 It's just after 10 and we still have a few people logging on, so we'll wait just a moment more before getting started. Difficulty here for a moment, but I think we're all ready now. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on this snowy Friday morning. This week represents another milestone in our long battle against COVID-19 as we will be lifting the mass mandate that has been in place since December, and the mandate will expire on Thursday, March 3. This is confirmed this week after a discussion with the city council, the administration did not propose extending it and the council concurred with that and it took no further action. This seemed like a good moment to convene another of these briefings that we have done so many times together over the last couple of years. We're joined again today by Dr. Tim Leahy from the University of Vermont Medical Center, the director of clinical ethics and infectious disease physician, and Dr. Leahy has really been a great local voice of caution and wisdom throughout this period and we're really excited to have you back with us, Dr. Leahy. We also have here with us this morning, Megan Tuttle, our planning director and our COVID response leader and really the head of this team that has been focused on data and analytics and best practices throughout the pandemic and has once again really provided the city a strong basis for making decisions and we're going to start today by turning it over to Megan to really walk everyone through the data and the rationale behind the lifting of the mandate and then after that, Dr. Leahy, I are going to have a little bit of an informal discussion about where we go from here and what this means for our lives and what resources and tools remain in place for continuing to manage the virus, particularly for individuals that are at high risk for COVID infections and serious impacts. So with that, Megan, why don't I turn it over to you. Okay, good morning. Thank you. Can you see my screen, Mayor? Dr. Leahy? Okay, great. I'm going to start by sharing some information about the key metrics that we have been monitoring throughout the pandemic and specifically looking at where we are today at statewide and at the Burlington level. So starting with the number of cases that have been reported across the state as of the last, well as of yesterday, we saw 206 cases reported on Thursday and we are now seeing a seven day average of cases of 198 across the state. This is down almost 90% from the peak at the beginning of January. I think that peak number that we saw was around January 10th. So we've seen a daily decline in the number of cases reported every day of about 90%. One thing that I did want to note here, typically in these briefings, we would share county level data. We tried to bring this a little closer to home and share what was happening across Chittenden County with the increase in cases that we have seen as part of the Omicron wave. You can see in the chart this green section of each of the bars. These represent cases for which a county has not been able to be assigned. So we have started to really pivot and look at both the statewide data and the city level data more closely than we have the county data for the past several months. When we look at what's happening here in Burlington, we have also seen a significant decrease in the cases reported on a weekly basis here in Burlington. We have seen just over an 83% decline since January 10th in the number of cases that are reported here in the city. We've also seen a similar trend in the detection of the virus in our wastewater monitoring. This kind of zooms into the period of time just before we detected the Omicron variant in our wastewater treatment plants to the most recent results that we received just last night actually. And we see that the level of virus that's been detected in our wastewater plants is down over 90% since, again, that peak around January 10th. I think it's important to just note that we have not received data for the North Plant as of this week, but we have been continuing to see those trends trending down across all of our wastewater treatment plants. And again, this is an important indicator for us because we know that our case data is limited to those folks that are actually getting tested and reporting an official result. So this just gives us an extra layer of information to understand what's happening within our community, within the city of Burlington, even if people are not getting tested. We've seen at the statewide level a decline in hospitalizations and particularly folks in the ICU. Hospitalizations are down about 70% from the peak in January. And I believe that the governor's team shared earlier this week that the number of Vermonters that are in the ICU is one of the lowest rates that we've seen since the end of the summer going into the fall. And I don't know if Dr. Leahy or anybody would like to talk later about what's happening more locally at our hospital. Another important piece of information that we've continued to watch is the progress on vaccinations at the statewide and local level. We now see that 93% of residents over five years of age in Chittenden County have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine. And 66% of residents five and older in Chittenden County are what we call up to date on their vaccines. So this means they're either fully vaccinated or fully vaccinated with a booster if they're eligible for one. The reason that this matters and in particular why this has mattered during the Omicron wave is is just quite simply because of we've talked about this a lot on these briefings because we know vaccines work. And particularly during the Omicron wave, I think it's important to focus on this. As