 I'm wondering if Tiff Blumlee would like to just chime in and say hello and talk about the upcoming session and how you're going to do your very, your freshman session remotely. Well, hi everybody. Thanks for inviting me. Gabrielle and I will be switching on and off this time. I'll do Ward 6 next month. I'll do Ward 5 and she'll be here at Ward 6. And so I'm not technically, I'm just a private, I mean, I haven't been sworn in or anything so I, you can't really trust a thing that I say. I do, we just spent three hours today in committee. Well, it was actually a full session of the General Assembly to go over JFO numbers, which were more encouraging and, and, you know, many are, are kind of undecipherable right now, given what we don't know about a future stimulus package, given what we don't know about the, the feds will allow us to spend some of the remaining COVID money on, and given what we don't know about the pandemic. And, and so I we're, we are in orientation sessions about 20 hours a week, actually, right now. And it's been really interesting. The administration is, is sponsoring every single agency is sponsoring something. So for those of us who are new in there, I think 34 new members of the house. You know, we've, we've got a lot of catching up to do. I won't find out. We won't find out what committee we're on until the session starts. So and obviously that's where Gabrielle and I will have the most information but I guess I, you know, so I can't, there's, there's very little that I can tell you about what's happening except that we are indeed meeting remotely for probably most of the session and and I think that's going to be better for the staff at the state capital who really have a hard time making that transition and would be exposed to all of us if we did a hybrid system as they're doing in the school. So I think that, you know, the question that I have and I have asked folks at Ward five about and our city counselors about is how is it, what do you need from from your legislative representatives what what kind of information beyond updates from, you know, from the legislature as things start rolling out and, but what, what, what, what should we be doing for you for for the neighborhood planning association. Um, so I have a question before we go to that, which is, what are the JFO numbers? I'm sorry the joint fiscal office of the state releases a whole bunch of economic numbers. And they're not finalized because they, you know, they're in draft form but indicators basically about the rest of this fiscal year and then the following fiscal year. Other steering committee members are welcome to chime in. I will just say that in terms of your role with the NPA, what we have typically done is asked our representatives and senators as well to talk to us at the beginning of the session to let us know what their goals are for the session. And then we've often had them come back at the end of the session to report on what has happened, like what legislation happened, you know, hopes, dreams, failures, the whole still range. So that has been pretty much the extent of our requests from our representatives and senators but feel free other committee members to hop in. I would just like to say congratulations and I know you, you had said that you guys are going to switch off and come as regularly as you can. I just want to say I think that's wonderful just so you can hear issues that we wouldn't even think to bring up even in, you know, a quarterly whatever or, you know, if you came at the beginning or the end it's great that you're able to come more often just issues come up that may not be a priority when you're at whatever meeting but in the interim so that's all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you for coming in. Sure. And actually one of the benefits of the pandemic is that it was hard for the legislator sometimes to make it back to meeting. Get back and couldn't get back. Yeah, right. Right. And so you're just right there. That actually means you're more accessible, which is cool. Yeah, I'm not even commuting. So, yeah. Any other thoughts about, I mean, it's difficult for me to talk about my, you know, the, the session. Right this moment because they're, you know, we're taking in an awful lot. And I don't know what committee I will be assigned to and I can speak in very general terms but I think that that next month, both Gabrielle and I will have more to more to say that would be maybe useful to you all. Yeah, so we're going to shift to Kevin in just a moment but Tiff before we say goodbye to this portion. Is there anything you can say in a couple of minutes about the orientation process and anything that stands out for you about being on boarded as a new legislator? Um, you know, it's, I think that meeting remotely has one advantage and that is that we have to work really hard and very deliberately to build relationships with people we don't know. And that's, you know, it's going to be challenging for people who are new to know who to talk to sometimes, to know who the expert on this is and so the more that we can, Gabrielle and I and others can use this time to to talk with, you know, some of the committee chairs and some of the people from the legislative council just so we know kind of who to turn to what's available to us in terms of help on this or that and and reach across the aisle to either the progressives or to the to Republicans. It just got to be very deliberate and that's, and you know, we, as first years have, we kind of coalesced around this and started orienting ourselves, you know, decided that we could help one another do some of this and there probably are about 30 hours of orientation sessions between the Democratic caucus work and all of the sessions that are being sponsored by the JFO or the legislative leadership or individual administration agencies and that that means, you know, a lot of people have full time jobs. They can't attend all of them so we're pinch hitting for one another and and covering certain things and taking notes and you know slapping in the same Google Drive I think that that the there's a lot of information we're getting the biggest whole lies in the stuff that you take in. Not verbally but just by watching right by you know walking in a hall and so if you know what I'm going to actually have to cut you off because that's fine. Yeah, no thank you for all that information I think it has got to be a very odd experience to be joining the legislature under these circumstances it's such a an environment that relies on sort of incidental interactions and lots and lots of contact so yeah thank you for what you're doing just to gear up. And so next I would like to introduce Kevin pounds. Kevin is the CEO of a new place and Kevin's currently working on the Champlain in project which is converting that former in to a temporary low barrier shelter and Kevin, because of your projects proximity to our ward we would love to hear how it's going and what you anticipate for the future. Well, thank you. Thank you for inviting me to share tonight. And also want to say just thank you to a lot of people in the neighborhood have really given us a warm welcome as new neighbors and so I know that that's kind of a, you know, as are already has already been alluded to as like meeting your neighbors looks a little bit different during COVID times and it did six months ago but I really do appreciate the way I'm just different individuals families, businesses, even a crisis King School down the street. I've kind of reached out and welcomed us. And so some of these are in some of it's even just personal relationships people reaching out and being very encouraging about what we're doing. Kind of what I was thinking and I don't want, I don't want to bore everyone with too much of a backstory but I think there's a lot of questions that come up about like who is a new place where did you guys come from. And, you know, what are you wanting to do with the Champlain and I think that that kind of captures a lot of it. Before I start talking though. I mean a lot of times when I do a presentation, especially if it's a more manageable group like this. I'll just kind of open it up. Are there any like things you want to make sure you're just like hey when you're talking about who you are like here where's some front end