
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said today that 751 new Covid-19 cases were reported in the state, with 149 of those from correctional facilities.
The total number of Covid-19 cases in the state now stands at 26,803.
Hot Springs County has shown the highest return on positive cases over the past two days, Hutchinson said in a news conference Friday afternoon.
A majority of the new cases being reported in the county are from the Ouachita River Correctional Unit, according to Dr. Nate Smith, director of Arkansas Department of Health.
Many of the newer positive cases were from people who previously tested negative but later developed symptoms and were retested, Smith said.
More data: The state has conducted more than 5,200 tests over the past 24 hours. The average time to get test results back from a commercial lab is 2.5 days, up from a low of 1.6 in April.
"That's something that concerns us because we need quick results that helps us to manage the outbreak, to control it, to isolate people that need to be isolated," Hutchinson said. "We want to watch that and, hopefully, with national support, we can get more resources in our commercial labs so we can get a quicker response time. That will help us in states like Arkansas."
The governor said while he's not concerned with having enough testing materials, he is concerned with the increased number of tests the labs outside of the state are doing, which results in delayed reporting.
To note: These numbers were released by Arkansas Department of Health, and may not line up exactly in real time with CNN’s database drawn from Johns Hopkins University and the Covid Tracking Project.