we've seen such an increase in the number of people that have contracted COVID-19, it's important to look at the impact of vaccines in terms of helping us prevent some of the most severe outcomes from a COVID infection. This is information that is shared by the state's from Department of Health about outcomes for for monitors that have been infected and whether or not that resulted in a hospitalization. So we know that from the first six weeks of this year, adults who were not fully vaccinated had a seven times higher likelihood of being hospitalized than those who were fully vaccinated and had a booster. And we also know from CDC data that vaccines in particular are effective against the most severe outcomes of COVID, which is is the results in death. It was noted in CDC data that in December of last year, unvaccinated into adults had a 41 times higher rate of death from COVID than people that were fully vaccinated with a booster. You know, we know that through the Omicron wave, unfortunately, we have seen a number of remonters still pass away from a COVID infection. But we also at the same time have seen, you know, the number of remonters that have died as a as a total percent of cases in that time period significantly reduced. And that is because of the impact of vaccines on those infections. So that's what I have to share, Mayor, in terms of where we are with those key metrics we've been watching. And I'll turn it over to you and Dr. Leahy to continue talking. Great. Thank you for that, Megan. And I thank you for bringing in the National CDC data on that last slide. If you think sometimes it's been great how much local and statewide data we've had throughout this ability to be able to understand what's going on in Vermont. I do think sometimes, particularly during Omicron, just sometimes the dramatic effectiveness of the vaccines that message got a little bit muted sometimes by just looking at the Vermont numbers, given how highly vaccinated Vermont was. And the fact that we have kind of a population that is somewhat older than many other states, I think Vermont data could look a little bit different than the National data that last slide there really brings home just how dramatic, really miraculous these vaccines have been. And that's, I think, an important message to stay with folks as we go forward from here because we're likely to not be completely done with COVID and vaccines are going to remain a really key strategy going forward. And we'll maybe talk more about that with Dr. Leahy in a second. Let me just summarize the Burlington Indoor Mass Mandate. Again, it will expire next Thursday. This was first implemented in December in anticipation of the Omicron wave hitting the city and concerns about not just public health. We were hopeful that by the time we put the mass mandate in place that Omicron would not have as great public health impacts as in earlier times in the pandemic because of the high level of vaccination, but we're still very concerned about disruptions and disruptions. We're welcoming the hospital and we did face a very challenging period in many operations, city included, but at this point it's really clear from the data just that Megan just went through that the Omicron wave has receded and the justification for putting in places no longer there. I want to be clear that cities, the city's policy does not directly impact what the Burlington schools decide to do. They have separate state guidance on schools and the superintendent has communicated that he does not intend to immediately lift the masking requirement in the Burlington schools when schools reopen from the specification week that goes into next week. There will still be the masking rules in place when the kids initially come back, but that may not last. He's going to continue to look at data and how that transition goes and raise the possibility that it would be lifted later in the month of March. Importantly, the way the state guidance and authority works, businesses, organizations operating public spaces can continue to have their own recommendations or even requirements regarding masks. So if the public sees businesses that they're going into continuing to post rules, they should follow those guidelines. Dr. Lady, thank you again for joining us. How are things going at the hospital? And we have a number of questions we wanted to get to. How are you thinking of the stage of the pandemic and how kind of the average Burlingtonians should be going about their life as we come to the end of February 22? Thanks for having me and good to see you again. I think the reality in the hospital is similar to the picture that the data that you've been discussing show that things are better. And the numbers of not only cases, but people who are really desperately ill from COVID have improved. And so I think that's something that we should celebrate. And yet the work is not done. We do still have dozens of people hospitalized currently. And we care about them. And we know that there still are vulnerable people who we care about in our communities who we want to take care of. And so I think it's this mixed message that we're all getting used to being measured about. We should celebrate our successes until grateful that we're in a state that is one of the best in the nation in terms of its vaccination rates, one of the lowest in the nation in terms of its hospitalization rates, one of the lowest in the nations in terms of its death rates. That's awesome. But that's because we pulled together as neighbors and we took care of each other. We trusted that vaccination would work against this illness that has against others. We invested in wearing masks, whether it was a law or not. And I think that saved lives. That kind of