questions that you have that I can I can make sure I answer. You kind of what I'm going to walk through and then I can do some Q&A at the end to but I'm not going to answer the question necessarily right now but I'm just curious are they any questions you're like hey, there's some things I'm curious about that I want to make sure you cover as you're talking about any place in the Champlain and I thought that summary you said you were going to explain sound fantastic that's exactly the kind of questions I was going to ask sorry I interrupted someone. I would say dive in Kevin. Okay, sounds good. Well, I'll say I'm going to do share screen show you take it through a little PowerPoint because I'm a visual person helps me kind of think through where we've been and where we're going. Can you see my screen now. Yes. Okay, good. Yeah, so our organization actually goes back to 1982 a new place does in 1982 we actually started as Burlington emergency shelter. And it was really kind of birth to when there was a small group of people from local congregations that saw the growing number of people that were experiencing homelessness in Burlington they're like okay, our faith kind of informs us to do something about this. And so, interestingly enough and I've met some of these people actually one of them was volunteering on Sunday helping us move furniture around. You know, they weren't people from a professional nonprofit background or social work background but they came together started this nonprofit Burlington emergency shelter, raise some money and they actually bought what was formerly the liquor store on on North Street and they reimagined it and this is kind of ironic to me is they reimagined it as a sober shelter. And, and so really Burlington emergency shelter kind of ran like traditional emergency shelter from 1982 all the way until 2014. And what I mean by that is people come in they get a meal, you know at 6pm. After they eat they get a bunk, they'd spend the night, wake up in the morning, get a cup of coffee hit the streets about 8am, 6pm, they could check back in for a bunk and repeat and, and I think you know what happened over time is that and, and even before going on staff I was involved as a volunteer with this organization so I can speak to this from a volunteer perspective is even though we definitely value the idea and the importance of providing somebody safe warm shelter, you know, and, and, and something to eat each night. There's also the sense of frustration of seeing people just cycling in and out right you know you see somebody there for six months, they'd be out for a year they would come right back, you know and, and I think for, I think a lot of people that are involved in homeless services for any amount of time. There's always a sense of frustration when you see people kind of caught in that cycle, and not really phrase we use a lot live within a new place is charting a path forward. And so in 2014, the organization and I think some people in the exterior thought it was just like a rebrand, but it was really much more than that it was like going under the hood is saying how can we make changes as an organization to really enable people are to quit people with the tools to escape the cycle of homelessness. And so what happened in 2014, even though it's still based at 89 North Street. Some changes that were made pretty instantly were okay let's let's start. Let's start organizing around individualized case management. Let's start creating an intentional transitional housing program that's helping people find long term housing and providing after care support, and things like that and so I'll just say, you know my involvement in the last year's executive director as I inherited some of this program. But I think once we made that shift away from just being a traditional emergency shelter, it's probably not by any accident that we saw a lot more people maintaining sobriety we saw a lot more people reconnecting with their families and healthy relationships. So a lot more people moving into long term housing and actually sustaining the housing. And, and so we actually really moved away from that kind of emergency shelter model into what I think we call more of a transitional housing program. Something that really changed for us was in last fall. It was right after Labor Day 2019. The city and community health centers of Burlington approached us about taking over running on the city's low barrier shelter and kind of what what had happened with that is, you know, back to like I think maybe 2014 Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity, because there was just this need for like a low barrier winter shelter it started it. They ran it for about a year. They gave it the cuts cuts ran it for about a year, Champlain, excuse me, community health centers of Burlington tried taking it on for three years. And, and I think, in all fairness what was happening is is it is a difficult, I mean it has been historically a difficult thing to run. And so this, this winter low barrier shelter was getting passed around kind of like a hot potato from one organization to another you know I think I don't want to speak for the other organizations but I think just a lot of people were experiencing staff burnout. There wasn't really, there's a lot of questions about how to make it sustainable and so we thought about it for about one week because it was there was about seven weeks to get up and running and decided we should take a stab at it as we thought okay if we could just get one winter under our belts to kind of get a feel for like what this thing is and what it could be it should be maybe it's something we could we could make more sustainable. And it's also something that we're thinking how can we make it sustainable how can we find a better location for it. How can we turn it into something that's year round and not just from November 1 to April 30. And hopefully along the way, start dripping into some some real some onsite services. And so, kind of what happened is we took that on. That was, and we were able to open it on ramp staff between beginning September we on ramp staff, create put the systems in place and somehow I mean semi rack was got the funding in place in about seven weeks to get it up and running. And, and I'd say by all marks, things were going pretty smooth, we were running it out of the basement at 179 South Winooski, and then something unexpected all of us happened. COVID hit, and that was March. And so, into March comes along we realized that 179 South Winooski the basement there is not going to work, especially during COVID it was already a lesson optimal space. And so, once COVID started hitting Berlin, and we realized we're going to have to shut down that space because if one person became sick, we're going to have all of our staff and guests, and there was just no way that we could follow any CDC guidelines. And what happened over. Okay, I just want to interrupt for a sec and let you know you have 10 more minutes and that includes questions so. Okay, yeah. And so what's happened over the course of this, the last few months is in the end of March, we ended up moving it to North Beach campground and campers. Then at the end of the end of May, I'm just because of some resource challenges and this is with the help of the state and city we did this we ran a sanctioned tenting area, while we were working on kind of a long term solution. Through a partnership with the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, we were able to acquire a pretty sizable federal grant and that's what enabled us to purchase the Champlain Inn and so we're renovating that right now as some of you can probably see by all the right blocks out in front of the Champlain Inn, and we're going to be reopening it on Monday as 34 unit 50 bed low barrier temporary housing facility and so like it like I said that there will be 34 semi private units 50 beds and and on site services there and so that's that's in a nutshell what we're doing when we open on Monday, we won't be opening all 50 beds because there's still some renovations going on on two floors. So we're going to be opening it with 30 beds on Monday and within the next two weeks after get up to that 50 bed mark. So, I'll stop there and provide some time for questions. Great thank you. I'll