 Good afternoon, everyone. We've got a few topics to cover today, including the data and modeling update, schools and mental health and testing, which members of my team will cover. As you'll see in Commissioner Pichak's report, the trends continue moving in the right direction with significant improvement across the region. So there's not much new for me to say on the COVID front other than I'm very encouraged. So I'm going to focus my remarks on other topics. February is Career and Technical Education Month across the country, and I've signed a proclamation for Vermont as well. As I've discussed in both my state of the state and budget address, we desperately need to grow our workforce in Vermont in all sectors, but especially in the trades. Whether it's plumbers, electricians, line workers, fiber splicers, carpenters or mechanics, Vermont has thousands of these jobs that need to be filled. That's why I propose several initiatives this year to make a real difference. First, my budget includes $10 million to reduce education costs for those working towards jobs in the trades. This includes $3 million to VSAC for those who want to enroll in a training or certification program. Another million would go to a pilot program for equipment and tools, which would reimburse employers of apprentices for these costs. We also need to work to end the stigma around CTE. It's time we recognize that going into the trades is just as impressive and in fact can be just as lucrative as a four-year degree. So we'll be launching a $1.4 million recruitment campaign for CTE enrollment that will include exploration of opportunities for middle school, engagement with parents of high school students and those in high school themselves. Additionally, with a projected $90 million surplus in the education fund, I'm asking that half of it, $45 million, be used to upgrade our CTE centers. Not only must we meet today's reality, but we know this need will only increase in the years to come. As we spend billions in ARPA funding, in addition to all the money from the bipartisan infrastructure bill, we're going to need more people who have the skills to weatherize homes, build bridges, install and connect fiber-optic cables, and so much more. We can't let this moment pass because the time to invest is now, and I appreciate this finally getting some traction in the legislature, and I look forward to working with them in the weeks ahead. Lastly, yesterday was also Mental Health Advocacy Day, and I participated in an event with mental health advocates, providers, community members, and mental health stakeholders. Due to the pandemic, our mental health needs are more important than ever. Before vaccines became available, we dealt with layoffs, remote learning, isolation, and business closures, which led to high levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and many other negative ripple effects. Secretary Samuelson will go into further detail, but I wanted to take a minute to thank all the mental health professionals who have worked so hard over the last two years. We've seen these frontline workers step up in extremely tough conditions, for far longer than any of us would have hoped. But they've done so to help Vermonters in need, and I greatly appreciate that. They provided counseling and crisis supports and kept folks safe all across Vermont. I want to give my sincere thanks to those who work tirelessly to keep our mental health system stable. With that, I'll turn it over to Commissioner Pecha. Thank you very much, Governor. Good afternoon, everybody. Taking a look first across the country and across the Northeast, as the Governor said, the trends that we've seen here in Vermont and in New England over the last few weeks now pretty much expand most of the country, although there are some exceptions to that. But as a total, the country cases are down 36 percent this week. Hospitalizations are down 10.5 percent this week. However, deaths do remain elevated and increasing across the country up 9 percent. Similarly here in New England, our cases are down about 44 percent in the region, and our hospitalizations are down about 20 percent throughout New England also. So really, the improvement started to begin here in the Northeast because we saw the Omercron variant surge the earliest, but now we're starting to see some of the biggest improvements across the country. So looking at Vermont's cases specifically, our cases are down about 40 percent this past week, down over 50 percent over the last 14 days. And the cases are down pretty much across all geographic areas and across all age groups as well. You can see we reported about 5,000 cases this week. That's down about 3,300 from last week. So continuing to see improvement in terms of the cases. We're averaging just over 600 cases a day at this point. So still obviously elevated relative to pre-Omicron, but down considerably from the 1,800 or so a day we were averaging just three or four weeks ago. When we look at our testing numbers, we can see that the PCR tests are coming down about 21 percent decrease. So, you know, that demand in testing is coming down. Obviously that can impact the numbers to a degree, but also as you have less amounts of the virus circulating, there'll be less need to go and seek a test for many individuals. But down 21 percent averaging just over 8,800 tests per day. So still a considerable number of tests being conducted and the positivity rate continues to come down as a result. The next slide we just wanted to show because you can see that Vermont is moving similarly to the rest of the Northeast, New England, New York, and New Jersey. If you remember the Delta wave, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine did not respond in the same way the rest of the country did nor the rest of New England. However, with the Omicron surge, you can see Vermont's increases. And also its decreases are pretty much in line with the rest of the states around us, which is certainly good news. Looking on college campuses, again, some improvement here as well. The most amount of tests conducted for the semester so far. The fewest amount of cases so far for the semester. And you can see that decreasing positivity rate of 2.1 percent. The one place where we're not seeing the improvement yet or in long-term care facilities, the active outbreaks have increased in terms of their overall number, now up to 515 cases associated with an active outbreak. Looking at the forecast, we do anticipate cases to continue to come down in Vermont as we expect them to do across the country through the month of February. So cases are expected to get lower than they are now and continue to see pretty solid improvement over the next few weeks. Turning to hospitalizations, the first slide we wanted to show was new hospital admissions. So these are new people coming into the hospital, not the daily census numbers. So you can see that our new hospital admissions started to trend down about two weeks ago, and over the last week we're down about 10 percent. So that's certainly a good sign as the admissions start to decrease. We'll start to see the census numbers, the total number of people in the hospital start to decrease as well. And if we go to the next slide, you'll see that we are beginning to see that down 5 percent over the last seven days in terms of the general hospital beds down 1 percent in terms of the ICU numbers. So again, just starting to see that improvement but expected to continue in the weeks ahead. Now looking at availability, you can see that availability is pretty stable on the hospital side, increasing on the ICU side. So again, good information there. And then these next two slides, we've been showing these every week. But again, the hospitals that do occur tend to happen in those 65 and older. You can see the vast difference there by age group. And they tend to happen in those who are not fully vaccinated. So again, a tenfold difference between those who are not fully vaccinated compared to those who are fully vaccinated and boosted in terms of hospitalizations and hospital admissions. Turning to fatalities, and unfortunately, we're reporting more fatalities this week, bringing our total number for the pandemic up to 542. We've reported 