to require their workers to be vaccinated or be tested weekly.

Reaction has ranged from outrage to out and out supports and something in between.

Joining us now.

Mike Preston, Governor Hutchinson, Commerce secretary, and Randy Zook, CEO of the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce Secretary Preston will begin with you, your boss.

Governor Hutchinson has has said that it's just the administration has gone too far.

That this is.

It's going to hard and they are stiff and the opposition to vaccination and to masking.

Any regrets one week later any weakening.

Yeah, no, I I completely support with the governor said on that.

I think it is going to have the opposite effect of, you know, mandating that businesses of 100 employees or larger have to give the vaccine.

I think it's going to have the opposite effect of people not wanting to.

We're trying to, you know, as long as this has been around a voluntary thing now, it's strongly encouraged.

And, you know, I've got the vaccine.

I encourage my employees to do so, but certainly I can't mandate that they do so.

I also on the counter side of that, don't think that the government should come in and tell a business that they can't required.

If a business wants to choose to do so on their own accord, then absolutely they should be allowed to.

And if they individual chooses not to and they don't have an exemption or reason to to be able to opt out, then it's up to the business if they want to terminate that employee, they should be able to.

But I do think it was in an overreach of the Biden administration to come in and do this.

Obviously this thing is headed for the car already is it's headed for the courts.

Your thoughts on the constitutionality of Mr Biden's position of the administration's position?

Well, I'm I'm not a judge and I hate to to try and rule on it.

Obviously I have my my personal opinion and my beliefs on it.

I've as I read it and think the constitutionality of it.

I don't think that there's been going to be the ability to for the to go through the course, but I, you know, I've been proven wrong before, and I do suspect the courts will weigh in in, you know, pretty quick time on this is it's a very pressing issue in front of us and you know, likely the court will.

Probably uphold what the president's executive order was.

Well, Randy Zook.

Tough question.

Yeah, it's unsettled as Mike said, needs to be in the courts.

It's going to have to be decided finally in the courts.

So we're urging our members to take a deep breath, slow down, wait, it'll be resolved.

It could be several months, during which time a lot more people are going to be vaccinated.

Insistence by some employers is having an impact, and some of these things like financial incentives or penalties around health insurance premiums are going to have a lot more impact over the next few months.

While the issue is resolved in the courts.

But it's clearly a Supreme Court decision that's going to be required.

Your counsel or other counsel, counsel to your Members.

What are they telling you?

I mean, is this an extraconstitutional move?

By the by the administration?

It's about half and half and it's it's been quite muted.

Frankly, I'm surprised that we haven't heard a lot more.

You know, real concerns, but I think people realize that it is going to have to go through the courts, and this is several months down the road before it's going to be decided if once it goes through the the processes of appeal, filing appeal and appeal to the supreme so.

Hold on, nothing's going to happen until the Supreme Court makes a decision.

It's a it's a tough issue.

I know for a lot of employers, but it's not so tough for others.

And when you start talking about OSHA, OSHA is clearly been upheld as a.

You know the arbiter of rule rules in the workplace and the reading of the law around OSHA requires employers to prevent or fix or remedy or.

Avoid anything that creates possibility of death or serious injury in the workplace.

Now a long way from here to there, but tough issue is, yeah, you want to take that.

I think that's the attorney general there it is the attorney general.

Do I hear Randy Zook saying get ready?

Be prepared, yeah, absolutely depends on depends on how the thing gets resolved one way or the other, but be prepared for whatever might happen.

OK, the the business round, which is a major spokes organization representative for American business, issued a lengthy statement within hours of the administrations.

And here's here's the operative clause.

Business Roundtable applauds the administration for its leadership and continued efforts to defeat the pandemic.

We share the administration's goal of getting as many eligible Americans vaccinated as quickly as possible, which is key to combating COVID, keeping vulnerable Americans safe, and accelerating the economic Recovery Secretary Preston back to you, it sounds like that aspect.

Anyway, of corporate America is behind the administration, are is the Arkansas administration out of touch.

I I don't think we're out of touch by any means.

I think we've we've had great conversations with the industry and business leaders in our state, and there's businesses and industry in our state that have mandated that their employees take the vaccine.

But the federal government coming in and telling them that they have to require it in terms of a term of condition of employment, is just something that that, you know, Arkansans are not going to be, you know, take too kindly to.

I think, as I mentioned before, it's going to have the reverse effect and.

People are not going to want to take it because of the federal government coming in and trying to mandate that what Randy has said is is spot on.

I think you have an opportunity in front of us over the next several months to you know additional education employers mandating it on their own to for various financial reasons that will help get people to the table and get us over the numbers.

As you mentioned earlier, over 50% now of the eligible population.

I think the numbers are going to continue to move in the you know go up from here.