jump in with a question if I can. Sure go ahead Andy. Great. First of all thanks for the presentation thank you guys for taking on the work and really support the idea of trying to reinvent systems to meet people's needs better and hopefully break the cycle so I really like what you shared with us. A couple questions I live pretty close by here to the Champlain Inn. I'm curious about what the staffing will be. I'm also curious about how people get referred. If you could just say a little bit about about that and sort of what the programming or approach or services on site are going to be. So, first question about staffing is so anytime we have clients or guests on site we have staff on site and so we run minimally two people first shift or two people there's always two staff on site 24 seven. So, during, during daytime hours and early evening hours it's usually three during kind of the middle of the night when people are sleeping it's two, but, but we always have a minimum of two on site. As far as referrals go. Let's say it kind of comes from three lanes. One is just self referrals and somebody just coming in off the street they've heard that we have, you know, low barrier shelter facility, and you know they knock on the door or they, they call and they say hey do you have a bed. We have the economic services, a lot of people that are that know they're on the verge of becoming homeless will reach out to economic services and they'll we have a really close to a relationship and they'll refer people directly to us. And that third source is just other agencies in town I mean it could be anybody from like you know Howard Center the Cots to you know Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity. And so they have the ability to make direct referrals. And so I, I, it doesn't always break down this way but I would get you know guesstimate based on past experience, about two thirds of the guests we have are actually referrals from either economic services or other agencies in town. And that helps too because it makes the beginner referral from another through another agency. It means at least they've had a first touch of saying yes to services, and it makes it a little bit easier to connect people to services to which is often a key to them escape, in that cycle. As far as on site services it, it, I mean a lot of some of this is formal some of this informal. I mean our staff, even our staff that aren't formal case managers. They really do like do things to the lens of like how do we, you know, engage people that may even be service a verse relationally and start moving them them in that direction. And so we kind of have two, two layers of case management we have what one person who we call our triage case manager. And that's just what it sounds like you know kind of like you go to the emergency room and they're trying to figure out like okay, let's let's patch this person up and then figure out where which way they could go and really nick our triage case manager when he's good doing case management people don't even know they're getting case management, like they don't know they're actually on this case load. They're just you know walking around the parking lot, you know, chatting with them about life and kind of encouraging them in a direction. For people that are have a little bit more forward motion. We connect them with what we call one of our chart new path case managers and that's, that's a little bit more that's that's definitely like let's sit down. Let's talk about you know what your story is what barriers are facing. And let's like start putting together a game plan of like, of what some of your goals are and figure out how we can get you moving forward on that. That's great. Kevin, we have five minutes left I just want to see if there any other folks who have questions. Yes, Mark. I have a question and comment. I do a lot of federal criminal defense and I know that there is the residential treatment field is underserved dramatically. And also the group of individuals that go through residential treatment in a place like Valley Vista but then need a silver housing type facility, while they are working let's say on conditions of release or whatever. I would urge the US Attorney Christina Nolan is very very much supportive of this idea. I would urge you to reach out to her office, the US Attorney's Office, but also to the United States probation office which is a wing of the federal court. Since they're often placing people or recommending whether or not people should be placed on conditions of release for example in a place such as yours. They're quite rigorous. And, but, and so it's really great. It could be a huge collaboration for you. So I applaud you. Thanks Mark. Thank you. Did you have your hand up. No, I was just trying to get your attention helping me out. Okay. Is there anyone else Matt. I just thank you, Kevin for coming really appreciate it. Maybe this is a dumb question but how do you, how do you feel this helps to meet present demand. Is it like 20% of the demand you may anticipate or is the demand inexhaustible I just wonder what your, what your knowledge is about that. That's a, that's a great question. I, when you said that I was going to pull up a staff that came in today. You just that we have our monthly meeting with the Chittin and Homeless Alliance this morning. And I think this probably gives you a good snapshot is as of today there are 568 room hotel rooms being rented in Chittin and County to house people they're experiencing homelessness. And so, and that's not really a sustainable approach it was it was just like kind of where things are right now. Just as things have been to say amplified by the COVID crisis and so I think that that kind of speaks for itself about why we kind of felt the pressing need to get this place open quickly because they're you know they're not from a financial perspective sustainable for the state. And there's really not the ability in those kind of settings even though I know the Champlain is a motel since we can own it we can create services and structure around it. I mean putting 118 people, you know, 118 rooms. That's the holiday and they're just not really designed to help homeless people move forward. So, I think, I think we kind of feel the pressure a lot to get it going. Thanks. And then Becky, and we've got two minutes so Mary you're on mute. Yeah, regarding food. Do you see them or are you open to food donations I guess is my question and if so what type of food, if you need that, if you're looking for that now. Yeah, so, traditionally a new place we've been really open to mill providers during COVID. It's been a little bit more challenging for sure. And so, at least through, you know the present situation because we're talking about 50 people per night individually on meals that's really tough for like even individuals and businesses to do so we we have a really close partnership with new moon cafe. It was on 150 Cherry Street and so we actually contract with them to provide all of our meal, all of our dinners each night. So great. Yeah, wonderful. And then Becky. I just got a question about families. Are most of your clients individuals or are you do you have families or families of children. They're all individuals. We, we point. Most most of the families right now are staying in like one specific motel with help from economic services. And then there's a COTS family shelter that we refer people to also. Unfortunately, we're out of time but Kevin, all this is very interesting. Thank you for making time to speak with us this evening I imagine you're extremely busy with opening on Monday so we really appreciate your taking time out of your evening to meet with us. Yeah, we may want to talk with you some more as this project is implemented and you know see how things are going down the road, literally and figuratively. Great. Thank you Kevin. So, the next portion of our evening is we're going to be talking about COVID-19. We're looking at it from three perspectives one from wastewater monitoring which is technology that has been implemented not fairly recently to detect the virus in our sewage. This is fascinating and I'm in kind of gross and I'm looking forward to hearing more about that we're also going to be speaking with someone who does contact tracing for the state. And then we'll speak after that with Tracy Dolan who's the deputy commissioner of the health department, and she'll let us know what's going on up to date at the department. So, to start off, we have Megan Moore, and she is going to talk to us about, and I hope I didn't butcher your name, Megan, to talk about wastewater monitoring. Yes, thanks. Let me share my screen here. Find out when you, which of my many windows. Let's see. I think it's that one. Do you guys seeing a slide that the title slide? Awesome. And my friend over here. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the tardigrade which is the world's most fascinating animal I view it as the, as the patron saint of COVID it's been blasted off into space frozen completely dedicated and then it comes back to life and so I think about if the tardigrade can do it, then so can we. So thanks for inviting me at think this is the first time that I've sort of talked spoken to a group other than to the media about our project which is wastewater based epidemiology. Not so much tracking the concentration so much as the infection trends and we'll talk a little bit more about that. Oh, and I am the division head for water resources so I oversee your water wastewater and stormwater services for the city. So a little bit of an introduction. Is there anybody here who's heard of wastewater based epidemiology or the fact that, you know, wastewater is basically one of the ways in which we can save ourselves from from COVID. Hopefully you guys have. There's been numerous articles and, and you know, after I sort of emerged from dealing with COVID shut down and making sure we could still provide water, drinking water and wastewater services to the city 24 seven which we have been successful in even through the height of the hard lockdown. You know I had seen seeing some of these news articles and I certainly was familiar with wastewater based epidemiology. Can remember if it was in the early 2000s we participated with the USGS and actually worked with them to sample our sewage. And I think that they could analyze the prevalence of different types of illegal drugs, because pretty much anything that you're ingesting you are in some ways peeing or pooping out. And then that can be picked up in the sewage and so they were able to kind of monitor the different trends of when heroin was coming in and then when heroin, if it went away or when the antidepressants that they saw in the school maybe population would fade away and then you'd see the like sort of elderly drugs that's very very interesting. You can think of sewage as a stream, right and a watershed in which, without even looking at whether the stream is for whether the watershed is forested or is, you know, a big old city, just looking at the water and what's in that way stream tells you a lot about what's going on on the landscape. It's not the only ones across the world and particularly in Europe and I know I'm they're also doing it in South Africa. People are using this method methodology, primarily to try to anticipate and just even get a few days ahead of the virus, and thereby hopefully stop outbreaks. So some of the key benefits of using wastewater based epidemiology. These are the cool parts and you can see in this graph here this is just an example of, you're able before you actually start seeing cases reported and people submitting themselves to the PCR testing. You're able to detect this increase in the wastewater stream and what we're looking for is actual components of the RNA it's not the virus itself but traces of the genes that are related to the virus of SARS COVID to really cool pieces is that before people start showing symptoms. So when they're in this range here. Actually I have my cursor over here when they're in this range here you're able they start they can start shedding in their wastewater so in their fecal matter, not necessarily in their urine. Another part is that people who are asymptomatic and remain in asymptomatic also continue shedding so it's a way of getting that sort of advanced notice, which you can see in this next slide this is a example from the lab that we're working with of a European city in and you can see that the, the concentration of the SAR of the RNA kind of remains low here and then before you actually start to see the cases start showing up in the population, you start to see this uptick right. So one thing that we have to be really careful on is that I, I can't tell you and the people who are doing this can't correlate exactly a particular concentration with a particular predicted case load. And that is largely because there's so many different factors, even looking at the different sewer sheds that we have in, in the city, certain sewer sheds are going to naturally have higher concentrations that may show up for the same maybe number of cases, because for instance, primarily residential flows so like the new North End, there's not a lot of business and commercial and production out there. And so most of the water that's actually getting to North Plant is from residential properties and that is where people are providing sort of the most contribution. Same thing with one of our sub sewer sheds in main plants, which comes from the old North End we've seen some of our highest concentrations there and while that is good to note from a trend standpoint especially to deploy additional resources in that area. We know that it is primarily residential and doesn't have the same influence that say the Southern sewer shed has, which has a lot of the flows from the breweries and restaurants and so on and so forth. And so things could be a little bit more diluted. Another cool part is that you're able to capture again this whole sewer shed here. And all these different, you know, could be schools that could be long term healthcare facilities that could be residences and you're able to either sample directly at the treatment plant, or once. And we've done this bit of work you can kind of break things out into sewer sheds where you have a higher level of granularity. And as I said it's really important to note that this is just one piece of an integrated strategy where we're not saying that it should take the place of testing or the place of masking and socially distancing. It is just one more imperfect data set with all the other imperfect data sets that we have. Concentrations can't be easily converted into predicted case numbers but what we do look at is the trends. And if any of you saw the graph that the mayor published today, which does come from this data, you know, it is showing an increased trend and we'll talk about that in a second. So just simply how do we measure it. The sampling is coming directly from, you know manholes those are the round covers that you see in the street. So those are access points to our sewer system. Our wastewater team has had been heroes in this whole thing. They're processing all of your wastewater while also going on doing the sampling. It's not without its problems the samplers can get hung up with all of the stuff that people flush all of the disposable wipes that people think are flushable and they aren't, and so on and so forth. And they overnight it to a lab out in Colorado and then they go through an extraction process and then use PCR to determine the concentration of the RNA. So I'm going to go a little fast through these ones, you know, we, there was a lot of background work that happened into coming up with the coming up with the ideal sampling plan for the city. Specifically at our sewer network system, we used our hydraulic model and then obviously lots of conversations with my team about figuring out what the right sewer sheds were. We knew that at a minimum we were going to be sampling the sort of macro sewer sheds for each of the three wastewater treatment plants that we have North Ave treatment plant main plant which is the one on the Burlington waterfront, and then East plant which is the one on the on but then we further went through and for the for the sewer sheds that are larger so this sewer shed here is for North plants this one over here is for East plant and serve sort of the university and the hospital. And this larger one is for main plant, because those are larger larger sewer sheds we did then break up North plant into two different ones. And then the