62 fatalities so far for the month of January. You may have a few that get backdated into January, but that ties us with December. But similarly to hospitals, you can see that the trends have remained pretty consistent here that the case fatality ratio is the highest among those that are the most vulnerable by age. Over those in between 70 and 79, close to 2.4%, those over 80, the fatality rate over 7%. But the other age groups have a very low case fatality rate under 1%. And similarly, those who are not fully vaccinated and boosted have a much higher rate of death compared to those who are fully vaccinated and boosted. So another piece of good news here, the forecast when we look at fatalities, similar to cases and hospitalizations, we do expect to see improvement in the fatality numbers for the month of February. So that will be very welcome news, and that's the expectation certainly that we have at this point. And then finally, just looking at the booster numbers, you can see Vermont continuing to rank near at the top across the board. And we've added about 5,500 new Vermonters to the booster ranks this week. So continuing to add thousands of Vermonters per week, and again, continue to be important to get your booster shot in order to start your vaccination series if you haven't to make sure we put this wave behind us. And with that, I'll now turn it over to Secretary French. Thank you, Commissioner Pichek. Good afternoon. Many of our efforts in the last week in education have been around supporting our new Test at Home program. We're working closely with the Health Department to manage the supply and delivery of test kits, but also in providing answers to questions relative to implementing the new program. Most of these questions come from school nurses themselves or from folks that are directly involved in implementing the new program. We take these questions back to our team along with the team of the Health Department, and we compile them and then publish them in the form of frequently asked question documents. Many of the questions we addressed this past week had to do with a new concept we've introduced into the program called presumptive contacts. So I thought I'd talk about a bit about that today. It's important because we're no longer doing contact tracing in schools, and this has been a cause of some of the need for us to publish FAQ documents. Presumptive contacts are individuals who shared a classroom with another person who tested positive for COVID-19. This could be students or staff. The definition of a presumptive contact casts a wider net than the concept of a close contact, which was central to our contact tracing process. Previously with contact tracing in schools, an investigation had to be conducted to determine the close contacts in any given classroom. Close contacts were defined as anyone who had been within three to six feet of a positive individual for more than 15 minutes. In many situations, particularly at our elementary schools, this resulted in whole classrooms being quarantined because it was difficult to determine with any kind of accuracy who were the close contacts. Schools often aired on the side of safety since many of the students, particularly at the elementary level, were not eligible for vaccination. This approach led to many elementary students missing school and also disrupted the normal school routines that are so essential to their healthy development. And we're still using contact tracing in the state, importantly, outside of the school settings, but inside its schools itself, contact tracing became very labor intensive and had a negative impact on the education of many students. And the increased contagion and speed of Omicron made it unsustainable and less effective. The shift from close contacts to presumptive contacts is at the heart of fundamental shift in thinking that's underway in our schools right now as they implement test at home. Instead of seeking out specific cases in their contacts, we're casting a wider net with presumptive contacts and deploying testing in real time to influence decision making on safety. The decision making on safety now shifts to students and their families, which can be unsettling for schools. But it is necessary to identify cases more quickly and through the deployment of significantly more testing and more rapid testing since antigen tests are give results immediately. Many of the FAQs that we worked on this week provided greater specificity on this idea of presumptive contacts. For example, we clarified that students riding a bus together or eating lunch in a cafeteria are not presumptive contacts for the purposes of test at home. Changes in our strategies for schools have always been based on a risk assessment. And buses and cafeterias have always come up since the very beginning of the pandemic as areas of concern. For example, early on we'd get questions about the risks for students riding together on buses or risks for students when they remove their masks to eat in the cafeteria. Our real world experience with the virus in our schools indicated that neither school buses nor cafeterias have been serious areas of risk or concern for COVID-19. So we are treating them the same under our new guidance and recommendations as we did previously. The larger pattern has been and continues to be if there are cases of the virus in our schools, it's because there are cases of the virus in our communities. The virus certainly can be transmitted in schools, but more often it is brought to schools, not spread in schools. Schools have never been riskier settings in their communities, but we protected them differently because many students were not yet eligible for vaccination and education was and remains one of our top priorities. Since the first of the year, however, we've been struggling with managing Omicron in our schools. We were not alone in that regard. I think it's important to point out that Omicron has proved to be exceedingly challenging for schools everywhere in the world, not just in Vermont. But Vermont has been especially successful in keeping our schools open, both through Delta and Omicron, thanks to the dedication and commitment of our teachers and our school staff. This has been difficult work to say the least, but it has been worth it. For example, our early shift to test to stay in October saved thousands of in-person instructional hours by keeping kids in schools. We have learned to manage the virus in our schools because we needed to do so, frankly, in order to keep education moving forward for our students. But meanwhile, we've been making significant progress towards lowering health risk for students from COVID-19 through vaccination. Vermont is the national leader in student vaccination with about 60% of our five through 11 students having at least one dose and 50% now being fully vaccinated. We certainly need to stay committed to ensuring that trend continues, but this is a remarkable achievement and will go a long way, not only protecting our students, but also keeping our schools open. We are starting to see some schools achieve student vaccination rates greater than 80%. We now have six schools who have applied for our student vaccination incentive grant program, and four of these schools are ready to receive their grants now. The incentive grant program is available to both public and independent schools and requires schools involved their students in directing the use of the grant funds. The amount of the grant award is based on the total enrollment of any particular school. Today, I wanted to congratulate the following schools for being some of the first recipients of these grant awards. The Crossett Brook Middle School had a student vaccination rate of 87% and received an award, or will receive an award of $3,855. Harwood Union High School had a student vaccination rate of 87% and they're gonna receive an award of $7,725. Green Mountain Valley School, which is in the same area in the valley, had a 100% student vaccination rate and they're gonna receive an award of $3,000. An Open Field School, which I think is in the Thetford area, had a student vaccination rate of 89% will receive an award of 2,000. I expect we'll start to see more schools become eligible for