Especially as the the approvals on the vaccine are given full green light from the FDA.

I know Pfizer has Moderno probably be next in line so you're making progress there and something like this, just you know, to me it has the reversed effect and it's going to create backlash, especially in Arkansas.

There would seem to be among the states though.

Secretary Preston, the states larger employers.

As Mr Zook pointed out, are there are all sorts of incentives or even mandates by employer larger.

Employers on their employees, is that not a tacit support of the administration's opposition?

Is business at Arkansas actually quietly supportive of this?

Well, I'd say that on the flip side of it is you know what if the federal government came in and said, you know you can't mandate as a business that you have to require your employees to have vaccines.

That would be kind of taking the counter to it, so I don't want to come in and have the government regulated business to the extent that they're saying you can or cannot mandate vaccines in your facility or for your workforce.

I think it's up to that business to determine what is what is best for them.

In Arkansas we have seen it a lot of large employers have taken it upon themselves to mandate the vaccine as a condition of employment, or they've offered those financial incentives to do so.

I think too much, you know, government interference in regulation on this is going to have an adverse effect, but as Mr Suck pointed out, it's just a second ago, the administrative Agency that will be handling this is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

They've got a pretty good track record of winning in court.

That they do is is Randy said it'll it'll likely end up at the Supreme Court at the highest level, and you're probably going to be split down the middle and you know our our our courts pretty divided, so I'd say it's a coin toss at this point of how they're going to rule.

But until that time is done I I see businesses taking it upon themselves to move forward and figuring out how to get their employees vaccinated.

If that's the choice, and that's the route that they want to go.

Question that I put up to Mr Secretary.

Is the political establishment in Arkansas a bit out of step with corporate Arkansas?

I don't know that I'd go that far, Steve.

I think I think there are honest differences of opinion, and I think the thing we need to be careful about is overreacting at a political level, and this is clearly an issue for the courts.

There is a process, it's well defined.

It's predictable in terms of length of time that it will take.

And once we've once, we've got that decided.

Because at the end of the day, whatever the Supreme Court rules that is the law of the land.

And as Mike pointed out, the OSHA laws are long.

Employees and have been upheld by you know, every challenge that's been put to him so.

I would I would.

I would just say that that we need to be.

I think would be most helpful if we take a deep breath.

Let the process play and not try to, you know, engage in too much political theater around it.

Yeah, in the near term near term you always sure well I mean in in in the near term Randy what Mr Zook?

What how is business in Arkansas dealing with this now we got a new unemployment report out Friday morning as we're taping this broadcast and we're down.

I think 110th of 1% again.

Well, that's the long and the short of it in Arkansas for open we've got 6070 thousand open jobs across the state in every sector of the economy.

This is one of the biggest difficulties and challenges businesses ever faced.

You've got unprecedented level of need.

You've got supply chain disruptions across the economy, every sector, nearly deliveries of just about anything you want to buy or delayed and and.

Companies, businesses or channel everywhere you go, you see now hiring signs or help wanted signs and every major employer in the state is needing a substantial number of additional people to get back in the workplace.

That's where we're sort of soft.

Right now we've got our number of what's called the labor force.

Labor force participation rate is a little bit below the national average, about five percentage points.

So we've got a lot of people who can enter in a.

The age range to get back in the full time workforce that we need to reengage with so a lot of different complex challenges that people face.

But companies are finding ways to deal with it essentially, or especially in raising wages.

Wages are going up, that's all there is to it.

Inevitable, inevitable supply demand need.

You know, gotta have it.

Gotta pay for it and then that's what it's going to take Mr Secretary.

The last time you were on the broadcast you said you saw some of that for every state, but particularly right.

So you saw opportunity in this.

You still do.

I still do and and you know I did echoed Brandy's comments that you know we still have 70,000 job openings.

That's an opportunity to get more people back into the workforce and to fill these jobs.

But in the new jobs report that you reference, we are down to 4.2% unemployment.

But if you dig deeper in the numbers, the most positive thing out of that is for the first time in months, we actually saw an increase of people into our labor participation pools.

So in previous months, that number had been shrinking.

It looks like for at least for this month, and hopefully going forward.

That stopped and turned around some, and you know I can attribute to that to the safe decision to opt out of the federal benefits.

Unemployment benefits early on.

We're now seeing those effects of that start to slowly take place and hopefully over the course of the next couple of months, that labor participation right number will grow in Arkansas and will start to fill some of those 70,000 jobs we've got about a minute left in the broadcast.

Sir, let me ask you this, and I were talking about this prior to the broadcast.

There are oceans of empty retail space.

Empty retail and manufacturing space, but especially retail across the state.

What's to become of that in the next five years?

Well, I think there's going to be a a blended model that you'll see people going to.