main plant into three and then East plants already small enough. And what was recommended to us by the by our provider of the services is that when things are kind of low so let's see back in October when we started with go We basically were only sampling at the, at the plant level, and their recommendation was to sample frequently there so that you actually had that frequency to be able to detect the different trends and then once you started to see things go up to start going out into the sewer sheds where you wouldn't be able to then determine whether say one sewer shed was hotter than another, and then potentially deploy resources to that sewer shed. That's far I think the only time it's sort of worked out you know when we had a spike in the North plant sewer shed. Resources were deployed to the entire sewer shed and not just necessarily to the one or the other because we were kind of still learning and figuring out at that point, how this this particular plan works. So looking at the latest data I think it's, it's really pretty interesting. This is just the different sort of trend so they're the colors here are corresponding to the CDC matrix which looks at concentration times trend. And you can see the week when we started with go Agua things were actually looking pretty good which kind of corresponded to where Burlington was at at that time there were cases of COVID that had been reported but overall it wasn't too bad. So we started to get into the next few weeks we were starting to see some upticks and main plant in particular that we are monitoring, and then North plant began starting to become hot and it kind of progressed. And then now what we're looking at this week, which is somewhat of, I guess, a fair amount of concern was a great uptick in North plants concentration. It's not just the, the pure absolute value of their concentration that they're looking at but the fact that it was low and then the grass got really seep. We're seeing sustained concentrations with a slight uptick and main plant and then we saw a huge uptick in each plant now it is possible that the uptick and each plant could be related to the number of cases at the hospital. So that's something that we're monitoring as well. And then the drafts that I think the mayor published. I just want everybody to know that, you know, over the Thanksgiving holiday because of staffing we were not doing a lot of sampling and so this big jump is determined by these two points of having somewhat lower values. Prior to Thanksgiving and then the sample that we took. And then we went into November 30 because we usually sample for a full day came back extremely high so this is the average concentration of the three plants. We submitted some additional samples and we have results coming back tomorrow and also on Saturday so it's going to be really interesting to see if this trend holds. At one plant I'd be a little bit more suspicious but the fact that we saw higher levels at all three of the plants does lead me to believe that something's going on now how it demonstrates or how it plays out in the in the prevalence in the number of cases across the city. I think time will tell. So what does the city do with this data. Anytime we get data we're sharing it with the Department of Health they are the experts they are the ones who can help us correlate it with what they're seeing in the case numbers and help us decide you know if particular action should be taken. When we've seen I think hopefully you guys have seen this when we've seen significant trend changes trend increases in particular we have shared that result with the public. There's always a chance that we share data and that the data you know is not confirmed on the other side and that we end up with lower lower concentrations but we feel like it is a good opportunity to kind of. Give people empirical evidence of things that you know we're looking again looking at imperfect data sets we're looking at the number of cases that have been confirmed as positive but that doesn't mean everybody who has covered has actually gone and gotten a test. And when and where possible we focus on increased testing opportunities and in the press release that the mayor sent out today. You know there are a number of additional testing opportunities for a five pine street where there's free test every day from noon to 8pm. And there's some other testing opportunities coming up. And then when you see and then you be I'm is continuing to test their students and staff. And then that I can take any questions. Yeah, so I think what we're going to do Megan. Thanks for all that information that is really, really interesting. What I'd like to do is actually hold your questions till the end to make sure that we hear from Kelly and Tracy next, and then just because of our time I'd like to actually ask. Folks to ask wait until the end to have their questions asked and answered. So, is Kelly with us. I have to pull my screen. Hi, I'm here. Hi Kelly. I don't know why my camera is not working but. Oh, I see. I haven't turned it on that's why. Okay, here I am. Thanks for having me tonight and giving me the opportunity to talk with you about contact tracing. I just want to be clear though I'm not an expert on contact tracing. I have been doing it since March, the end of March when we were trained. We were kind of pulled from our regular duties and trained up to help out on the effort and I've been doing it since then. There are a lot of other folks that have been doing this type of work a lot longer. And we rely obviously on our experts. But I thought I would share my screen as well have a few slides to go through, kind of keep me on track but also make sure that I give you you all the, the information, the most accurate information we have. So let me see if I can do that. Let me see my screen now. Okay, great. So, um, this is just really an overview. Again, to keep me on track and, and to make sure that I am giving you all the fundamental information so case investigation and contact tracing is really a core disease control measure. I've been employed by health departments for for decades and now it's a key strategy for preventing further spread of COVID but as Megan mentioned there's lots of strategies and this is just one of many that we are implementing. So when someone refers to contact tracing. Sometimes they mean both case investigation and contact tracing, which, again, involves working with the patient who has been diagnosed with with COVID, and then identifying those people that may have been in contact with that, that patient and the goal obviously is to reach the contacts before they can transmit the virus to other people. So I'm going to start off with just what case investigation looks like. So a typical interview starts when we find out someone has tested positive for COVID. And we start the interview by gathering information about whether they had symptoms or not and when they started. So what, what type of symptoms did they have. We have a checklist of symptoms we asked them to go through. And, you know, having the day, the date at which symptoms started is really key and we can talk about that why. We also want to find out where the patient may have contracted the virus so we're really interested if it's not clear if they're not if they say they're not quite sure where they may have contracted the virus it's really key for us to go back 14 days. Prior to symptom development and find out what what they were doing and who they were with and the types of activities to kind of assess the risk that they had. And then obviously we want to know about the people that they are with two days prior to their symptom development. So we, we refer to these people as close contacts and a close contact is someone who was within six feet of the infected person for 15 minutes or more. And now that's a cumulative total of 15 minutes it used to be when we first started doing this, we asked people to determine whether they were with somebody for 15 minutes and that was a concentrated period of time but now it can be over the course of a 24 hour period. So we give, we give isolation guidance obviously I've linked here I'm not gonna. I'm afraid if I go to it it might not go back so I'm sorry, but, but I can make sure that I provide the documents are all on our website. So the