this award in the coming weeks. We're also working with the Health Department to do some reporting on student vaccination rates by school and I hope to be able to share that information soon. As I mentioned, we're always evaluating risk in the formulation of our guidance and that risk assessment includes a consideration of both the public health risks and the educational risks. Since we've made significant progress with student vaccination, we can say the health risks for students from COVID-19 have been reduced significantly as compared to when we opened school in the fall. So now we need to put more emphasis on evaluating the education risk to our students. We will continue to have variants come and go, more or less on a cyclical basis and those variants will continue to challenge the operations of our schools. But the educational risks are gonna be accumulating and ongoing and we need to have a call to urgency to address them. We need to remain committed, not only to keeping certainly the COVID-19 risk low for our students, but also ensuring the education and healthy development of our children can proceed uninterrupted. To do that, we need to get school back to normal as soon as possible. Ultimately, that is what's going to keep our students safe and healthy. At the agency, we're now planning to make this pivot at the state level to what we termed previously education recovery. We conceptualized this work at three areas last year. We call them academics, social, emotional needs and re-engagement. Our investment last summer in the after-school programming and the summer matters programming was largely directed to address the concerns over re-engagement. We are now planning on directing our state level federal resources to focus on the academic and social emotional needs of students. At this point, I expect we'll be able to make that pivot towards the end of February. That concludes my update. I'll now turn it over to Secretary Samuelson. Good afternoon. Today I'll cover a few topics related to the agency of human services. I wanna point out that most weeks during this time we concentrate on COVID, specifically on vaccines, testing and hospitalizations. These remain a central component of our work and I will discuss them in a moment. But I wanna begin by talking about one of the non-COVID impacts of the pandemic. Vermonter's responded to the call to protect themselves and others throughout the pandemic. You have isolated, quarantined, masked and avoided social gatherings. These have been important measures to protect us against COVID, but they have come at a cost. Increased isolation, challenges in accessing timely care and longer hours at work and the overall stress of living and acting during uncertain times has led to an increase in mental health and substance misuse concerns. This has affected all age groups. As a result, we've seen deaths from suicide and overdose increase. This is tragic in 2020 and 2021. For many of us, these have been our family members, our community members and our friends. Here at the Agency of Human Services, we've also seen that our colleagues are struggling. The recent report from the Department of Corrections highlights the very real and present mental health challenges facing our direct service workers throughout the pandemic, many of whom have been on the front lines for over two years. Most importantly, as Secretary French mentioned, the mental health stressors are accumulating among our children. We hear from pediatricians, teachers, parents and our Department of Children and Families that our younger Romaners are struggling. As we come through this surge and move towards an endemic state and Dr. Levine will cover that in more detail because we are headed in that direction. We must provide children, youth, our frontline workers and our older Romaners the stability and social action they need to live their lives. In a response that we continue related to COVID, we need to balance the COVID and non-COVID health impacts of the pandemic. Romaners mental health will be a front and center as we turn to recovery. We see the light at the end of the tunnel, but the best way to get us all to finally closer to normal is to become updated on your vaccines. As of today, 57% of Romaners, five and older, are up to date. We know it's challenging leaving work, your family or just your daily routine to get an extra dose of COVID vaccine. We also are working to make it easier and more accessible to Romaners to help reduce these barriers. If you're an employer, a community organization or another group, please help us in these efforts. Reach out and we'll come to you so that you can host a clinic for your clients, for your staff or for your other community members. To make a request for a clinic, you can go to healthvermont.gov slash business or if you're a Vermonner to schedule an appointment, you can go to healthvermont.gov slash my vaccine. The state's most recent focus on testing and mass distribution has been on getting those resources out to Vermoners who may be impacted the most from health consequences from COVID and who struggle with accessing these resources. Approximately 30,000 masks and 30,000 rapid tests have already been distributed to a variety of organizations for them to distribute to their clients. In the coming week, another 72,000 procedural masks, additional KN95s and 10,000 antigen tests are going out to organizations who continue to serve these populations. For the general public regarding masks, 400 million N95s will soon be available at pharmacies, community centers and other locations across the United States, including Vermont through the federal government. Related to testing, we continue to maintain our PCR testing system. As we look forward, we also continue to look at getting additional rapid tests into Vermont. For those of you seeking rapid tests through the federal government, you can go online to COVIDtest.gov and access additional tests. Vermoners can find testing information and where to get a test in Vermont by going to healthvermont.gov slash testing. They can also call 855-722-7878. Now I wanna turn to hospitals. Hospitals as we've seen are beginning to stabilize. Hospitals have seen staff returning with some hospitals reporting at least half of their as many staff out this week as compared to last week. We continue to monitor hospitals closely and work with them to address emerging needs, including staffing and finding appropriate care for people needing mental health and sub acute levels of care. This past week, we worked with our care coordinators at the Department of Mental Health and our community partners to move patients who need psychiatric treatment out of emergency departments and to the care that they need. This is a continuing area of focus. Again, highlighting the need for mental healthcare, particularly for our younger Vermonters. We are leveraging our staffing contract to bring psychiatric healthcare providers into Vermont to increase the total number of beds that are available and have previously been closed while also exploring crisis options for crisis care. In addition to focusing on patients waiting for psychiatric treatment, we continue to open sub-acute beds and facilitate the movement of patients who no longer need a hospital level of care to a sub-acute setting like a nursing home. We are currently finalizing an agreement this week to add an additional 20 beds in Chittenden County where we continue to see pressures. And in the past week, we have worked directly with hospitals to address barriers to discharge, including placements and the number of currently hospitalized sub-acute patients has now decreased by 15%. On staffing, there are currently 123 staff from the TLC contract, which we've previously discussed, and additional National Guard staff serving in our hospitals, nursing homes and mental health providers. While hospital numbers are stabilizing, I wanna be clear, the staff in our hospitals and across our healthcare system are still under strain. As I mentioned last week, they continue to serve our acknowledgement. Thank you, and I'll now turn it over to Dr. Levine for the health update. Thank you. Today I'm going to speak about vaccine booster shots, our future with the pandemic, and