You know online and retail, but there's still going to be the desire for people to get into storefronts, so they'll be storefronts.

So maybe a little bit different from the storefronts were used to think more of like what an Apple Store is, where you know it's a place where you go in and and have conversation and maybe purchase something online.

And some of these stores are going to change.

But you know the the face of retail is is going to be different, just how different that's going to be.

You know the next few months to a couple years.

Will really determine that right?

Secretary Preston and Randy Zook, the state chamber.

Thanks very much for your participation.

You bet, and we'll be right back.

And we are back and COVID on a clinical level now, a team of U.S. Army medical personnel has arrived in Arkansas and is assisting local doctors and staff with their coronavirus caseload.

That patient count would have been much lower.

It's widely agreed, had the Arkansas vaccination been higher sooner, and there's continuing concern for COVID outbreaks in schools?

We're joined now by Doctor Stephen Mattie of you matter of UAMS and Doctor Joe Thompson of the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement doctor Matt.

If we can begin with you, I have to believe that those additional hands on those trains, skilled hands are making a difference there at UAMS.

They are Steve there.

There are welcome.

Team for our caregivers are our hospital for our patients.

They've made a huge impact already.

They've been on site for about a week just there being here and the the the sense that there is a concern from our our federal government to send.

The relief team has done wonders for our morale and of course the added help.

Has increased our capacity to take care of patients who need their care.

Seek their carrot, Umm?

So yes, very welcome team indeed.

Well, if we can narrow it just a bit, doctor out exactly what services are they providing?

Are we talking about technicians here?

Obviously it's clinical care.

Right, a team of 20 clinicians arrived.

There are four physicians, 14 nurses and two respiratory technicians.

The physicians are a critical care physician who is stationed in one of our intensive care units.

Two physicians, one family medicine physician when internists who are on our COVID units not in the ICU but our our inpatient COVID units and then one emergency room physician the the nurses are distributed amongst the ICU Intensive care unit are COVID units that are not in the intensive care unit and our emergency room and the respiratory technicians are deployed throughout the hospital.

Matter that even with the addition of these military personnel, these trained skilled military practitioners that hospitalar the UAMS or hospitals across the state are still stressed in terms of space and particularly staff.

You have more so staff and then space we created here at UMSL.

A lot of extra patient care space to intensive care unit space and and non intensive care COVID unit space as have other hospitals.

The limiting factor for us has indeed been to staff the beds so we're not using all the space that we could because of inadequate staffing and even though 20 clinicians have been a relief for us.

And has not been up to staff all those beds and that is a concern, not just for our our hospitals here in Central Arkansas, it's around the state and indeed we are seeing the same thing around the country.

Well, we reached this past week.

It was.

It was.

Celebrated, perhaps prematurely, a 50%.

Finally a 50% vaccination rate of those eligible Arkansans.

Let me go to Doctor Thompson here and I'll bring both of you and Doctor Joe Thompson of the Center for Health Improvement.

Certainly it's worth observing, but some have observed that a celebration may not be, you know, it ought to be a muted celebration anyway.

Well, if we have 50% that are protected through vaccination, that means it's better than 40.

That means we have 50%.

That may not be protected, and they still are at high risk of COVID-19 the acute infection.

And increasingly, we're learning about the long hauler, where as many as 10% of folks have long term problems after they get infected.

So we're on the right path.

We're increasing our vaccination rates, but anything we can do to accelerate that would be much warranted.

Essentially brought up the long COVID doctor.

Let me start with you and we'll go to Doctor Mehta as well.

Only this Friday morning I'm reading some new research on the impact on youngsters.

Particularly, it can be especially egregious.

All the way from brain development to obesity.

Even well, we've seen throughout the epidemic that overweight, obese individuals have a harder time.

Individuals with comorbidities like diabetes or COPD have a harder time with this virus.

We're also learning more this virus.

20 months ago we never knew about.

Now we're 20 months in.

We're learning scientifically we're learning clinically more about how this virus reacts in our bodies and what it causes in our body.

So some of these long hauler syndromes actually appear to be inflammatory reactions that cause permanent damage to our lungs.

Our brain or some of our kidneys and other things.

So this is really a disease.

You do not want to get and the vaccinations are the pathway to avoid it all right?

Doctor Madam, back to you.

This higher vaccine vaccination, right?

Obviously it's going to give clinicians some breathing room or absent at least another wave.

Well, certainly every every percent increase in vaccination is helpful in in decreasing their risk and therefore the numbers of patients hospitalized.

As Doctor Thompson said, we have a long way to go to really have the kind of impact that we need.

But but I'll look at that on the.

On the positive side, any increase in the vaccination rate is is welcomed.

We continue to hope for a continued dramatic increase.

The number of Arkansans vaccinated well, the number of Josh Thompson.