neighborliness is something I felt incredibly grateful to be part of. And as you said, we're getting into this better place in the pandemic. But it's not over. And so we need to shift into this phase of saying, well, how is it now? What do the numbers look like? Can we relax a little bit? Or is this one of those times where we need to amp up our responses? And I think throughout a really key theme I've been thinking about is how do we protect not just ourselves, but also the neighbors we care about who might be a little bit more vulnerable. That might be the grandmother who lives down the road, whose medical illness or age makes her susceptible. It might be members of disenfranchised populations, a BIPOC population. It might be people who are immune compromised who maybe can't make as good a vaccine immune response. And so how do I, as a person, behave as a good neighbor so that I'm living my life and I'm enjoying it? I'm not in a continuous state of emergency. But also I'm not forgetting that I want everybody to be okay. And so it's been, I guess, a piece of good fortune for all of us to be living that reality here where our society is thinking about that or our leaders like you were thinking about it. And I think that's saving lives. Well, what strikes me is that we do have different tools at this point to answer that question. How do we protect ourselves? How do we focus that question now that so many of us are vaccinated and as those data slides showed are at much less risk than when we were both because there's not as much fire circulating right now and because the risks to people who are vaccinated and boosted and we should just continue to know there's more work to do. It is given how there really is a difference between the outcomes of people who are boosted versus simply having the vaccinations. It is a concern of mine and I think others that still have a pretty big gap between the 93% of the over five population that is fully up to date versus only about 66% that has just gotten the initial course so the vaccine has not gotten the booster. So that sort of remains out there as I think something that we should continue to message and people should, if you haven't gotten the booster yet, if your kids are eligible and haven't gotten the booster yet, you should do that. But beyond that, it does strike me that it's a much smaller part of the population that is at serious risk at this point and that we have greater tools for helping to protect those people who remain vulnerable and can you walk us through what you see as those main tools because sometimes I have emerged during this Omicron wave and maybe haven't gotten as I think enough attention to really understand how this is, there are different decisions that people have now and different opportunities. So let's walk through them. Yeah, happy to help with that and I think the slide hits the high point so I can sort of give a little bit more color commentary. So absolutely agree about making sure that we all get the vaccination that we need and people who are at higher risk by virtue of being immunocompromised might get more doses of a vaccine, but making sure that you've got the number that you need is I think number one priority. It keeps our most vulnerable people as safe as we can get them and it helps people who don't feel hugely medically susceptible, still protected from bad luck, which happens. I do see 20 year olds in the ICU because lightning struck and if you have an easy, safe way to protect yourself from that, that's great. Master are of course really important inside with people outside of your own household and I think we're getting into this phase where different people are going to sort of weigh those risks differently. I think some people are going to say because of X, Y, and Z, either medical fragility or just risk aversion, I'm not going to eat in restaurants or I'm not going to do that stuff. I'm not going to go inside with crowds unless I have a mask. Other people may decide to do that, but having good masks available for those who decide to wear masks or in places where it's required is really important. It's quite clear now that cloth masks are not nearly as good as other masks and that the more high quality KN95 and KF94 masks that you can get now are a little bit better than surgical procedure masks. I figure if it's right to wear a mask, wear a mask that works and for me, I find actually a KN95 from a reliable source is a little more comfortable than a surgical procedure mask. I tend to wear that but I make sure it's from a trustworthy supplier. Dr. Lee, before I move off masking, I think maybe one important element that it is a shift and when we, you know, I think it's sometimes a challenge in this pandemic as the science and as the tools shift, the public, you know, it can be jarring to the public when the communication shift, but also can be correct and I think this is one where the message is different now and the tools are different now. Throughout much of this pandemic, we've been focused on, you know, as the mask mandate was sort of an embodiment of the importance of kind of collective masking of everyone masking. As we lift the mandate and as we, you know, kind of move into this new period, I've heard a lot more discussion about kind of one way masking and that there's really a clear recognition now that people who are vulnerable can have, can protect themselves through the use of masks in a way that doesn't just depend on sort of collective action, that this one way masking is effective. Is that the way you see it? Yeah, I sort of think of there being three scenarios. One is the scenario in which it's really up to each person. You know, you're in a context, the grocery store or something like that, where