some points on BA2, Moderna vaccine and case reporting. I'll start with booster shots. There is now even more data to support how critical boosters are. Now from a CDC study, which was done as the Omicron variant emerged. While getting vaccinated provides a lot of protection compared to those who are unvaccinated, a booster makes a significant difference. Both case rates and mortality rates were lower among people who had received their booster compared with those who were vaccinated but had not received it. And unfortunately, case and mortality rates are considerably higher among people who are unvaccinated. Looking at mortality rates among vaccinated with booster, one per million. Vaccinated without booster, six per million. And of course, if we just looked at unvaccinated, 78 per million. The data continues to speak for itself. A booster gives you much greater protection against the worst effects of COVID-19, severe illness, hospitalizations and death. The need for a booster does not mean the initial vaccine series didn't work. What it means is we've learned more during this ongoing pandemic and it suggests COVID-19 is like many other diseases and requires multiple doses for the highest level of protection. The fact is this nearly unprecedented global pandemic is a public health emergency that has unfolded in real time. Decisions that have been made regarding the number and timing of the doses of vaccine were based on the then available science. And that science has continued to evolve. While different decisions have been made using knowledge we have gained, the results of the CDC study I just cited, along with literature from other countries like Israel, reinforced the reality that vaccination remains a powerful public health tool and is having a huge impact on the pandemic despite the changing nature of the virus. The Israeli studies showed a relative effectiveness of 90 to 95% against severe disease or death. As I've said many times before, you should not consider yourself fully vaccinated or protected or up to date on your vaccines if you haven't gotten the booster. Protecting Vermonters from these serious outcomes is what will help us move out of the Omicron surge so we can live with this virus more safely. And Vermont, we're doing very well at getting people their booster as you just heard but we need to do better. Whether it's a parent, a child, a coworker or a neighbor, you can help encourage anyone in your life who's age 12 or older to be as protected as possible. And I want to especially point out that among Vermonters age 50 and older where we see most of our serious outcomes, the rate is just 70%. For months, comparatively higher vaccination rates is making a big difference. At no point during the Omicron surge, even when our hospitalizations were in the 120 range per day and the number of ICU beds in use were in the high 20s, did the state's healthcare system capacity become overwhelmed? I along with many other public health leaders believe this is a direct correlation with our state's leading rates of vaccinated and boosted residents. Now speaking of emerging from the surge, I want to talk about our future with COVID. It may seem like we've been stuck in the Bill Murray Groundhog Day movie, repeating the same day again and again for the past two years. But in fact, we are indeed moving forward. I continue to get lots of questions about how our lives in this pandemic may change if Omicron cases continue to trend downward. As we look forward to exiting the Omicron surge, and while I'm not committing to a timeline, I do have cause for optimism. We are planning for a new phase of coexisting with the virus in the post-pandemic era. Many of us in public health believe Omicron has hastened our pathway to the endemic state, meaning a time when the virus is constantly present in our population, a permanent but hopefully milder part of our lives, a time when COVID is less disruptive and people have learned to live with and manage it. Not unlike the flu, a virus that can be dangerous but is largely managed through regular vaccinations and good prevention practices. You've already witnessed some of the public health strategies that have evolved so far in terms of transitioning away from contact tracing and surveillance testing. Our goals will continue to be focused on protecting those at highest risk of COVID's worst outcomes and ensuring the healthcare system has sufficient capacity to meet for monitor's needs. We must therefore continue to pay close attention to hospitalizations, but our reliance on metrics like daily case counts and percent positivity will no longer have much value. While surveillance efforts such as wastewater analysis, focused testing of populations at greatest risk of serious illness and genetic sequencing will help us monitor ongoing virus activity. With our high vaccination rates and increasing access to treatment for those at higher risk, we will be in a much safer place with this virus. And Vermonters will continue making those common sense decisions about which types of activities or protections against the virus makes sense for them. Weighing the risks depends on their own situation. Our collective decisions and actions for prevention through vaccination, testing and treatment for those at high risk of serious outcomes and appropriate masking require a commitment to personal risk assessment and risk tolerance and consideration for others. This means we all need to approach this future with healthy doses of civility, empathy, equity, compassion and respect as each person navigates their own comfort levels, challenges, abilities and rationales. Now like our discussion about schools and the imperative of maintaining in-person education, we need to focus across our society on recovery, working to reverse some of the setbacks we've all experienced the negative impacts of living in a pandemic for the past two years. Recovery from COVID includes improving our social and emotional wellbeing, focusing efforts on addressing substance use and mental health as you've heard, food insecurity, a rise in eating disorders and assessing the impact of the pandemic changes in our health behaviors that have long-term impacts on health. What I've called health debt, which contributes to the epidemic of worsening chronic illness that accounts for so many of our current hospital admissions. As the risk from the virus decreases and with hope that no significant variant strains appear on the near horizon, these critical issues can no longer remain on the back burner. And when the time is right, the same deliberate, phased, gradual approach we took in the Vermont forward process, believe it or not, a little less than a year ago, will allow a successful move towards this recovery and endemic times. Now a few final points I'd like to share. As part of our evolving pandemic response, we're continually assessing the most effective use of our public health resources. Now that means updating our case dashboard only on weekdays, Monday through Friday. All the data from the weekend will be available on Monday. We've been doing this already after holiday weekends and have had no problems accessing and analyzing data on regular business days. Our data team has worked incredibly hard, nearly nonstop for two years, and I not only thank them, but look forward to their time and expertise on other important projects. Next, you've likely seen news reports about a sub variant of Omicron called BA2. This has been identified in one Vermont specimen. These types of mutations are normal and are being studied. It's not a new variant, but rather a more transmissible version of the original Omicron. Besides the fact that it can spread even faster, scientists have not yet found other traits that are cause for concern. And lastly, the FDA announced yesterday that the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine has received full approval for people age 18 and older. The vaccine itself is the same vaccine people have been getting for months. This step just means there's even more data proving that it works and is safe. Along with the Pfizer vaccine, we can have even greater confidence that these two approved COVID-19 vaccines have cleared every level of review that's required of