Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson says ‘individual discipline’ key to reopening safely

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson says ‘individual discipline’ key to reopening safely

May 07, 2020

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson has a phased plan for reopening, and he joins Judy Woodruff to discuss why he thinks this is the right time to implement it.

“We targeted and put restrictions on many of our businesses, but we didn’t shut everything down. And now that our cases are down, our trajectory is going in the right direction, we’re starting to lift some of those restrictions.

And, just like we did it differently before, now we’re not doing it all at once. We’re doing it a step at a time, and so we can measure very carefully as to whether you’re being disciplined, whether our cases go up, whether our — we have any kind of a resurgence.

And so we’re being cautious about it. But our cases are down. Our trajectory is going in the right direction. We’re doing our testing. We have contract — contact testing capability.

And so I feel comfortable in lifting some of these restrictions now. The key is that we have to be individually disciplined to do the social discipline. And it’s really hard out there whenever the sun is shining. We’re cooped up. We want to get outside. But we have to discipline ourselves.”

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