 We're good. Do you want us to take a look at the slide? We are reading this as live. It's live stream. Yeah. Ready? All right. We'll go ahead and get started. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. I'm Michelle Hewitt, El Paso County Public Health Public Information Officer. Today we just have a few brief updates from Colorado Springs Mayor John Souther's Chair of the El Paso County Board of Commissioners, Mark Waller, clinical psychologist Dr. Lacey Edwards with Aspen Point, and from the Colorado Springs Fire Department, we have Chief Ted Colas and Chief Co-Medical Director, Dr. Matt Angelitis. We do want to continue to remind everyone to seek out those reliable sources of information, including El Paso County Public Health's website. And please also know that the public can use our Public Health Call Center. The number for that is 719-575-8888. Thank you. Good afternoon. Obviously, at the city, we have three principal priorities as we work through this crisis. Number one is the health, safety, and welfare of all our citizens. In that regard, we're staying in very close contact with the health department following their advice. I have very frequent communications with the Governor of Colorado and also monitoring all communications from the White House. There's almost a daily briefing from the White House about all the various issues going on, what the funding streams may look like, and things like that. Our second priority, of course, is the health, safety, and welfare of the employees of the City of Colorado Springs. A number of our employees that can work from home are working from home. As to the employees that are involved in the direct provision of city services, such as our firefighters, our police officers, our street repair folks, our code enforcement folks, we want to do everything we can to protect them and keep them safe. Third priority, of course, is to begin to prepare for the economic impact of this event. There's no question we're going to see a precipitous decline for an undetermined length of time and city revenues. And so city finance has to do all the modeling so that we know how to deal with that in terms of cutting expenditures. While public health remains obviously our number one priority, I also want to echo the calls by our local business community to encourage lower risk ways to stimulate local businesses. We've got businesses that are really hurting. Obviously, the closure of our restaurants to in-service dining is a big blow to that sector of the economy. But it's a creative sector of the economy, and I met with the restaurant industry yesterday and just listening to some of the things that they're going to do to make curbside service and pick up service available. That's a lower risk way that folks can engage in the economy and have some sort of normalcy in their lives. Obviously, we also encourage folks to, if you can't get out to a store, you can purchase online. You can talk about purchasing gift cards for later use, things like that. The other thing I'd emphasize to our community is I know that we have a very giving community, and I think you're going to see several ways that you can help mitigate this crisis. Pikespeak Community Foundation has set up an emergency relief fund that you can give to that by going to ppcf.org slash relief. The state of Colorado has also set up a relief fund. That information, I'm sure, is available on a variety of sources. We've got a new website created by our city industry called supportthesprings.com, and it's going to give all kinds of ideas for supporting the local economy. And that's at sportsprings.com. So please look at that. My only other comment, and obviously I'll take questions afterwards, folks we've been tested before. We've had floods, we've had fires, we've had economic downturns. This is a unique and very, very challenging test. We don't know how severe the economic damage is going to be. We're going to monitor it. We're going to see how long this takes place. It's going to be painful. We don't know how painful. But we are going to get through it. We're not exactly sure what everything is going to look like when we get through it, but we will get through it. It's going to take leadership from people like myself, the commissioners, the council, people, the department heads, the emergency folks, obviously the health department, which I want to single out is exercising incredible amount of leadership in this effort. It's incumbent on us as leaders to listen to the health department get our direction from us. We have to be leaders. Our citizens, I think, hope understand that there's a shared responsibility. They have to do everything they can to mitigate this thing, take care of themselves, practice good hygiene, appropriate distancing, and things like that. And there's going to be some shared sacrifice, and we don't know what all those sacrifices are going to be, but I'm confident that this is a resilient city, a resilient county, a resilient state, and we're going to get through it. And at some point in the future, we'll celebrate the fact that we have overcome yet another great challenge. Thank you, Mayor Souther. I'm Mark Waller. I chair the Board of County commissioners. And I want to begin by saying thank you, mostly to the citizens of El Paso County for their patience and understanding as we move forward through the issues associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. But I also want to say thanks, and I can't stress this enough. The great work that our Department of Public Health is doing, they are, I think, really doing the kinds of work out there that's going to prevent this from spreading in the ways that it's spread in other countries and other areas of the world. And I think at the end of the day, that's going to save many lives. And I also want to say thank you to all of the employees of El Paso County, 2,850 employees that are being flexible and gracious about how we move forward through this crisis. So I think it's important in these circumstances to say thanks. And we owe a lot of thanks to a lot of folks for helping us manage this in the absolute best way possible. I want to reassure the citizens of El Paso County, we are open for business. Now we're doing our part to limit the impact of COVID-19 on the public, but we are