any vaccine approval in use in the US. I'll turn it back to the governor now. Thank you, Dr. Levine. We'll now open it up to questions. Starting with folks in the room. I had a question maybe Dr. Levine can fish in with this about the transition to endemic, right? I mean, it's fair to say statewide that there's a broad spectrum of how people feel right now with the pandemic and how people should be reacting and what precautions people should be taking. So if we're looking just at our hospitalizations as our metric, our data, what benchmark should we be looking for in our hospitalizations when people can start to feel more comfortable? I don't think it's all our hospitalization metrics. We have to look at other data as well. Some of that involves mental health, social issues and so forth. So we're struggling with this nationwide. It's not just Vermont as we move from pandemic, which we've been in high alert for the last two years to something that's going to be quite normal in a lot of respects. So it's going to take, again, all of us looking at all these different areas and making the right decisions about where we go from here and giving the best information possible in order to keep everyone safe. But at this point in time, we're feeling good about where we are and in the direction we're going. Let Dr. Levine add further. I certainly don't want us to focus on a specific number. I think it's the trend data that's really, really helpful and the direction things are going. But also we want the healthcare system to be able to stabilize. So just choosing a number doesn't necessarily indicate that they've indeed rallied and stabilized. The healthcare workforce has been through a heck of a lot and continues to every day. And we certainly don't want to make any changes that would impact them adversely before they're ready for it. But otherwise, the answer to your question is really this balance between not only paying attention to the COVID metrics and the impact of COVID on the population, but paying attention to all of the other items that we've been talking about today and how they are impacting the population. Because there's been, not that we don't pay attention to those during the pandemic, but every time we institute new mitigation procedures and policies, we often adversely impact them, not intentionally, but things that make people either feel like or actually be more isolated. That is the root of a lot of the problems that we've talked about, whether it be mental health, whether it be substance use, suicide, eating disorders, you name it. As well, if I may, to the CDC study that you were talking about earlier opening remarks, did some of those metrics, did that include natural humidity that people had gotten through prior infection? And I guess, how do you see that playing into the data? Yeah, so that was a paper that really looked across 25 states and jurisdictions at vaccination specifically. So it was really geared towards data sets that give information on vaccination and impact on outcomes like hospitalizations, that's cases. So that's, it wasn't designed to look at what you were just asking about. Do we have any idea exactly how many N95 masks we'll be getting from the federal government and if they'll be coming on a rolling basis or all at once? Secretary Samuelson, do you have any of that information? That's a match. For a timeline of when people would expect to see them in pharmacies or elsewhere. We know that nationally that there are gonna be 400 million masks distributed. I don't have a specific timeline of when those are going to come out. I know that they'll be in pharmacies and other locations. And again, more information will be available, I think, from the federal government as we go forward. Can I hear Commissioner Sherling point? Commissioner Sherling. No, Secretary Samuelson covered it. No other information beyond that on the federal program. Great, thank you. Yes. With a lot of focus on mental health moving forward, how does the state plan to measure the impact when it's touched children, frontline workers, really all groups of people. If these people can't seek mental health services, how does that come to the forefront? Just how many people are affected? Commissioner Levine, Secretary Samuelson. So on an ongoing basis, the agency of human services through our department of mental health, through the department of health, collects information on the status of mental health in Vermont. We've been doing that throughout the pandemic. You can see that in our reporting where we've talked about the increase in suicide and overdose. We'll continue to monitor those measures and with the operational COVID response team, if there are additional measures that we need to add directly related to COVID, we'll do that. But really, I think our goal will be to look longitudinally pre the pandemic, now during the pandemic and then as we come out and recover what our results will be. One more follow-up, if I may, might be for Secretary French. We've seen the guard members helping out in hospitals. I'm wondering the state of schools with staffing problems, call outs. Would we consider, I've seen other states have guard members go into schools and do something similar. Do you see that happening in Vermont? Yeah, I don't necessarily. I think every state has a different size guard and has different capacity and what I've observed is our guard and our priority's been on the healthcare system. But it is, it's a good point that a lot of what we're seeing now and I've seen some concern from parents recently about, okay, we've implemented tests at home. My school's closed today, why is that? I think it's important to continue to acknowledge that we still have significant staffing issues and that's across all sectors. But certainly, with Omicron, people are getting sick and that includes school staff where they have to stay home, take care of a sick child and so forth. So, we still see that pressure on the system. I was gonna add on to your previous question if that's okay about the mental health piece because that kind of gets to our thinking on education recovery and we put sort of a conceptualization of that together last year and that was almost, I would say at a different moment in time, I don't think we were anticipating the end of the pandemic per se but I think we were thinking about the new school year starting more or less normally and we'd be able to point the system to really dig in on some of those recovery issues and in particular to start to leverage federal resources that have been assigned to the state to do that work. Working with the General Assembly, we have some strategies lined up to do that. So, we haven't been able to make that pivot, if you will and now we're feeling a sense of urgency to do that. We have a long standing practice in the state in education in Vermont called educational support teams that go back over 20 years or so that were originally designed to assess academic needs for students in buildings. We hope to sort of position them at the district level as opposed to the school level that cuts down on the points of contact interface from a state perspective. So, instead of dealing with 300 some odd separate entities we deal with 60 but we want to leverage those ESTs to start to gather some information about what the trends are. For example, I think in schools pre-pandemic, when I visit a school I would hear concern around anxiety, just heightened anxiety levels and I don't know if that qualifies as a mental health issue per se but we certainly think there's increased anxiety not only among students but also among staff today. So, we need to find a way to start to collect those sort of that information and trends so the state resources can be deployed more effectively but we also have discrete strategies that have already been created through our ESSER plan with the general assembly such as community schools and so forth. So, it's gonna be a question of sort of coordinating things and bringing things online but not necessarily waiting for the data to come in to confirm something we already know was out there as a trend but it's kind of moving all those things together once. That's kind of, I think what people will start to feel when we start