 Good morning, everyone. As you've seen, our cases have continued to grow. And Commissioner Pichuck will present more on that in a few minutes. This growth has led to some big steps to slow the spread, which we announced on Friday and are now in effect. As I said last week, each of these steps that are addressed in the areas that our contact tracing team tells us is driving the spread. What was found is that it's mostly adults from multiple households getting together with friends inside and outside. And it usually involves alcohol and food, with little, if any, mask wearing and distancing. After we urged against them and advised limiting them to one or two trusted families, these gatherings, like Halloween parties and beers with friends after games, continued. And it's led directly to our record growth. But as a result, in addition to requiring quarantine for all non-essential travel, we unfortunately had to ban multi-household gatherings. I know this is incredibly difficult and frustrating, especially with the holidays right around the corner. But it's necessary. And we need Vermonters' help to get this back under control. I'd like to take a minute to address some of what we've heard since we made this announcement, including questions and concerns from people who believe there is inconsistency with our approach. And from people who would prefer we shut down restaurants or schools or close contact businesses like gyms and salons, but not restrict private social gatherings. So let's talk about consistency. The steps we took were based on data from the contact tracers because from the beginning, we have consistently used data and science to guide our decisions. Still, I understand it may seem counterintuitive that restaurants remain open, and yet you can't have neighbors over for dinner. But the fact is, from October 1 to the time of Friday's announcement, 71% of outbreaks were linked to social events, parties and people hanging out at home or at bars and clubs. We're just not seeing these types of outbreaks linked back to people dining at restaurants or working out at gyms. This tells us the protocols that these businesses are, for the most part, working. And while we have a number of cases that have shown up at schools, we have very few schools that have experienced transmission from one person to another, which means schools are not driving this either. And this brings me to the next point. In the environment we're in, we've got to prioritize need over want. In my view, in-person education, protecting our health care system, and keeping people working as long as we can do it safely are things we need. Parties and cookouts, hanging out with people you don't know just as social lives may be fun, but they're wants, not needs, and they put a lot of people at risk. Put a different way with pediatricians making it clear that in-person education is critical to the well-being of our children, I'm going to prioritize keeping kids in school. Because, again, schools are not the root of the problem. I know for many, getting together with family and friends over the last few months have been so important. But I'm hoping by laying out what's at stake, it will motivate for monitors to follow this guidance so we can get back together again soon and safely. I also want to speak to the skeptics again. Make no mistake, I understand that if you want to ignore the science or choose not to believe it, there's not much we can do to stop you. But I want to be clear, the number of people in hospitals is growing across the country. Because some care more about what they want to do, rather than what they need to do to help protect others, keep kids in school, keep people working, and prevent the health care system from being overwhelmed to the point where care is being delivered and makeshift hospitals. It's a fact that the consequences of an overwhelmed health care system will have a far greater impact on the economy and welfare than all the prevention and mitigation measures in place across the country. So again, the skeptics are right. They can do what they want, but please, don't call it patriotic. Don't pretend it's about freedom because real patriots serve and sacrifice for all, whether they agree with them or not. Patriots also stand up and fight when our nation's health and security is threatened. And right now, our country and way of life is being attacked by this virus, not the protections we put in place. Look, I understand getting together with family, especially during the holidays, is important. And I understand how hard it is to be asked to keep making sacrifices. As I said last week, I haven't seen my mom or my daughter in nearly a year. But right now, we're in the middle of a pandemic, and we're seeing record growth. And this growth is not because of tourists. It's not because of restaurants. It's not because of gyms. It's not because of schools. It's because adults continue to get together with other adults, multiple households, inside and outside in situations usually involving alcohol, where they stop taking precautions. And then they go into work, sending their kids to school, visiting another neighbor who works in a nursing home, and spreading the virus at each stop. I don't believe anyone is doing this on purpose, but that's what's happening. I hear the anger out there, the frustration, the anxiety, and the sadness, and I get it. So if you need to take it out on someone, send them my way. I can take it. But what I can't take is seeing this continue to grow, because it's putting our health care system, our economy, and many lives at risk. So you can question our methods, but I'm asking you to please do your part to help. By Friday, we'll be providing more clarity on social gatherings based on questions you've gotten to help folks understand what we need from them. So stay tuned on that. They'll be coming by the end of the week. I also want Vermonters to know we're stepping up at the state level as well, because