The number of youngsters in fan for that matter.

Teachers, as of particular has been recent weeks of months.

Of particular concern to you.

Of course, kids 13 and older now can get vaccinate 12 and older can get vaccinated, but those under 12 are yet to have a vaccine available for them.

And as we came back to school, particularly when we were at this very High Peak of transmission at the end of August, there were significant concerns.

More than half the school districts had put.

They mask requirement in place for their teachers, students and staff, and this is actually, we believe having an effect we we are down from the peak that we were at in late August.

We're still having high levels of transmission across the state, but it's not still on an upward trajectory with more and more cases each day.

We have a map that you have for the center has provided for us and if you can will pull that up and doctor if you would walk us through that.

I assume most of our viewers are watching in color so we last year and then re instituted this summer school district level infection rates.

These are the rates of new infections in individuals that live within the school district, so not in the school itself, but what the school district draws from kids, teachers, staff, others, and obviously the number of infections, the level of infection relates the risk in the schools.

The CDC threshold is very low.

It's in that smallest green level, 10 per 10,000.

They would say as high rates of communication of the virus.

We scale this so that people could trend overtime in the purple school districts with 100 more.

That means that 1%.

Of the residents of that school district had been newly infected in the last 14 days, so that's an extremely high level of transmission.

Those school districts should clearly look to masks and other defensive mechanisms and try to accelerate their vaccination rates.

You'll see here, we've got some yellow and we've got some orange moving in the right direction.

Three or four weeks ago, almost the whole state was red and purple, so we're moving in the right direction.

But we've got a long way to go for those of us who aren't epidemiologically trained anyway.

You say 1% is A is a high rate of transmission.

To the layman that would suit me.

1% that's not very much well, so so just to put it in context, 1% would mean one out of every hundred people you come in contact with.

Today is newly infected and transmitting the virus.

So if you go to a Walmart, you go to a Kroger, you go to a grocery store, you go to a church event.

It's likely that there is an actively infected and transmitting individual in that group of people with you.

So 1% today equals tomorrow or the next day.

This Delta variant is a very infectious variant.

It spreads very quickly.

And therefore if you were unprotected, if you've not been vaccinated, you are at risk of coming in contact with somebody that is transmitting the virus, and that you may contract it from as a doctor.

Mehta as doctor Tom.

Your colleague noted its vaccinations right now for 13 and above.

When when can we see that the the FDA approved it for 12 and under?

Well, I don't have any special information or knowledge of that.

We are hearing that it is likely or certainly hoped for by the end of this calendar year.

At the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022.

But we have not heard that uncertainty.

The Doctor Thompson any different intelligence from what I think, at least for the Pfizer vaccine we're hearing that they may submit data later this month early next month for the six to 12 year olds, and then following that for those five in.

Under obviously the pharmaceutical injuries at work on hard to get a vaccine, but then we need the independent assessment of the Food and Drug Administration and then the CDC's recommendations for who gets it and at what rate for boosters and other things moving forward, right?

If I could ask control room to pull up map back up again Dr. Thompsons map back up again one more time, what Doctor Thompson and Doctor Meadow?

What does that?

What should that map tell Arkansas?

What I would tell Arkansans is that we are still having.

A very, very high level of transmission throughout the state.

We have almost the whole state and orange, red or purple, and that is a very high level of transmission.

Our two tools here are vaccinations to protect people and the defensive measures that we know work, masking distance, good hygiene.

Those are tools that we have to continue to combat this threat and you and other clinicians are running head on into political considerations.

It's inevitable.

What is your message?

The education establishment?

We are all tired of COVID there's nobody.

He likes wearing a mask less than I do.

I promise you that, and I think we were making progress here.

We are seeing a decrease.

We're still at a high level, but we've hit that peak and it looks like we're coming down.

If we can hold on for a few more weeks, maybe a couple more months, I think we have a chance to break the back of the transmission here of COVID-19 yr doctor metal give you the last word here your colleague sees maybe some light at the end of the tunnel, do you?

I do very much so, you know, we are seeing a gradual decline in the number of patients number of our Kansas hospitalized with COVID.

We're seeing some slight decrease in the amount of pressure on our health care organizations hospitals, so that gives us all hope I I want to underscore something that Doctor Thompson said that that I paraphrase that that even if you are not vaccinated, you cannot.

Or perhaps you will not that wearing a mask paying attention to.

Distancing and good hand hygiene really are effective tools, and I would urge everybody to to continue those techniques.

Those strategies were all tired, but we'll get through this.

Let's get through it together all right.

Doctor Stephanie Mehta and Joe Thompson, both of you.

Thank very thank you very much for being part of the program.

Come back soon.

Thank you for watching.

As always see you next week.

Second, support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

The Arkansas Times and KUARFM 89.