talking about this pivot that's about to happen. Thank you. Yeah. I just want to add my two cents to your original question as well. Unlike many changes we make to manage the pandemic where an intervention occurs and we actually get to see real time, the impact of that, I don't want to set us up in a sense that the expectation is you go to endemic and make a lot of changes in how people live their lives and all of a sudden these problems melt away and a very discrete point in time that's soon because many of these problems, in fact, all of them predate the pandemic and then significantly worsened because of the pandemic. Just thinking about the schools, if we look at college and high school data about the prevalence of anxiety disorder and depression and students at those levels, it was a significant problem before the pandemic. Counselors were talking about this constantly and it got worse of course during the pandemic. So these are going to be things that require a lot of attention and don't necessarily turn off right away. Many of them relate to personal lifestyle behaviors which we always know take a long time to evolve in a positive direction. Given the restrictions now on truckers crossing the border on both sides, the United States and Canada, just wondering what your thoughts are on those restrictions and the possible outcome? Well, obviously this isn't under state control. This is federal control. It's something that the Canadian government and the U.S. government agreed upon. And I continue to think that having a vaccine is important. In this case, it remains to be seen whether the steps taken will actually prevent any spread. We have it on both sides of the border. So I'm not sure that it's going to make a drastic difference one way or the other. But I know it is a serious point of contention, especially on the Canadian side, much more than on the U.S. side. But again, I'm supportive of vaccinations. Forcing vaccinations is something that we've resisted. We want to educate and promote and have them available for people to make the right decisions. Thankfully, Vermonters have made the right decision in Vermont by and large. And we've have a great percentage of Vermonters who are vaccinated. Given that strategy, are you concerned that the truckers might say, you know what? I'm not gonna drive. Yeah, I don't know how long that would last, to be honest with you. I think there's always, it seems as though, another way to get freight and so forth across the border where one person might feel impacted, another might see an opportunity. So there may be trucking companies that have a fully vaccinated staff that will step up to the challenge. So we'll see what happens. But again, I understand the difficulty some see in this. It's about forcing them to do something that they will resist. But in the end, I think it, again, being vaccinated is a good idea. We've seen the data. We saw Commissioner Pichek had given the data on hospitalizations and so forth. And we're in good shape in Vermont because of it. So again, but at the same time, we've been able to do that without forcing people to do so. We'll move to the, Chairman? Just one quick one. What do you make of a ranked choice voted in presidential election? Seems like there's a bill that's been introduced recently. Just wanna get your thoughts. Yeah, my position hasn't changed on that. I am not supportive of that. I think the person with the most votes wins. All right, we'll move to the phones. I know Lisa said she had to leave at one. It's 12.59. I don't know if you're still on Lisa. Not, we will move to Greg Lamero, the County Courier. Greg, the County Courier. All right, we'll move to Tom Davis, Compass Vermont. It's my lucky day. Governor, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the contractor licensing issue that the Senate has brought up in past. I know you're not a fan of it because you feel that the threshold of the amount of a contract is gonna be higher than $3,500. I was also curious if you have any thoughts about the fact that this registration process doesn't actually require any vetting of people who wanna be contractors and their true ability and competence in that field. Well, again, I'm not sure what this problem solves from my standpoint. And I'm really concerned about the smaller contractors, the larger contractors already have the insurance requirements. They will register the money paid for registration and licensing, so to speak, is something that is just part of their daily operations. So this doesn't impact larger businesses. It really is the smaller entities and more desperate need, again, of those smaller entities to continue to do the work and the trades and so forth that I've spoken about. So when you look at what they've arrived at, like a $3,500 when you consider labor and materials, that doesn't go far. That's about a one day job for many, depending on what you're doing. So again, I think it puts an undue burden on the single proprietors, those who have small operations. And I think the level should be increased if we're going to do it at all. And I'm not saying we should do it at all from my standpoint, but if it's going to be done, I think it should be a higher threshold. So one statement of concern I've heard from small contractors who are pretty established in their reputation, who are actually in favor of some form of registration is that whenever there is a tremendous amount of work that comes in as there has been in this current economy, everybody who has a hammer all of a sudden becomes a contractor as opposed to be an employee under somebody who has more qualifications to be mentoring them. And they would like to see that weeded out. Is that something you'd consider? I don't know, again, how that would be done. Again, without getting into some sort of licensing aspect and who's going to determine who has the skills necessary to be in the trade. Again, I would advocate that for monitors should do their homework and look at references and those who have been in business for quite some time, small operations, their reputation should proceed them and you should work with them and get your project accomplished. But again, I'm not sure what this will solve in many different respects. There is already a mechanism that you can sue somebody civilly if they take advantage of you in some respects. So I just, I'm just not sure what the, what problem, okay there, Tom. I'm not sure what this will solve in the contracting world or the- Actually that wasn't me, that was somebody else. Okay, sorry, Tom. But thank you for your answer. I appreciate it, no other question. Lisa Loomis, the value reporter. Good afternoon. This question is for Deputy Secretary Samuelson or maybe Commissioner Shirling. But first a note of thanks for Commissioner Shirling and your staff, Mark Bosma and Shayla Livingston who engaged in a lengthy email back and forth with me last week before getting some KN95 at our local libraries. We appreciate that and we were able to let our community members know and we're happy to take more if they're available. My question though is about the efficacy of surveillance testing. Is that going to continue to be used and will the state continue to sponsor or prop up so many surveillance testing sites throughout the state? PCR testing at this point in time. PCR testing, yes. Secretary Samuelson, Dr. Levine. So I'll start off and then I'll turn it over to Dr. Levine. We will continue to offer PCR testing across the state of Vermont as an option for Vermonters who are looking to get tested. That'll be done on an ongoing basis. We believe it's an important diagnostic test for individuals who may be symptomatic and would like to get tested and may or may not have access to a rapid test. And I'll let Dr. Levine speak to the surveillance testing in schools. But given how quickly Omicron spreads, we're seeing less and less value in that as a testing modality for an on an ongoing basis in our school-based system. And so we'll begin to see that taper off as we've put in place the test at home program in the school setting. Thank you for that. The question was not about the schools. It was about just the general population going and getting weekly or bi-weekly PCR tests as a preventative