it's going to become up to each person to, you know, decide what their level of risk tolerance is and what their level of risk is and mask accordingly. And it is true that wearing especially a KN95 does provide excellent protection from somebody else who's unmasked who unwittingly has COVID. It is better, of course, if they're both wearing masks, but we found in healthcare settings that if the healthcare provider is wearing a mask and maybe the patient is too sick to put on their mask, that the likelihood of that healthcare working getting infected is extremely low. So that's information that you can use in the grocery store, particularly if you're at high risk. I think there still are going to be certain settings in which we want to, you know, we don't want to sort of throw away the idea of communal masking, particularly in indoor crowds. You know, so recently I attended an outstanding electronic music concert with my son who loves, my child who loves electronic music. And there was a big crowded indoor space during a lull in the pandemic. It was before the Omicron surge and we wore masks and would have worn masks even if we didn't feel any risk to ourselves because it's so high risk in that context. So I think we're going to continue to sort of feel out situations like that. And then of course there are the highest risk circumstances, you know, I'm providing care, hands on doing intubation or something like in the hospital for somebody with COVID and which is remains required and I'll stay like that for a good long time. And so I guess that's the thing I wanted to point out is that even in this time of anticipated loosening of some of these rules will have places like hospitals where the rules are going to be tighter because the risk is higher. And so I think there are reports in other setting where you're kind of thinking continued. I mean, I think it's still a federal rules are still in place there. Those have not been lifted yet. And for, for good reason, I hear a lot of people saying, you know, we may never go back to flying without, without a mask on it. You think about things that way. We'll see, you know, I think, I think that that's definitely something my crystal ball hasn't brought into clear yet. So I think we need to be able to feel out what is lost, not being able to see a full facial expression and how much risk we're reducing. And if at some point we get to a place where the risk of transmission within the hospital gets close to what it was before we ever heard of COVID, then I think we should be able to get back to taking our masks off, but it's going to have to be that level of assurance of safety because our patients need to know that they're safe when they come to see us. Rapid tests are a tool many of us have become familiar with really just in the last couple of months. Now they feel like they're much more ubiquitous and, and feels like they're going to be kind of part of the landscape for some time. How, as, as Omicron recedes, how are you thinking about using rapid tests? Yeah, I do think these are an incredibly important recent tool. Many of us use these to make seeing family and other loved ones over the holidays safer. This is particularly true, I think for intergenerational connections or when you have somebody and your family or friends who's medically fragile and you don't want to endanger them. It's a way to get together inside and a cold day and enjoy it, but feel like you've got hours of protection. So if you get a negative rapid test, you know that for the next several hours, your life's just going to be, you know, you're going to bring a wine, a bottle of wine to a friend's house as a special gift. And you'll probably be like, yeah, I tested. All right. Good. What's up? What's on the, what do you think of that game last night? So I think that's going to be still part of our lives, but a bit more strategically used. Excellent. And finally, and here, I really do feel like this has gotten, this is a really significant change that has gotten less attention than it needs to. And that requires the public to understand it. I think for this, for this new capacity, you know, for this new tool to really be fully effective, people need to understand that there are treatments out there because they require to be effective. They require acting quickly. So can you, can you speak to that and what these new treatments are and what the public needs to know about them? Yeah, this is probably a good moment to pause and give some gratitude. You know, I think one of the big challenges through this pandemic is that the news is bad and we hear lots of really scary numbers. And also we are witnessing true miracles. Like it's ridiculous. The number of tools that we have now available this quickly. And so when I think, okay, we've lost 593 of our monitors. We've lost 943,000 Americans. We've lost almost 6 million people around the world. And those are surely under counts. I also think that is bad news by also think, thank God we have over 10 billion vaccine doses delivered so that we didn't lose more. Thank God we have rapid tests. Thank God we know about masking and thank God we have so many effective treatments now that is difficult for people who are not reading about this two hours every day to even remember their names. It's ridiculous. So I can get into the details, but just, but I feel so thankful that I'm able to help people stay alive and get back to the lives they cherish because we have tools like this. So it turns out that over the last basically year, but especially in the last several months, we've just had sort of a panoply of new and proven effective treatments become available to our patients. And, you know, a new one came online just last week. It's just one