certainly open for business. We're doing our best to follow the guidelines set forth by the federal and state governments, while at the same time maintaining the limits on numbers of people in buildings and things of that nature, but again, we are open for business here. I can't stress that enough. It's the county is responsible to provide services through the state and federal government to some of our most vulnerable citizens. And to that end, we have closed most of our public facing portions of our public buildings. In particular in our citizen services center, that's where most people go to get their DHS services meant. They also go there for DMV purposes. Any public facing portion of those buildings has been closed down with very few limited exceptions. Again, limited exceptions for DHS, limited exceptions for DMV. Otherwise we're asking the public to stay out of that building and certainly out of our other local buildings as well. Many, many most of the services that we provide can be provided online. Again, I can't stress that enough. If you're looking for a service from El Paso County, chances are that can be provided online. Please go to elpasoco.com. That's elpasoco.com to look to see if the service that you're looking for can be provided online. In most cases it can. And if it can't, again in very few and rare exceptions, we will be providing those services at our citizen services center and other public buildings. But again, most of those services can be provided online. In addition, some of our offices have extended deadlines. So if you're a person that has a deadline that needs to be met, you have a service that requires some sort of deadline. Understand that most of those are being extended at this time. In those cases we've set up alternative methods of contact. We've established some work from home procedures for our employees so they can still help citizens maintain and get the services they need. And we have many of our other employees or otherwise on call so they can help us continue to provide services in El Paso County. And again, if you want to learn more about service availability, go to elpasoco.com. That's elpasoco.com. Please go there before you come to one of our public buildings. And one big service that, again, we're still providing is services through our Department of Human Services. But again, most of those can be provided online and please elpasoco.com to find out if your service can be provided online. Other measures are being done by our other local elected county officials, including the sheriff, the assessor, treasurer, clerk and recorder, our DA and other commissioners individually. If you have issues related to one of those, services related to one of those offices, you can access those offices through our website. Again, that's elpasoco.com. If you don't have access to the internet and you need to make a call, you can also do that. And you can do that at 719-575-8888. Again, that's 719-575-8888. And I'll turn it over to Dr. Edwards. Thank you, Commissioner. So I'm Dr. Edwards. I'm a clinical psychologist with Aspen Point. And I want to talk about some of the mental health aspects of this change that we're all experiencing. So I know our community is flexing really quickly. Many people are moving to work from home at a really rapid pace. And there's a new normal coming, right? So what we've been used to was your rhythm. It was your routine. And now we need to lean into just developing new routines. So I'd encourage you to think through what would serve me best in this time. How can I best take care of myself both physically and mentally? That could mean leaning into new ways of cooking, taking care of loved ones in the home, sleeping patterns, and also ways of lowering your stress. So I'd encourage you, even if you're home or if you're still in the workplace, lean into those areas where you can exercise. Find a way to physically release that stress. There's lots of options out there, including gentle methods such as yoga and stretching, moving all the way to YouTube videos where you could do a more aggressive workout. But I'd encourage you to not keep that stress and anxiety bottled up. It's really normal to feel anxiety in this season where we have a lot of uncertainty and that's okay. But we want to make sure that it doesn't become overwhelming. So I'd encourage you to give each other grace and extra margin with people you interact with. Know that with best intent our whole community is shifting and we want to do that to take care of one another. But it would be really normal for you to have a place in your day where suddenly you're feeling anxious or maybe frustrated with something and we want to take a deep breath and step back and say, okay, what do I need in this moment? What is my body or my mind telling me? And how can I respond to that in the best way possible? I'd also encourage you to practice gratitude at the end of your day before you go to sleep. What am I grateful for today? What good things happened? What would I like to see happen tomorrow? When we set our minds with intention, we can make a strong path forward both for ourselves and for our community. So I'd encourage you to lean into that. And if the anxiety does begin to feel overwhelming, feel free to reach out. I know that Aspen Point Crisis Center and our telephone lines are open. We're ready to serve you. We also have many other behavioral health members in our community ready to do the same. So know that you're not alone and there are people here to walk through this with you. It's uncertain for all of us. And that's a normal human response. So we want to meet you there and also journey with you. I'll turn it over to Chief Colas. Thank you, everyone. I'm Ted Colas, Colorado Springs Fire Chief. I'm here today to tell you about a new triage protocol that the Colorado Springs Fire Department and others in the area to include American medical response are going to be implementing. This new triage protocol enables our firefighters and paramedics to identify COVID-19 patients or those who are suspected to have COVID-19 but who are able to manage their symptoms at home and try to give them a route and information so that they can do exactly that, manage their symptoms at home and not overburden emergency departments. What we've seen across