measure as opposed to when they feel ill. Yeah, I'll let Dr. Levine speak to that, but we're not recommending ongoing PCR regular testing for the general public who are interested in just surveillance testing for themselves. And I'll let Dr. Levine speak more to why. Thank you. Hi, yes, we have clearly pivoted away from that. Though as the secretary pointed out, there are still reasons to get PCR testing that require a PCR test, whether it's international travel or some other factor. The way that we would like the population to continue to evolve, and this will be possible in an era of increasing supply of rapid testing capacity will be to use rapid testing for decision making, for symptomatic testing, for ability to decrease transmission of virus at a time when there's a significant amount of virus around. It's a much more effective way to manage the testing apparatus at a time like this when we're still seeing a fair amount of Omicron. I do hope we're gonna see a time when we don't have much virus around. And at that point in time, we'll reevaluate again what kind of testing strategy would make the most sense based on the characteristics of the tests. When you talk about surveillance testing, some of that really to a public health person really means a focus on certain populations. So again, we think of populations once upon a time we thought of teachers and students. For a very long time, we've talked about people who are either staffing or living in long-term care facilities or other congregate living settings like correctional facilities. So we'll be reevaluating the role of surveillance testing in settings like that as well as part of our ongoing testing strategy, which will include wastewater surveillance and genetic sequencing. Thank you. VT Digger. I understand Secretary Friendship's comments correctly. It sounds like only six schools have met the 80% vaccination rate so far. Are you at all disappointed that more schools haven't met that threshold, which if I recall is also the threshold for students to take off their mask when that policy comes into play? Yeah, I'll let Secretary Friends change that, but I don't believe that we have determined who has met the threshold completely. They have to report that. So I don't know if we've heard from all the schools. There's still an opportunity to meet the threshold and achieve what we'd like to achieve in that regard, Secretary Friendship. Hi, Aaron. What I was reporting are the districts that have applied or the schools that have applied for the incentive grant. Coincidentally, they do have to have a threshold vaccination rate, but that isn't the same thing as what is the broader eligibility across the state. You might remember before the first of the year, we set up a data collection of survey from schools to start to get an understanding of what their vaccination rates would be. We had difficulty getting a solid response on that survey from schools. We probably maybe had about 50% of the schools respond to that survey. It doesn't surprise me now, looking back. This is when Delta was really peaking and the school nurses are the same folks that were involved with contact tracing and so forth, the same folks that complete the survey. So we haven't had a good read on what the broader vaccination rates on a school-by-school basis are across the state. So what we decided to do after the first of the year was to pick up a conversation. Actually, we started earlier in the fall about trying to automate that at the backend at the state level to basically intersect the agency of education's enrollment database with the Immunization Registry at the Department of Health. So we have figured out a way to do that. We really couldn't do it earlier in the year because we didn't have the accurate enrollment data from the school. So that coincidentally became more stable in December. So now we're in the process of merging up those two data sets. So we should have some reporting on the statewide school-by-school vaccination rates here shortly. I mean, I would still say considering that the vaccination rate for 12 to 17 year olds, I believe statewide is below 80%, many schools probably still not meet that 80% threshold, right? Yeah, I think, I've been very clear that there's a lot of variability in the student vaccination rate, unlike the staff vaccination rate, which my observation is is fairly consistently high across all schools in the state, but there's gonna be some variability in the student vaccination rate that we wanna focus in on. Has that kind of inconsistent uptake kind of changed your mind or made you guys think about the possibility of a student mandate of vaccines, the possibility of the Department of Health, I believe it would be, making the COVID vaccine one of the requirements for students to stay in school? Yeah, I wouldn't connect the two conversations necessarily. I think the conversation around the difference in uptake will inform our strategy and our supports for school districts. Again, we should have some insight into that here shortly. I think there are gonna be school districts with substantially lower student vaccination rates than others and we need to be able to provide some supports for those districts. I'm not sure what that looks like yet, but I wanna pursue that line because I know it's very real in the landscape. The larger question of mandatory vaccines, there is a, as you refer to a statutory process, Dr. Levine leads the immunization advisory council. We are actually in the process of scheduling a meeting of that council. So Secretary of Education, I have a seat on that council. Well, that's a longer sort of slower process, but we're gonna meet and we'll provide some feedback and announcement on where we're going next in terms of mandatory vaccination. Okay, do you know if there's any kind of general timeline for, isn't when you release that feedback? Not yet, we haven't met yet. Okay, thank you. Just to add to that, Erin, we've recognized that the younger the age, the less the percentage has been less in terms of vaccination rates amongst the different age groups, high vaccination rate of those over 65, but certainly as we move down through each category, we've seen less. We recognize that early on, thus the reason behind this program, that this incentive program for kids so that in schools, so that we could incentivize getting vaccinated and provide an opportunity for them to do so. We recognize this early on if we thought that there was going to be a high rate and we may not have had the incentive program that we developed. Ed Barber, Newport Daily Express. Ed Barber, all right, we'll move to Colin Flanders, seven days. Hi, I had a question for Dr. Levine. You were talking about changes to the way that the public health data will be forward. I'm just curious, is there anything that you can think of that's kind of been put on the back burner as you spent the last two years focused so much on reporting out this data? Is there any other public health surveillance efforts that have kind of fallen to the wayside that you'd like to see pick back up or you're new to focus on? You broke up a little, but I think I got the gist of the question. The public health surveillance data continues to be collected. That's not the issue. It's really the ability of public health and all of us together to focus on all of the issues at a time when a pandemic is occurring and lots of mitigation is going on that's impacting the population. So I don't wanna give you the sense that we still don't have a view of the scenery, so to speak, in the landscape and understand what's going on out there. Clearly, even when we look at our public health workforce, the percentage time that the workforce is spending in an emergency response and in the health operation center continues to decrease as these recent months have gone by. So that means more and more of my staff are paying attention to all of the things that we traditionally pay attention to in a more constant way. So that's all very good. But the problems that you talk about in public health, obviously COVID's not the only infectious disease. We went through another mosquito and tick-borne season without talking a lot about it except telling people to do the right thing and