this is not all on your shoulders. As we announced last week, we're continuing to expand our testing and tracing capacity, which will help slow this further, and hopefully, without more restrictions. Even though Vermont already does more testing per capita than any other state, our goal is to make testing more available. To start, we're opening five testing centers this week in Burlington, Middlebury, Waterbury, Rutland, and Brattleboro, which will operate seven days a week. By opening these centers, two-thirds of Vermonters will be within a 30-minute drive of a testing site and will continue to build on this. Additionally, we started offering testing for all teachers and school staff with about 1,700 tested yesterday, and that will continue throughout the week. We've also brought on additional contact tracing staff, with 40 now working full-time. And we'll be adding another 20 from the Vermont National Guard and 10 from the Department of Public Safety over the next two weeks. But even during these tough times, there is reason for optimism. We continue to see progress and good news about vaccines. As Dr. Fauci said recently, there's light at the end of the tunnel. And we know we can change our trajectory when we all pull in the same direction, because we've done it before and we can do it again. And once we do, we'll get back to where we were and safely roll back these latest restrictions while we wait for the vaccine. I'll now turn it over to Secretary Smith. We'll share an update on additional protections for our health care system. Secretary Smith. Thank you, Governor. At the beginning of the pandemic, through the authority of my office as Secretary of Human Services, we restricted visitations at hospitals. In August, we relaxed those restrictions, given the low prevalence of the virus in our state. But things have changed. And yesterday, I ordered hospitals to return to the tighter restrictions imposed earlier in the year. So what does that mean? It means this, no visitors are permitted at this time. And until further notice, with some limited exceptions, these exceptions include one, and these are in inpatient and acute care. And I'll go through several iterations here of what I'm talking about. But in inpatient and in acute care, the limited exceptions are one person, one support person on labor and delivery, one parent or support person for pediatric patients, one consistent support is strongly recommended. But when necessary, a second support can be identified as an alternative. One visitor's support person escorting an individual undergoing same day surgery or ambulatory procedure, one consistent support person may be permitted in other rare circumstances, such as patient with communication needs, person who is deaf or who do not understand or speak English, or a patient with a cognitive impairment or disability who requires assistance to access care. For patients in end of life care, the care team will manage decisions around visitation. In emergency departments and urgent care and express care situations, no visitors are permitted with few exceptions. Those exceptions are one person or support person should accompany pediatric patients. One support person may be permitted in other rare circumstances, such as a patient with communications needs or a patient with cognitive impairment or disability who requires assistance to access care. Visitation for patients in end of life will be managed by the care team as well. And then in outpatient clinics, visitors, family members are not permitted to accompany patients to outpatient visits unless the patient requires support and assistance to access their appointment. And again, if you need someone for communication purposes or for the fact that you have a cognitive impairment or disability, a support person is allowed. One parent or support person may accompany pediatric patients and patients who would benefit from other forms of support during a visit are encouraged like a family member to listen and participate in a discussion or are encouraged to include support people via phone. For all permitted visitors entering the hospital, those that are permitted to visit the hospital, hospital shall restrict entrances into all medical buildings and clinics, ensure that everyone who enters any facility will be asked the purpose of their visit to the medical center, keep and implement a written process to screen all permitted visitors, implement a process for tracking the permitted visitors, require all permitted visitors to be masked and maintain a face and nose covering for the entirety of the visit, keep and implement guidelines for the conduct of permitted visitors, including direction to remain in the patient's room and others, prevent visitors from in-person visiting with patients suspected of having COVID-19 or test positive for COVID-19, require permitted visitors to clean their hands upon entry and exit from the building and entry and exit from the unit or clinic or entry and exit from the patient's room and permit only Americans with Disabilities Act service animals to accompany patients. A couple of other things as well, just so that people know, suspend all hospital volunteer programs until further notice with the exception of certified birth doulas. I do wanna just mention why we're talking about healthcare, that we have extended the healthcare stabilization round number two. That round had closed with 236 applications, but we're reopening the application portal. The agency of human services has received requests from multiple providers asking for additional time to submit or complete their application for this grant program. We've reviewed these requests and determined that we can make accommodation for these applicants. So as of this morning, the healthcare stabilization grant portal was reopened to applicants. Providers will now have until Tuesday, November 24th at 11.59 p.m. to correct and submit applications. I do wanna briefly talk about