after another. And those are treatments that people can take if they want to be protected from getting COVID and they're super high risk. There's a monoclonal antibody that can be given to immune compromised people called heavy shell that they take if they're not infected and they're not exposed to keep them protected when their immune system is not strong enough. There are also a handful of treatments that I can give to people who have COVID. It's clearly diagnosed and they're at high risk of getting severe disease or death, but they're not sick right now. And so they just don't want to get sick. And so I can give them, there are two pill options and two, three IV options. Even hard to remember the numbers because it just changes every week, but three IV options that I can give to be able to keep them at home with their family and doing the stuff they like to do. All safe, all proven effective. And the good news is also that with increasing availability of those drugs and reducing case counts, we went from having to ration those things, just like you mentioned that the hospitals were under huge strain and we were really having a hard time hospitalizing enough people that needed to be hospitalized. We also did not have enough doses of those medicines until just a couple of weeks ago to be able to give them to everybody who needs them. We now have enough doses to be able to give them to people who need them. So if somebody is high risk and does develop COVID, I really want them to contact their primary care doc and say, Hey, can I get one of those treatments? And those processes are in place. Even if somebody is unlucky enough to not only have COVID, but also to end up in the hospital, maybe needing oxygen or other supportive measures, we also have proven effective treatments like Remdesivir and steroids and other immune suppressant drugs that also have been proven to work. And so, you know, of course, you don't want to land in the hospital that sick, but we also have the ability to help protect people from death and get them back to their lives. And this is just a couple of years into a pandemic that nobody had ever heard of back in December of 19. And so COVID has not been defanged. It's still got some bad fangs, but we do have some tools we can use to fight it. Thank you for all that, Dr. Lady. And it is hard to keep up with how, I mean, some of what you just mentioned is really quite new. And so just to make sure I'm getting this right, some of these interventions, the pills you mentioned, are most effective if they are taken within the first three to five days, I believe, of infection. Is that right? There is a premium on if people are feeling deeply ill of reaching out to their provider, as you suggested, to know if that is appropriate treatment for them. Time matters, right? Yeah, that's right. The details of how long into your illness you could be to be eligible sort of vary by treatment. But I think that's the right message is to say that if you have symptoms, it makes sense to get a test because you want to know, and if you're at high risk of getting severe disease and you have COVID, call your primary care physician because they can talk you through, you know, you were in that eligibility window and can they either prescribe that pill for you or refer you for the IV therapy as appropriate to your situation. So yeah, get tested and make sure that your doctor knows. This is another good use in sort of thinking how these strategies work in combination with each other. So another reason to have some rapid tests around so that if you are having some symptoms, you can quickly determine whether or not that's likely COVID. That's right. And one of the little subtleties of this is that if you have symptoms that really fit COVID and you get a rapid test and it's positive, that's COVID. And so call your primary care physician if you're at high risk. You know, if you're not at high risk and you're, you know, you're safe at home, you don't have some reason to come in for medical care. Okay. Then you know just to isolate and keep others around you safe. But if you're at high risk of serious disease, yeah, now's the time to call and get that support. If you have symptoms that fit COVID and your rapid test is negative, you know, they're not perfect tests. And so that's, that's a time that you may ask, you could go into one of the state sites to get a PCR test or you could ask your PCP to get it done just to make sure you could retest with a rapid antigen. It makes sense to have in the back of your mind that if you have plausible symptoms, a rapid antigen test might be something you need to build another layer of certainty into that. Okay, great. We're going to open this up to, we're fortunate to be joined by a number of people today. Appreciate you joining us. We'll turn it over to you in a second. One last question for me. There are many parents out there that are continuing to kind of. Modern news asked the question when, when will vaccines become available for children under five? Is that something you're anticipating soon? Yeah, it was, we all had a bit of a disappointment. About a week ago, we, the FDA was planning to review Pfizer's new vaccine for kids under five, which has been a long awaited development. You know, parents of kids under five have not been able to relax to the same degree because they can't get their kids vaccinated. And so we're all waiting to hear the news of that hoping that perhaps we would have the vaccine in March or April. Sadly, the FDA canceled that because they felt that there needed to be better data for the review to occur. That builds on a inclination from the early studies that the dose may have been a little bit too small or that kids might need a third dose