isolation guidance is is clear that we want people. Again, as I mentioned we want to know when their symptoms developed. So we use that as their day zero. And so day zero we want people to stay home and stay isolated from others for a minimum of 10 days from the first time to the second set of symptoms. So day zero. They have to meet three criteria to be released from their isolation, the three criteria are one is a minimum of 10 days. The next is 24 hours without a fever. And the third is their symptoms have improved. So if they get to day 10, and they still feel sick, we ask that they stay home and stay isolated for a couple more days. So it is a minimum of 10 days, some people, you know, get sick they feel lousy for a couple days and but by 10, by day 10, they feel that much better and they can be released as long as they have no fever and their symptoms are better. We also want to make sure that people can isolate safely and correctly. So we always finish the interview by asking them if they have any needs associated with isolating. Do they have the cleaning supplies that they need. Do they have someone that they can ask to deliver food to them. What, what do they need to be able to stay at home for those 10, at least 10 days. We also want to have folks that will help make sure that they can isolate correctly safely and correctly. I included this graph just because I think it helps people think about when we're talking about the timeline for people that have coven. Obviously they're exposed to the virus and there's an incubation period that incubation period varies from person to person so it can be as short as two days before their symptoms start, or it can go as long as 14 days so it can be 14 days incubating in the body before the first symptom comes up. Then day zero is what we call the symptom development so on day zero. We go back two days prior to that to talk about the infectious period. So the infectious period is obviously the time when they can spread it to other people. So that goes from two days prior to their symptoms through the 10 day isolation period and again this you can see the isolation period down here is at minimum of 10 days. And they can be released from isolation after their symptoms have improved and obviously no fever. So that is a nice way to kind of look at it. So then once we've identified the close contacts that people have had, we call those people and we conduct a very short interview with them. We obviously notify that they've been exposed. Sometimes they already know that they've been exposed to somebody because that person has told them. So if, if a friend or a family member has been exposed to has COVID, they, they typically do outreach to those people around them that they know that have been in contact with them. So, the majority of time this is not new. This is not a surprise to them so they're notified of their exposure. We confirm the date. So we say we understand the last time you were in contact with someone who has COVID is this date is that if they know about the exposure, then they can confirm that date. We ask them if they have any symptoms and you know that is important if they have symptoms we want them to get tested right away. If they don't have symptoms we would we ask that they can they go into quarantine and they watch for symptom development. The quarantine guidance is to stay at home for 14 days and watch for symptoms. However, you can if you don't have any symptoms. At day seven, you can get a test and stay in quarantine until the results come back and if the results come back negative, then you can be released from your quarantine early. Again, we finished the interview with off green support to be able to quarantine. The timeline for close contacts. So you can see that they, it starts again with an exposure. The exposure may or may not actually turn into COVID. So we want them to quarantine. And again, the reason we're asking them to quarantine for 14 days is because it can take up to 14 days for someone to have symptoms. So the incubation period is again from two to 14 days. And then this day seven, they have the option of getting tested. And then if they have no symptoms or they test negative, they're released from their quarantine. Obviously some people are going to test positive. And so then, then we call them and they become a case or a patient and we do we go through the same interview process that we did with the patient that first had COVID. This is the last slide that I had and it's a little complicated. And so I'm not going to spend too much time on it, but it really, it kind of just walks through the process of contact tracing starts obviously with a positive result. And then, as I mentioned, we reach out to find out who the person was with. The, I think the most important thing that I wanted to mention about this slide was that not everybody that has been in contact with a person is a close contact. And it's really up to the contact tracers to do the interview in such a way that we can determine whether the people that the infected person was with are considered close contacts. Whether they're with a workplace, a school, a restaurant, a bar. We have, we actually have a team of people that we can refer to, to, to offer the guidance about whether a location that the person infected person was at is needs to be notified and needs to have an assessment about the risks that was associated with that, with that, that facility. So, I mean, those are the two things that I wanted to make sure people understand is that not everybody that comes in contact with the person is considered a close contact and not every place the person went to is considered a risk, a risk to the public. So, with that, also, we have a lot of information on our website related to coven, we have a lot of data. A lot of graphs. I encourage you all to go there and look for more information if you're curious. We also have a coven line that where you can ask questions about quarantine travel. The, the governor's executive orders, all that so people, we have that, that call center available Monday through Friday, I think now it's on the weekends as well, but I would encourage you to check out our website first. Okay, Kelly, great. Thank you very much for that information. We get to know how it works on the inside. I guess I've been through any of your processes here. Unfortunately, Tracy Dolan who's the deputy deputy commissioner of health has not joined the meeting. And I've been trying to get in touch with her unsuccessfully. So what I'd like to do for the remainder of our time is open it up to questions. And also Megan give you a chance to say more if there's something you'd like to, you know, I thought you'd like to complete. But otherwise, if folks have questions about, you know, wastewater detection, or contact tracing, please let us know. Yeah, we got Matt and we got Mary. I get to go first. Sorry, Mary. And can I ask, thank you for all that information is really, I was hoping you're going to have all that details really, really interesting. So are you based on what the results are here most recently will you now do like more targeted sampling from certain certain streets and things like that or is it still to is it still too diverse or diffuse to really be able to start that. Yeah, so we with the uptick that we had seen in November we have been doing regular sub sewer shed samples. Which is why I know that the old north end sort of the northern leg of the main wastewater treatment plant. We have seen some high numbers there. And while it does show us that there is possibly a prevalence of the cases I'm a little cautious because I do know that it's all residential, whereas, comparing it to the other sewer shed the one that serves downtown, or the south end. It, its concentrations are going to be more diluted than the old north end. So we've been doing that testing regularly the testing the results that come back tomorrow are samples that were taken from the three plants so sort of aggregated samples and then the results on Saturday will be all three plants plus the sub sewer shed so we might get that level of granularity. You know I think it has helped us in our in our sort of GIS tool we do have the locations of long term care facilities and I know that's not really something I get into but I know on the calls