long-term care facilities. Let's start with adult day programs. Our adult day programs, which have been closed since March, have been working closely with VDH and Dale to plan to reopen. That planning has been done carefully with strict adherence to infection prevention and control and in recognition of the important role they play in supporting families and participants. Several programs across the state have reopened. However, based on the increasing risk and community transmission we are seeing, we are concerned about these providers who serve some of the most vulnerable per monitors in congregate settings, providing close physical care. So therefore, HSN, VDH and Dale communicated with our adult day programs yesterday to suspend in-person programs. They will remain available for telehealth and flexible service options to continue to support their participants. And let's talk a little bit about long-term care facilities. Currently we, let me just say this in the beginning. As I mentioned previously in one of these press conferences, CMS requires skilled nursing facilities, what we traditionally have called nursing homes. We have about 37 of them here in the state to allow indoor visitation unless there is a positive staff or resident in the facility, or the county positivity rates are beyond 10% in the county. Now, CMS uses as leverage on these nursing homes to abide by these regulations in that they can discontinue Medicaid and Medicare payments that pay for the patient's care. I think I have a disagreement with CMS position because a county positivity rate of 10% is a significant, you have a significant chance of introducing coronavirus to the facility at that level. And when you have a positive case that has been introduced to the facility, you are then at a disadvantage. We will be, I've asked my general counsel at the agency to seek a variance or an exemption or a waiver from the CMS requirement so we can protect vulnerable Vermonters in those incidents where we see higher percentage, higher prevalence of virus in the state. In the meantime, we have started to institute some things that fall within the purview that we can before this waiver is acted upon. Currently we're working closely with the Rutland Health and Rehab to contain an outbreak of 26 residents and 12 staff. VDH and Dale continue to work daily with that facility to address infection prevention measures, staffing concerns and ongoing testing. I wanna thank the organization for their continued support. And I also wanna thank Rutland Regional Medical Center and Bayada Home Health for the things that they've done in terms of helping with staffing in that area. We also are managing an outbreak in a residential care facility for seasons in Washington County that has impacted 17 residents and three staff again. We're working with them daily to address the needs of their residents and support they may require to keep residents safe and on the road of recovery. We have reached out to all our long-term care facilities to recommend more frequent surveillance testing of staff weekly or bi-weekly in order to get ahead of any outbreak risk at each individual facility. The state is able to financially support that testing and is available to all our long-term care facilities, all skilled nursing facilities and all residential care. We are counting on all our facilities to continue to be vigilant in their work to protect their residents from the introduction of the virus into their buildings. Although there are many caregivers and service providers that have been allowed to entry into the facility in order to provide direct care on a daily basis, one avenue of the risk that can be reduced is through the visitation. We have advised our long-term care administrators of this flexibility that we believe is available for each facility in considering their approach to indoor visitation based on clinical and safety considerations to include in the protection of the health and security of residents and staff. We recognize that many of our long-term care residents are missing their families and that families are missing their loved ones. And as we see this new surge, we really have to prioritize the integrity of the facilities as they work to keep the residents safe. So we are advising through Dale and through the agency that we take as many precautions as possible and still fall within the CMS guidelines but take as many precautions as possible in order to protect the residents of our long-term care facility. I'll now turn it over to our commissioner Pecha. Thank you very much, Secretary Smith and good morning, everyone. Just off the top, I wanna mention that there won't be a lot of positive or optimistic news necessarily in this presentation. However, as the governor said and I'd like to reiterate, the future is not inevitable for us. It is truly in our hands and our actions today, our actions tomorrow will determine what in fact our case counts look like, what in fact our hospitalizations look like and how safe we keep ourselves and our communities. So since the last time we provided this presentation, the United States added an additional one million cases. So this is the fastest the United States has ever added one million cases within six days. So that's a pretty astonishing number and the rate at which it's growing is rather astonishing as well, breaking last week's record of 10 days. Unfortunately though, Vermont is not immune and case growth is speeding up here in Vermont as well. Yesterday, Vermont reported across the threshold of 3,000 reported cases. You can see from the chart that it took us about 88 days to report our first 1,000 cases. It took about 142 days to report our next 1,000 and then a mere 23 days to report the most recent 1,000 cases. You can clearly see why the governor's mitigation measures were a necessary step last Friday. Looking at our reproduction rate or our effective reproduction rate, this is the rate at which a person with