As new variants of the COVID-19 virus continue to spread across many parts of the country, vaccination and testing rates are beginning to rise in Garland County, according to county vaccination coordinator and pharmacist Dr. Cody Turner.
"We are seeing a lot more vaccines in the last week, or really, the last two weeks, than we have in a while," Turner said Friday. "We're probably doing somewhere around 20 shots a day and, mostly, these have been first doses, which has been the interesting thing. Which -- if the trend continues, then that means that two weeks from now, we'll be giving about 20 fully-vaccinated people a day and then another 20 first doses on top of that."
Turner said they have been administering more COVID-19 tests as well, which, he noted, has been "reassuring to see."
"There's probably a 20-week span there where we were not giving more than two tests a week -- there's just no interest in it," he said. "And then for the last two weeks, it's been somewhere around three or four tests a day, with the (seven-day average) positivity rate here at 33.33%."
The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, on Friday, issued a statement announcing a change in its visitation policy to limit patients to only one visitor a day, effective Monday. CHI St. Vincent spokesman Joshua Cook said Friday afternoon, when asked whether they would follow suit, that they have not issued any changes at that time but are continuing to review and assess the situation.
Mandy Golleher, director of marketing and communications for National Park Medical Center, said NPMC, as well, is continuing to closely monitor the local virus situation.
"At this time our visitation remains at the reduced restriction level which began in March, allowing one visitor per patient at a time in most areas," she said. "We continue to urge our friends and neighbors to become vaccinated against COVID-19."
Golleher said more details, along with a list of local pharmacies administering the vaccine, are available at NationalParkMedical.com.
"We know the importance of family presence for our patients and regret having to make this change, but we were forced to do so in order to protect our patients, staff and visitors," UAMS Medical Center CEO Dr. Steppe Mette said in the statement. "We have already had one patient infected with COVID by a visitor. With the workforce shortage hospitals are facing now, we must minimize the risk of infection for our medical staff and care teams."
Mette said they will, however, continue to allow additional visitors for end-of-life situations.
"Our staff has worked closely with families over the past 18 months to ensure they have as much contact with their loved ones as possible, and they've come up with very creative ways to keep families connected and protected from the spread of COVID," he said. "We have to be much stricter until COVID cases in Arkansas are under control and the number of patients in our hospital decreases dramatically."
Turner said he believes that a lot more people are realizing that receiving the vaccine is really worth it.
"Because the worse thing that can happen to them at this point is either they get COVID or the vaccine doesn't work for them," he said. "But it's a lot less fear of, 'Oh, the vaccine's going to hurt me,' and it's a lot of people that have seemed hesitant in the past or wouldn't have, you know, been interested if there wasn't an increase in cases and an increase in deaths right now."
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some variants of the virus cause it to spread more easily, leading to more cases of COVID-19. Turner noted the original virus was followed by the alpha variant, which was about twice as transmissible as the original. And the delta variant, he added, is twice as transmissible as the alpha.
"So it spreads about eight times easier than the original virus, and with the symptoms being not quite the same as the original virus, that sparked a lot of the new willingness to get vaccinated," he said. "I would stress that if you have any exposure and you're not fully vaccinated, or if you have symptoms that match at all what the virus is supposed to show, it is worth getting tested just for isolation and contact tracing alone.
"We do need to do more tests and we have the capacity to do a lot more tests. It's just if people don't feel that, you know, 'Oh, my cough, maybe I should go get tested,' and that may be a missed case that causes community spread to increase. So, testing's important," he said.