the country is exactly that, that emergency departments can get overwhelmed with patients who are able to manage their symptoms at home and if they clog up the emergency department or if they don't have COVID and go into the emergency department, that's an area where there's a high degree or high suspicion that they can become exposed because our emergency department staff is working around the clock to take care of patients that are coming in that definitely need that emergency care. The CSFD will continue to respond to medical emergencies as we always have but this new directive is given to us by our medical protection team that has given us really a doctor's order to say this is how we need to proceed in order to keep our community safe, in order to keep our health care workers safe in the pre-hospital setting as well as inside of the hospital. We've got, as it was already stated today, we've got a limited number of health care workers in our community and we want to do everything that we can to keep them healthy and keep, maintain their ability to respond to those Colorado Springs who most need our care. Now for any details around this new triage procedure that we're going to be following I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Matt Angelitis from UC Health Memorial he is one of our co-medical directors for the Colorado Springs Fire Department and also American Medical Response. Thank you Chief. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you guys today about a new process that we're implementing in our community. The design and implementation is centered around protecting the members and citizens of our community as well as the first responders that we're asking to provide treatment to them. The protocol is set up to screen patients for potential coronavirus symptoms or exposures and then to guide treatment for those patients in a very detailed way for our first responders. The process also involves real time communication with physician medical directors if patients or our first responders don't understand or have questions we're there and available to video conference or real time conference with patients in their homes or at the site of the calls to ensure that we're providing the very best possible care we can and to ensure that we're not unnecessarily spreading the virus in our community or to our patients in the hospitals who are most at risk. I expect that as our volume increases and we utilize this protocol it will be in a very important part of our community's response to be able to maintain hospital beds and take care for all the citizens in our community. I'm here to answer questions. I appreciate your time. Any questions? Very unlikely. The question is in light of the fact that the city of Manitou Springs has chosen to close the Manitou incline is it possible that something similar that could happen to Kaurasprings parks? As you know at this point in time the governor in all the directives that have come down so far has actually encouraged folks to get out and engage and exercise as long as they maintain social distancing. That's certainly our viewpoint in the city of Kaurasprings. We've had a lot of people this week with the good weather depends upon what day you're talking about taking advantage of our parks. I saw a lot of people biking on the trails on the way up here and I think most people are perfectly able to be responsible about that and maintain social distancing. As to the closure of the incline I will simply say this the Manitou Springs City Council that last night at a meeting they did not consult the city of Kaurasprings beforehand they did not consult the health department I personally understand for example why they might want to curtail the shuttle because that brought people together I personally would not have made the decision to close the incline where I think people can engage in exercise and keep social distancing based on what I know of the intergovernmental agreement between Manitou and the city of Kaurasprings they really should have talked to us before they did it but they have in fact done that but in terms of that being a precursor to anything that the city of Kaurasprings might do with our park system I would not encourage you not to view it that way and we don't anticipate closing any El Paso County parks Commissioner Waller indicates similarly in El Paso County we don't anticipate closing down any of our regional parks either for the same reasons expressed by the mayor of Colorado Springs other questions so one other question here just came in please address CSPD response infrastructure expansion to establish more recovery or treatment sites similar to UC health tents or retrofitting existing buildings I think different questions frankly obviously CSPD I can speak to that a little bit there's no curtailment in police services the police are obviously doing everything they can to protect their citizens responding there are officers responding to different citizen situations but in terms it then turns into a health question which I think the health department or perhaps the PD medical or the FD medical directors better able to address so I believe I understood the question to be are our health care systems developing alternate treatment opportunities for screening and testing and the answer to that is yes UC health and insurer both working hand in hand with our public health departments to set up additional triage treatment and testing facilities and also working tirelessly with our operations teams to ensure that we have the equipment staff supplies rooms beds needed to care for those patients in our community that need that health care I have a quick question while we're on it I'm not sure if any of you guys are able to answer this question but we wanted to ask about how many people have recovered in El Paso County I know we're trying to keep track of that kind of information but is that something she might be able to field for us currently our first case that was reported in El Paso County is fully recovered and do we have any other information on cases recovered is that just it that's the information we have available at this time do we know how we're keeping track of those sorts of things we're just monitoring the same patients who have tested positive for the fire chief I