the virus, how many people they will infect if the rate's above one, it's growing. If the rate's below one, then we are seeing a decrease in cases. You'll notice from this analysis from RT Live that Vermont is the second highest reproduction rate at the moment, second to only Maine. So again, this is another indication of how quickly our cases are growing, not just the number, but the speed at which they're growing as well. You'll also notice that of out of the 17 or so states in the Northeast, all of them are in the top 20 on this chart, indicating again that cases are growing more quickly here in the Northeast. And again, we're seeing that here in Vermont as well. Looking at the case curve across the country, not too surprising, particularly to anyone watching the national news, you'll see that case counts continue to go up. We're now averaging just under 150,000 cases every day. Also hospitalizations have continued to go up. They're the highest they've ever been throughout the pandemic, just around 70,000 people in the hospital. And our fatality rate unfortunately continues to crawl up as well. Now reporting more fatalities on average than we did back in the summer surge. So again, all of those things concerning when we look at the numbers. Another thing we wanna point out is how the three peaks that we often talk about were a little different than each other. We've talked about this before, but I think it's important to reiterate because the trend has continued. When you look at the first peak back in the spring, again, you'll notice that it was very localized. It was in the Northeast, New Orleans, a few other places in the country, but it was largely localized and there were hotspots around the country. When you go to the summer peak, again, you'll notice that a little bit more broad, but generally in the southern part of the country, some states out west as well. When you go to the current peak, and this is the past 14 days, you'll see that it's just so broad that it's across everywhere pretty much in the country. It's hitting some parts of the country worse than others, but it is impacting essentially every part of our country, including us here in the Northeast. If we go to our next slide, we'll see this is the national forecast, and again, things don't anticipate slowing down in the near future. Unfortunately, we were likely to see about a 71% increase in cases over the next six weeks, topping out at about 250,000 cases per day on average. So that is the national estimate in terms of case growth over the next six weeks. Turning now to our regional monitoring, we can see that again in the region, our cases were up over 45% week over week, adding about 25,000 cases in addition to the cases we had last week. Last week we added 13,000 additional cases from the cases we had the week before. So you can get a sense of the increase and how quickly that is increasing as well. When you look at the next slide, you'll see this is the weekly numbers over time. So again, just under 80,000 this week, we're approaching that peak in the region back in the spring. And again, I just want to point out how more quickly the cases are rising in the more recent weeks compared to the last 12 weeks when we've seen cases rise, but more slowly. And again, the regional forecast, all of this means that, unfortunately, the regional forecast predicts even more case growth than compared to last week, anticipating 150% growth over the next six weeks. So again, something we certainly have to pay close attention to. Turning now to what this would mean for our travel map and a reminder that travel is suspended without a quarantine, but you can see that red is essentially everywhere in our map, including right here at home in Vermont. But I do also want to point out that our travel map bans cases into three categories, zero to 400, 400 to 800, and then 800 and over. The map on the other side shows what the case count looks like when you look simply at how intense the case counts are, not what bucket they fall into. And from this map, you can see that there are cases hitting certain parts of our region much more severely than others. But I would point out that Washington County and Orange County here in Vermont do rank pretty high on this list when we look at places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. So again, they're parts of our region, parts of our state that aren't being hit as hard as others. But we are seeing a significant impact here in Vermont. And again, something we need to pay close attention to. Turning ahead to our Vermont data, we'll go through this somewhat briefly, but you'll see that we reported almost 600 cases this week. Clearly the highest number since the start of the pandemic. And what is fueling that case growth? You've heard Dr. Levine and the governor mention Halloween, and I want to just break that down for everyone just a little bit so you can see what they're talking about. But on this slide, this is something we used to talk about back in the spring when the governor would announce a policy initiative that would open the economy a little bit. We would measure what happened 10 to 14 days after that policy was implemented to see what kind of behavior was happening, what kind of change in our case counts we saw. And fortunately throughout the spring, we didn't see much change as the economy slowly and safely reopened. Here, when you look at Halloween and you look at the 10 to 14 days after Halloween, it does fall right in that period where the case growth did start to tick up much more substantially. We're seeing this across the country, across cities, across more rural areas, calling it the Halloween surge, but clearly we're seeing the cases go up in that period of time when you would expect them to, accounting for the delay from exposure to getting symptoms, to going and seeking a test, to getting that test result, and then getting it reported to you in the health department. So again, it's