that I've been in the data with a BDH. We are often looking at whether or not there are those long term care facilities because those are obviously some ones that we're, you know, particularly particularly concerned about and if we can give them any heads up to, you know if this is the week to do more testing go ahead and do it if, depending on what their testing programs are. Yeah, let me just ask one more. The time gap is it about a week or two weeks. I was kind of remember. I meant to look this up I think for. We can detect things. Let me actually go look look it up and I will get back to you just now because I remember I remember it's talking about that earlier on. But there's that window on my ground my presentation, where people are shedding the virus but are not showing symptoms. I think the first five days once they've been actually exposed. Thank you. The New York Times said seven to eight days I believe. Okay. They also correlated lower viral detection with affluent neighborhoods. Except in India. In India, the poorest neighborhoods have the lowest incidence of COVID. And they think that because they've been exposed to so many viruses through their life that they have a higher immunity. I digress but that was it I read that today as well. So that's some of the thinking that I was just talking with our kids those pediatrician about why kids aren't getting and it's because kids have more recently been exposed to and gotten other types of corona viruses and that's one theory. I've heard theories about developing countries like South Africa where they regularly get shots that are prevented is for tuberculosis and whether or not, you know that is is conferring some sort of immunity it's just, it's so interesting, you know, obviously wastewater has been around forever but we have this sort of new science I mean the, the amount of learning that's happened even in the six months on this wastewater based epidemiology has been phenomenal like what we knew in July versus what we know now is is pretty cool. So, Megan I have a question. So, the current testing that shows the high increase in the wastewater, including the hospital. So, would that that would include UVM as well. I know that generally the UVM students did not have covered so having the absence of all those students with that influence the test, not having a lot more of positive but having the absence of a lot of negative results, you know what I'm saying so. More in the virus, less to dilute it by all the non positive college students. Yeah, I know I get what you're saying if, yes, so if overall the, the wastewater flows the amount of water that is being used. You could have the same load of virus RNA, so the same amount of virus RNA and yes if there's less water, then your concentration could go up I had not thought of that. I have not looked currently at our water metering results to see how much their flows have dropped with going home. But that that is one good explanation for sure. I think it's hard because like overall, we had we had not seen huge numbers in east plants watershed even when there were cases at the hospital. And there hasn't been a good way we'd have to do a lot more manhole sampling like above the hospital below the hospital and try to isolate it to figure out if it's somewhere else in the neighborhood downstream of the hospital because the hospitals at the top. If the hospital or lower down the watershed we can isolate it better but it's not not the best setup. Thank you. Can I ask a quick question of Kelly. Kelly are you seeing a lot of results of positive results of people who had no idea that they were positive a lot of no I'm sorry a lot of asymptomatic people this time versus say when you started doing the contact tracing or has that remained the same. Um, it's that's a really good question and I don't know that I have a good, clear answer. It's, there are people that are asymptomatic but it's not as many as I, I would say that it's not as many as there seem to be in the beginning. But I don't know that that's true. I, you know it might be just my experience, and it's hard because there's a volume issue like it just right now there's so many people that that we were interviewing that it's all kind of blended together into one big jumble. So, I know that the data, we have a data team that are keeping track of that and I can find out. It's just, it's also fascinating to me I can give you all 10,000 questions, but it's just, it's so fascinating the tracing it and looking at the wastewater and but it's that cool I don't know if anybody saw the article or the cartoon about the Swiss cheese and how Swiss cheese you know every piece of cheese has holes but if you layer all of the cheese is together. All of the holes are covered and so you mask wearing social distancing testing all that stuff has to be done at the same time because we pretty much have to just throw everything at this. And that's just this thing to hopefully you know get to the other side and wastewater is one piece of that contact tracing is one piece of that it's, it's, it's, yeah. I mean I would have liked to have skipped this part of my life I guess. Let this happen some other time but when you step back scientifically it is pretty cool. So Megan when you've spoken with us before you've really focused on infrastructure and new projects and the new sewer pipes and all that kind of thing. This direction you're now in the epidemiological direction is that a typical for your job or have you traced other viruses or like you talked about drugs that we see like how much of this has been your job in the past and relative to now. I mean we, we actually have been doing a lot of different types of sampling, like water quality sampling more for other contaminants. Like, like BOD and whatnot trying to understand the strength of the wastewater and if people are discharging things that they shouldn't be discharging so a lot of my professional life and even like my master's degree was on water quality sampling so that part of the science certainly has kicked in on this. We, we have partnered with the wastewater based epidemiology on the on the drug studies, but our staff itself has not necessarily been as played as large a role as they are now. And we're just one piece of the puzzle right we're working with the COVID analytics team at the city. They're one piece of puzzle puzzle and kind of managing the data and being the go between us and our vendor go Agua and the data and BDH and all the other people who need to know. So, yes, it's a little challenging like because it's so cool I could spend forever on it but then I also need to run the rest of the organization at the same time so there's a little little bit of attention there sometimes. Yeah, I can imagine and Kelly this is not what you usually do at the health department. No, it's not. It's not so. Everybody's changed in some way for this whole thing. Yeah, definitely. So do we have any more questions. We have folks looking for Tracy Dolan but we don't have any sightings or no, no detection yet. So we have some unexpected extra time and I have another question. If anyone else does not. I have 100 questions. So, Kelly, do you know if this is true. This is a theory. I don't know this is true so they say the short incubation period versus the longer incubation period. Do you find that elderly people or people who have compromised immune systems are more likely to have a short incubation and the young healthy people would have the longer incubation or is that not true at all or have you even are you aware. Yeah, that's fascinating I haven't actually heard that and I don't, I don't know the answer to that but these are good questions that we have, you know, a group of data folks that put together different reports based on our data and if we know exposure. Yeah, we could, we could definitely look at that. So, but I don't know. And are the current numbers are they spread throughout the state as well. You know, yesterday's I don't know but it was like, definitely the largest with 178 cases. And I know. Yeah, I'm not sure the distribution of that, but it's that it does seem to be distributed distributed more widely than it was for a while there. And I did I did find this. Lisa scientific briefing about the advanced notice and so generally they think that the wastewater