of that age to get really good protection. And so what's happening now is that they've gone back to do additional studies before they bring their portfolio back to the FDA for study. That adds this delay and I think the hard part is it really depends on how long does it take for them to go out to those studies, give additional shots to the kids in the study, I suspect, and then see how they do and then come back. So I don't know for sure when they're going to be able to come back with those, that information, but I'd be a little surprised if we hear more in the next coming months. So it's probably not going to be until late spring or summer that we get a vaccine for kids that young, and then we're going to be able to get a vaccine for them. And then we're going to be able to get a vaccine for them. Which is a disappointment. Right. Right. Okay, well, let's. Let's. Mayor, if I, if I could, I just had a one final question for Dr. Leahy. You know, I really appreciate the way that you opened this conversation by saying, you know, we have had a lot of success in the state and, you know, there are a lot of things that we need to continue to pay attention to. And I think one thing that I was just curious to get your attention on is we're starting to hear people talk a lot more about this idea of living with COVID. And I'm curious if you could say a little bit from your perspective, what that means. And I think a lot of what we've talked about today is sort of the kind of thing that we can anticipate, you know, the types of measures or the types of kind of measured decision making that we would envision under, you know, a life living with COVID, but I just wondered if you could say something more specific about that. Yeah, it's a great question. I sort of hear it Megan from, from two levels, you know, partly there's the, you know, what can we as a community expect from COVID. And then there's also just, you know, how can I be a good neighbor version of it? And how can I be a happy person in that scenario? I think as a community, you know, what we can expect is that COVID's not gone and it's not going to go away. And there probably will be peaks and valleys like we've experienced. The hope is that because more and more of us are vaccinated, that those peaks and valleys are going to be easier than prior surges. And so we'll have more time to enjoy life that's closer to normal. But that there may still be times when we see an uptick in cases and have to deal with that. So what I think that means is that as a community, we're going to sort of need to fold COVID into our lives. We can't just forget about it. It's not gone. But we also shouldn't feel like there's a, you know, red blinking siren on our, you know, in our front of our consciousness all the time that this is going to be something that we manage as adults, just like we manage, you know, challenging weather or a difficult year of influenza, you know, or whatever else comes up. So I think we'll just need to be sort of sort of literate in what it's like in that particular season and adjust accordingly. And I suspect we'll just get more and more used to it, just like best analogy I've heard to this is just like you go, oh, it's raining. I'm going to ring an umbrella. We're just going to be like, oh, it's one of those, those times when bummer, but I have to wear a mask a little bit more than I usually did, but it'll go away soon. All right. No big. And then I think there's sort of like that individual personal level. I mean, I'm sure I'm not alone in this, that this has been an incredibly stressful couple of years. And I think part of the stress has been just the constant information overload in the sense of, you know, these woeful numbers and the political strife about this. And for me, I think a lot about community trust. And I think, yeah, how will we remember these years? And what I really want is to feel that, you know, these were difficult times, but that we pulled together. We helped each other. We were amazed at the ways our neighbors helped each other. We were proud of what we did. We were impressed by the science and felt increasingly reassured. And so I kind of think, okay, so what's my role? Is there a way that I can be the kind of neighbor that people expect will just be kind of nice and considerate. And wear a mask when it's appropriate or ask questions. Would you feel most comfortable if I wore a mask? You know, I think that's the basic, the basic decent stuff that we expect of our fellow drivers or people waiting in a line in a store, that kind of stuff. And part of that for me is sort of trying as much as possible to avoid political divisiveness. There's so much snarkiness out there. And I think that undermines the success of our efforts to keep everybody safe. So as much as possible, I think it's good to sort of say, hey, people are going to disagree and that's cool. It's how we get to the right decisions. We're all here with good intentions. We're all dealing with uncertainty. We're all doing the best we can. And the more we trust each other studies show, the better the outcomes in COVID-19 are. And so another reason to feel grateful we're here. Thank you for that, Dr. Lady. Well said. With that, why don't we check in with our members of the media and see if there are other questions. Okay. And I'll go to the microphone. I was Jordan. In the background there. I think that came through a little garbled, but just as you've done before, people do have a question used to raise hand function. And that will enable the microphone. And. If not. Mayor, if there while we're waiting to see if there are any questions, I was wondering if Dr. Leahy has just one more minute. You know, I'm wondering if there is anything kind of, that we can share