know we had talked no more than a week ago or a little bit prior to that about steps we were already taking is this new triage system different than those steps we had already implemented is this a more safe situation or what's the difference well the answer is yes this is a new implementation it actually we started rolling it out to our employees on Monday it's only now being fully implemented so that we understand the protocol and everybody has all of the correct direction to be able to implement that protocol there are there will be times and this I think that we need to make clear there will be times that our paramedics or EMTs may show up at somebody's home and speak to them evaluate them look at all of their signs and symptoms and go through some questions and questions with them to find out what their history is and at that time advise them that it's not advisable for them to go to an emergency department by ambulance that maintains that equipment and those first responders to go to the next call so it provides more depth in our in our systems community or community system but it's a change for us it's something that is it is new and we will give the very best explanation that we can to those patients and then on top of that we're not going to leave them empty handed either we're going to provide them with the absolutely best home healthcare information that we have available to us that comes down to us through our medical directors from the health department I can imagine that might be a frustrating situation for those patients who are saying maybe I need to go to hospital what are you saying what are you saying I need to get there but you're basically asking them to trust you well to trust the medical direction this was put through this protocol was designed with our medical directors and actually a team of quite a few physicians put this together in the interest of public safety we don't want to extend the exposure any more than we then absolutely has to happen and we understand that emergency departments are a place where there's going to be a congregation of sick patients and when we introduce new patients to that we can either exacerbate their current systems current symptoms to make them worse or introduce system symptoms to patients that have not yet been infected Ted do you have something to add? I got a scroll back up in our chat here thousands of blood drives have been canceled around the country is there a short supply here in Colorado Springs and have you been talking to hospitals about this situation? Absolutely we are working with our public health departments and hospital systems to ensure that we have the blood that we need available but the news is accurate we are short on blood supplies Question what can be done to prevent toilet paper scrums where people rush the store and fight for packages thus risking spreading the virus and violating the crowd orders? I probably have we equally have no expertise whatsoever on that topic so I will volunteer to answer it I would hope that our stores I have seen some signage you know so many per customer and things like that and that seems reasonable to me I have never been able to figure out this run on toilet paper myself it does seem a little bit crowd psychology but I think it is an opportunity to appeal to our citizens in general there is no indication that supply chains for normal needs food paper towels cleaning things is unduly disrupted I don't think there is any reason to collect five months worth of toilet paper there will be a supply chain and I would ask it to be reasonable but I really obviously the government is not going to intervene and say you can only give one roll of toilet paper per person and things like that I have kind of stepped in I have seen some signage please only X number per customer and that is what I would encourage let me get in on this one as well I would also say we are all in this together every citizen every government official every small business owner we are all in this together and so I think we need to make an appeal to citizens to say listen take what you need but don't take more it is as simple as that the issue that that causes if you take up a lot more than you need there might be an at risk citizen out there that needs to have toilet paper or flour or milk or something like that and they can't get it at that store then they got to go to the next one and they can't get it there and they got to go to the next one and all we are doing in that circumstance is putting at risk citizens in more circumstances for exposure and more opportunities to get sick so I think once again we are all in this together we all have to do our part and I think for citizens that means don't hoard take what you need but don't take more this is for CSFD what is the threshold for actually taking someone to the ER what symptoms need to be present so if I understood the question correctly what symptoms would warrant to the emergency department so we utilize the symptoms that patients present with cough, upper respiratory symptoms fevers, congestion as an initial screening tool and then we subsequently screen for risk factors those would be things like are they elderly do they have comorbidities that might make them immune compromised like heart disease or lung disease or kidney disease and if patients are young have normal vital signs for a bad outcome from coronavirus they would screen as a patient that could potentially be left at home and not transported again I want to remind everyone that the concept is our hospitals have corona patients present and are full of patients with coronavirus and taking people into that environment unnecessarily is often not in their best interest as the chief mentioned earlier we do leave paperwork and a detailed set of information about how patients can seek outpatient care, non-emergent testing or treatment, they get information for phone lines and help lines to receive additional information and guidance so we're doing our very best to provide excellent care and try and prevent the spread of the infection and potentially making those patients who utilize 911 sicker than they already are alright with that we'll close I would just remind members of the public if you have questions you can call the call center at 719-575-8888 thank you