based epidemiology the sewer levels will give you four to seven day advanced notice. So, you know, a head of confirmed COVID cases and you know some of that is probably people getting tested and it takes two days to get back and all that but you know it's not a lot of time but if, for instance, the press release that we put out tonight about the uptick helps people make a different decision about that gathering that they were going to have because we know people are still making those mistakes, or maybe they only invite two people over instead of five. So that's the information we're trying to provide. Sorry. As you can say I read UC San Diego has been testing the wastewater as well. And each dorm is on a different system I guess so they can use that information to, if there's an uptake to increase testing for a specific dorm and there's examples of you know testing specifically for long term care facilities large long term care facilities or jails correctional facilities, right because you're not necessarily going to unfortunately spend the money to be constantly testing the population but you could use it and again when you see it, say flat no prevalence no prevalence no prevalence and then it goes like this, it lets you know you got to get in there and act quick. That Mary that was close to the question I had which is, um, is St. Mike's Champlain UVM are they doing hyper local testing like of individual dorms. Yeah I don't know what the status is of that it's a little bit above my pay grade you know he's certainly that was one of the concepts that we had and partnering with them. The, the testing is fairly expensive and our staff don't have the capacity to be sampling additional manholes, but that those conversations have have happened and you know, things could change in the future I think. The only other city in Vermont that I'm aware of that is potentially doing this testing, or thinking about doing this testing, we heard is Rutland Rutland is considering. They had done a pilot program earlier on, similar to what we did and are thinking about bringing it back, which is good. It doesn't work for every community I was thinking about doesn't have a role to play in managing some of the outbreaks in Washington County, but it only works if people are connected to a municipal sewer system so if you're on a septic system, like many people are in Vermont. It's sampling the wastewater treatment plant and in a particular town is only going to get those people who are sort of in the municipal core. So, you know, it's imperfect but it works really well in Burlington. I see you address this while I was trying to reach our other presenter but I was thinking about people who come to a particular part of the city. During the day, but then they leave and they may go, you know, 15 miles away in the evening and so we can detect the virus where they were, but that if they poop at work. That doesn't tell you anything about where they may be. Correct. Yeah, so it. We talk about sort of cultural norms we even talk about like when, when are the time periods when people are likely to make a deposit or a contribution. Now, or even we talked about should we or could we be sampling specifically in the manholes that serve the schools. If Burlington High School had opened up. I had we had identified the manhole that serves Burlington High School and that we were contemplating sampling then but then it gets into the question like I remember in high school. I didn't poop in high school. So, we could have been doing all the sampling and it wouldn't have been telling us everything so really you know everybody poops but not at the same time and. Those people I think like to poop at home. So residential sampling is the best. That makes sense. Oh, sorry. I'm just gonna say does urine carry the virus or just poop. There's I've seen one or two articles it's primarily shed in the feces from from what I have read so it's the poop that is the most important. Okay. Do you have a schedule logical question. I have a question for Kelly actually. And this might not be something that you're tracking necessarily but just kind of anecdotally I'm curious how many folks that you've contact trace or talk to who were positive have been really surprised that they were positive. You know, I, I have worn a mask every time I've gone in public I haven't gone to any small gatherings. Just curious about kind of the breakdown of, of how many people are sort of shocked versus saying oh you know I shouldn't have gone to that party or whatever it is. That's a really good question. And obviously it's helped to answer anecdotally but it recently. There's been a link to somebody or something. So it had there hasn't been a lot of shocked people, because right now they're, it's really recently it's been unusual to not know what the source of the exposure was. Not that long ago, a couple weeks ago. It wasn't uncommon to talk with somebody is like you know I do everything I'm supposed to do, and I don't, I have no idea how this happened. So, it's, it's, you know, it's not surprising now with the increase in cases it's a lot of families, it's a lot of, you know, one person friend, you know friend groups or families and then it just, it's, yeah. So. And thanks to both of you for being here this has been super interesting. Yeah thanks for having us. In my presentation I can send the link in the chat box, the city does have a whole page on its wastewater monitoring and we have at least a simplified data set there so that you can kind of keep eyes on that. If you haven't heard me actual press releases it's probably because things are kind of settling down and and somewhat of a plateau but that way you can check in tomorrow if you don't hear anything and see what the data show. Great. Thanks. Any more questions before we wrap up for the evening. Any comments. I will say that Ben Truman has been looking for Tracy Dolan our missing presenter and I told him we were actually doing okay we're talking a lot about poop and his response was you really need to get out more. We may have been Truman from the health department or Tracy come back in February which is our next scheduled NPA meeting and they may circle back and give us an update at that time. And Megan always always interesting to hear from you. I just want to keep you here forever and Kelly, I'm so glad that you joined us and let us know about the important work that you're doing and I know my neighbor is also a health department. It's a question who's now been conscripted into contact tracing so thank you for your service. I know it's not the work you are hired to do but it's had such an important role to play in our getting through this pandemic. So if we've got no more comments or questions, I would like to thank all our presenters and do want to give a shout out to Sandy you said for participating this evening. Hi, good to see you. I know you're not presenting this evening but I'm glad you're here. Nice. Nice to see you all thanks. Thanks for the great agenda tonight. You're welcome. Hey, all you friendly faces thanks for joining us. We're happy to see you and our next meeting like I said is in February, and we will be addressing the upcoming local elections we have a mayoral race and we have City Council, City Council race coming up. So a little slot for water resources we want to come back our rate study and affordability program got put on hold because of COVID and because we couldn't do outreach but we're trying to reboot it. So our tinkering of the rate structure and the providing affordability program so that income burden folks don't can still have access to clean safe water. We were going to try to come to you in January but this is good information that we won't be able to come until February but if you can carve out a little slot for us to reboot that would be very, very helpful. Okay, that might be a good little pressure reliever in the middle of the candidate forums. I'm just kidding not free water but you know, residential, let's eventually appropriate constant priced water and making sure that people who can't afford water still have access to it. Great. Well, we look forward to seeing you in a couple months everyone and have a good, safe, healthy holiday season, and we'll be back you'll hear from us. Thank you all for along with our agenda for February.