about what it means for us to kind of move from considering a virus to be a pandemic to an endemic. And not sure if Dr. Leahy has any advice for us on how we, you know, how we know when we have kind of reached that pivotal point. That's a really challenging question. It's a great question. So, you know, when something is epidemic or pandemic, as you know, it means that the rates of the disease are higher than they used to be. So of course, you know, when there was no COVID, and then there became COVID, that was an epidemic. And since it was widespread, it was a pandemic. Once something becomes endemic, that means that the rates are sort of at a relatively stable baseline. And there's of course a little bit of variation. So every year we have. Our SV respiratory sensational virus cases and kids in particular. And, you know, maybe some years are a little bit worse than others, but they're basically about the same from year to year. And so that's considered endemic. That's still, you know, particularly scary for the parents of those little kids who end up in the hospital for that. And we are, you know, we try really hard to protect them, but it's not a, you know, a four alarm fire in the community. The hope is that COVID will sort of over time settle down into something that's closer to RSV or closer to influenza where we have cases each year, but it's not such a dramatic number. What that number will sort out to be as we transition from endemicity to endemicity is not known. You know, I think that's the hard part is that we're in this kind of transitional state. And I figure the way I think about it is that I know that we're, we're in this phase where I anticipated is on average going to be better because of immunity. I know that you can't trust immunity 100% because variants can emerge that can be a little bit less susceptible. So I know that we still have to kind of count the numbers and watch to see what the cases look like and act accordingly. And I suspect that over time it'll slowly progressed toward sort of getting to a, it'll kind of go like this and then get toward a level that's a little bit more stable. And at a certain point, we'll kind of arbitrarily say, boom, we're going to call this endemic, but it's still going to go up and down a little bit within that. The difference between this transitional life where we're just kind of getting used to the highs and lows and that endemic life are pretty trivial. Because at the end of the day, we're going to say if the case counts are higher than we like, we're going to do a little bit more than we think. We're going to do a little bit more to protect ourselves from it. And if they're nice and low, like we like it, we're going to live our normal lives. That's still going to be true. Thank you. I'm not seeing any hands from the media. There are a couple of questions we're dropping the chat. I think we can just address quickly as we wrap up here. Will the vaccine mandate be lifted or changed? Just one question. I'm not 100% sure what the, what is meant by that, but it is worth noting that we did have this sort of exception to the mass mandate in Burlington that institutions that were requiring everyone who entered to show proof of vaccination did not, masking was not required in those settings. That rule is going away with the mass mandate. In terms of Burlington, perhaps the question is about what is Burlington doing as an employer? Certainly Burlington is keeping its rules requiring vaccines or a testing option in place. At least for now, we will continue to require unvaccinated employees to get tested that could, that could change if the numbers continue to go down over the course of the spring. But I do think, you know, to the point that we've come back, circled back to a number of times here that COVID is not going away. It's likely to be here. I certainly plan, I think organizations should continue to think about vaccination rules for their employees. I think schools should be thinking about vaccination, adding COVID to the list of vaccinations that are required for children to attend school like we have for many other vaccines. I don't think the vaccination, knowing how miraculously effective these vaccines have been, I don't think the conversation about rules regarding vaccines is going away anytime soon. And then finally, our PCR tests completely phased out. The answer to that is no. There continue to be PCR tests available for free every day. I think every day, right, Megan? Or just about at various locations in Burlington, including the Pine Street location that has been in the city has been happy to help support. That could change at some point. I have noted that, you know, England announced recently they were phasing out that broad free testing. You could, you know, I guess hopefully we will reset a point where we can comfortably do that. But there, I've not heard any specific plans for that. Have either of you. I'm not in the state now. Yeah. Okay. I think with that, well, thank you again, Dr. Leahy for joining us. It's great to see you. Thank you again for everything you've done. I think you've been one of the, one of the reasons that the community has come through this so well. And that I think, and I really appreciate how you captured it. I think there is much for this community to be proud of and how we've gotten to this point. And that work is not over as we shift to a new phase here. And, and, and we can all be gentle and kind with each other as we navigate through these changes will be better off and appreciate your reminders of that today. Thank you. Good to see you. Thank you for your hard work, Megan, getting us to this point. And I hope everyone has a great weekend. See you soon. Mayor, thanks, Dr. Leahy. Thank you.