Saturday COVID Update: No traditional graduations until after July 1st

Here are some Key Notes, Statistics, and Video for Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson’s news update on the COVID-19 pandemic. Governor Hutchinson welcomed Johnny Key, the State Secretary of Education, and Dr. Nate Smith, State Secretary of Health.

On Saturday, Sec. Key (right) gave direction on high school graduation ceremonies.

Before introducing Sec. Key, the Governor stated that Arkansas schools are not going to be having traditional high school graduations until after July 1. “I’m very sympathetic because I have a granddaughter who’s a senior in high school this year. But it’s really a risk whenever you bring thousands of parents and students together in one assembly to have a celebration. That’s exactly the kind of gathering that could lead to a spread of COVID-19. So we’re not going to be having those kind of large gatherings,” stated Hutchinson.

Johnny Key reiterated the risk of traditional graduations, “In many communities, the high school graduation is one of the most attended, one of the largest events in the community in the whole year. When you have friends family members coming from across the state, and in many cases coming from out of state, for a traditional graduation ceremony, we simply cannot mitigate sufficiently the risk of spread in a situation like that.”

Key said they will look at the issue again as July 1st approaches and work with the Department of Health, looking at the public health data to determine if that date needs to be modified. “But right now we’re asking all of our schools not to plan any traditional high school graduations prior to July 1.”

He did offer the option of other types of graduations in lieu of large gatherings. “Some communities might want to go ahead and do something in the normal time. In that case, we are going to allow them to create non-traditional [graduations] either by remote means, by digital means, by video – there are a number of techniques that schools have already started exploring to see how they could make this happen as a celebration for their seniors.”

He said that even with non-traditional ceremonies, schools should still take into consideration following social distancing, restrictions of congregate gatherings of 10 or more people.

He also made an appeal for patience, “I would encourage you to just to wait. That would be my encouragement to our school districts – to wait until after July 1. If that’s not an option for you then we will make this other option available for you.

The Department of Education will send out more detail to superintendents in the coming week and will begin accepting proposals from school districts to evaluate their non-traditional graduation celebrations, according to Key.

Governor Hutchinson also referred to several graphs to show the number of daily COVID-19 cases and the 7-day rolling average of new cases, the number of hospitalized cases each day, and the number of tests being performed.

: Number of new COVID-19 cases per day

: 7-day rolling average of new cases, including prison population

: Number of cases currently hospitalized

: Number of tests performed daily, by the Public Health lab, UAMS and private labs.

Dr. Nate Smith, State Secretary of Health listed the current statistics for COVID-19 patients below:

49 deaths, up 3
2830 total cases, up 89
- 42 new cases in the community
- 47 new cases at Cummins Prison
1813 active cases
970 cases have recovered
104 hospitalized, no change from yesterday
22 on a ventilator, down 3
37 Nursing homes
- 194 residents, up 18
- 109 staff, up 7
Cummins
- 820 total inmate cases, up 136
- Staff still being tested.