be careful out there and encouraging them to get out there. So things like that, plenty of other infectious diseases that we are continuing to survey and do surveillance on, but don't actually talk about a lot up here at the podium. I mentioned chronic diseases and the impact of lifestyle changes and behavioral lifestyle changes to try to stem the growth of childhood obesity and all of the problems then lead from that. A host of environmental issues that we continue to focus on as a department as well. So I mean, all of these things are ongoing and the goal is that we get back to a time when all of us can pay attention to the things that we would much rather pay attention to than the case rate of COVID of the particular day and our personal risk of interacting with COVID at a point in time. Does that kind of give you the flavor of what you'd like? Sure, thank you. And then I just had another question for Governor Scott over the weekend, former President Trump held a rally where he suggested that he might be eyeing at 2024. Ron, I'm just curious if you could give us an assessment of the Republican Party in your mind right now as you, I'm sure are starting to think about whether you wanna run again here in Vermont, probably as a Republican I would imagine. Could you just, how are you thinking about the state of your party nationwide? Well again, my view on former President Trump hasn't changed. He decides to run in the future, I will not support him. And some of the remarks he made over the weekend are concerning and I think it says everything you need to know about him and his character. So again, I'll continue to do what I think is right. I don't believe the core values of the Republican Party are necessarily shared by the former President, but I continue to be the person I am and there are many of us throughout the country. And I think you'll see more step up in the coming weeks, months into the next election. And should we expect to see your name on a ballot in the next election? Something to be determined. I still haven't made a decision and we'll probably be doing so in the next few months. Thanks. Joseph Gresser, Barton Chronicle. We'll move to Guy Page from Montaily Chronicle. Good afternoon, Governor. So earlier, given the report, UVM report about increasing mental health problems, including consideration of suicide in our state prisons, is it time to reopen the prisons to in-person visitation by family members and volunteers, including recovery and church groups? I guess my answer would be yes. I think that is, I think it's a good point. I believe that we need to get back to normal and that would include visitation in some of those institutions and do so in a manner that would help, I think, help those who are incarcerated as well as the family members alike. But I haven't spoken to the Commissioner of Corrections about this at this point in time, but it would be my preference that we get back to that as soon as possible. Thank you. Governor, critics of S30 say that making hospitals gun-free zones actually make them more vulnerable to a mass-killing shooter. Now that it's passed, both the House and the Senate needs to be reconciled, but it's passed both chambers, what do you think about a possible veto? Well, I've been consistent over the last number of years, after we had a huge bill that we passed in 2017, 18, and at that point in time, it was made a significant difference, I think, red flag provisions, the background checks, and so forth. I think we're, I don't know, a change, a drastic change from what we saw before, but I thought it was necessary. Since then, I believe that we need to make sure that we continue to evolve with the existing laws we have, make improvements there if necessary, but you have them at a disposal and make sure that people know how to utilize the tools we have now, rather than go and make new laws. So, in the end, I don't believe that we need to change any of our gun laws at this point in time. We'll see what the final bill looks like when it passes again, if they have some reconciliation and it passes both chambers and comes to my desk, I'll be able to give you a more definitive answer, but at this point in time, I have not been in favor of changing any further gun laws. Thank you. Andrew McGregor, Caledonian Record. Yes, thank you, good afternoon. For Secretary French, how's adoption of test at home proceeding across the state of the majority of schools implementing it now and is AOE helping implement test at home and providing the necessary resources at independent schools? Hi, Andrew. Yeah, I think at this point, especially this week, we're seeing the majority move. I had a meeting with the school nurses leadership association on late Thursday and they were still indicating to me that some nurses were still in a transition phase, but I think in particular this week, it is being fully implemented. Yeah, and we're working directly with districts, as I mentioned in my remarks, both with supply issues, but also clarifying the guidance through FAQs. Independent schools, we haven't brought online yet. It's purely a function of supply, so we are planning to do that at some point, but I don't have a firm date yet. What supply issues are you looking at? Is it just the number of tests you have available or is it something else? The tests. And no timeframe on that? No, I mean, they have a, when I say supply for them, it is the quantity of supply, but they're also a much more complex logistical supply chain, if you will. So we have to work through those issues as well, but we don't have a firm timeline yet on that. But something you do intend to work towards? Yes. And then for Dr. Levine, if I may, questions about the rapid at home tests, we're leaning more heavily on these, and they definitely deliver results a lot faster than PCR. I'm curious though, do they detect an infection as early as a PCR test may? And how is the state's self-reporting tool going? Are you seeing results come through there or do you wish that it would be utilized more fully? So for the first question, the answer is definitely we always have labeled the antigen tests less sensitive than the PCR. So there's a possibility that an antigen test early in an illness can be negative. And a PCR would be positive at that point in time. Having said that though, with a high viral load and increased infectivity early in the course of illness, as we see with Omicron, I would expect the results to be pretty good for antigen tests even early in the illness. But that's why we always advocate for the two-test strategy, so that if you're symptomatic or have been significantly exposed, especially if you're not vaccinated and your test is negative, we advocate that you do the second test in the kit within 24 to 48 hours. With regards to the state reporting tool, we've actually been pretty pleased with what we've learned on that. And we've seen, I think, upward of about 6,000 tests that have been conveyed to us that were positive results and about double that that were conveyed to us that were negative results. We obviously don't know the denominator of either of those. I suspect way more tests were done than that, abundantly more, but at the same time, that's pretty good. And I appreciate and thank Vermonters for reporting to us as they have been doing. And would like to continue to encourage them to use that tool, because it is very, very user-friendly and quick. Do those results get incorporated into the positivity rate that the Health Department reports or is that exclusively for PCR tests? That's exclusively for PCR. And one of the problems as we've talked about is not knowing a denominator. So when you're trying to look at a positivity rate, at least with the PCR tests that are done at the state sites and through the pharmacies, we know how many tests were done. It would really not be a valid statistic using the antigen tests. Okay, thanks, everybody. And I believe Ed Barber's back down, so we'll try going back to him. Ed Barber, Newport Daily Express. Go ahead, Ed. Ed, you're really breaking up. Can you give it another try? Ed, if you can hear us, maybe you could just email your question and we'll get you an answer. All right, thank you all very much. We'll see you again next Tuesday.