a pretty clear tie back to Halloween. And it's a cautionary note again for us when we think about the holidays that are yet to come and how we might have more vulnerable people in our lives during those holidays as well. So I just wanna also point out the new mitigation measures the governor implemented on Friday that went into effect on Saturday night. This is another important thing for us to keep in mind that we will start to see the impact of these mitigation measures, assuming Vermonters follow them and change their behavior within the next 10 to 14 days. So we really wanna watch this case count and growth closely, and particularly over that sort of eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, up to 14 days after these measures were fully implemented. So that's something we'll be keeping a close eye on and reporting on in the future. If we go to our next slide, you'll see the Vermont forecast. Again, you'll see that cases are projected to continue to rise on average, even getting as high as averaging 100 a day. So right now our average is below that, but we anticipate that we will start to see cases slow down and start to decrease because of the intervention measures that were put into place on Friday. So again, something we'll be watching closely. And for the first time since last spring, I'll also be presenting a hospital forecast. This overlays both our historic hospital and ICU data with the forecasted out hospital and ICU data as well. You'll see that hospitalizations could rise into the 40s, ICUs into the low teens. We anticipate having sufficient hospital space for that. But again, Vermont's behavior will end up determining whether any of these come to reality or not. Just to mention two of these reopening metrics because we usually breeze over them, but there are two that stand out in the last week or so. The first one is the growth rate. You can see that the growth rate is higher and more sustained. That's what we talked about back in the spring when we were reopening the economy. We are seeing it for the first time. We see our RT rate, our reproduction rate above that 1.1 level that was a guardrail for us. So again, you're seeing why intervention measures were a necessary component. And then when we look at our positivity rate, we're seeing the same thing. Positivity rate getting close to that guardrail and at a higher and more sustained level over the last week to 10 days. And just very briefly, a couple of updates on higher ed and on K through 12. Starting with K through 12, you'll see that here in Vermont, we added 20 cases impacting an additional 12 schools. New Hampshire added just under 100 cases impacting an additional 28 schools. And Maine reported 82 cases impacting 25 schools. So again, you'll see the number here in Vermont, but we are training much more favorably to Northern New England. And again, with higher ed, New Hampshire, driven largely by the University of New Hampshire, added 121 cases this week. Maine across its colleges, 51. And here in Vermont, 34, with many of those cases coming from UVM. And with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Levine. Thank you. On Monday, unfortunately, Vermont broke yet another record of number of people with COVID-19 reported in a single day with 122 cases. As of today, we've recorded another 95 with 17 people in the hospital, one in the ICU. Health department teams are monitoring or investigating a total of 156 plus situations. We have called special attention to Orange and Washington counties in a press release yesterday. Those counties account for nearly 40% of the COVID-19 cases in the state in the last two weeks. The secretary and I met and are working with town and elected officials in those areas to step up our response and focus on making sure Vermonters are following health guidance as we do throughout the state. Because each new case means the potential for further spread, which can lead to outbreaks. The most important thing we've learned about this virus is that it will take advantage of us, but only if we give it the chance. Asking Vermonters to give up spending time with friends and family outside of their own households is not easy, but based on what we've seen driving transmission, it is necessary. I know we can change our behaviors in time to make a difference, to keep our schools open, to keep people working and to protect our healthcare system, and importantly, save lives. I shared a story on Friday of how easily a seemingly harmless social gathering could lead to cascading numbers of cases and outbreaks. Today I wanna share a different perspective from someone on the other side of those cases, one of our contact tracers. She's given me permission to both use her name and her story. Her name is Monica Oglebay, and in normal times, she's our health department's clinical services director with the office of children with special health needs, a job which she brings passion to every day. But since the pandemic started, she has been our contact tracing clinical lead. When I'm about to read, she actually wrote in a Facebook post, and this is coming from someone who's not normally big on social media, but the recent outbreak and record-breaking case numbers lit a fire. Here's what she writes. It's really quite simple. The definition of a close contact in the contact tracing world is within six feet for greater than 15 minutes. So if you don't wanna get named as a contact and have to quarantine, don't be within six feet for greater than 15 minutes of anyone you don't need to be. If you don't wanna get COVID-19, don't be within six feet for greater than 15 minutes of anyone you don't need to be. If you don't want me to call you and ask you where you've been for every second of the day for the last week, we can make that phone call very short. If you haven't been within six feet for 15 minutes of anyone you didn't need to be. Now, some people need to be in close contact with others. We call them healthcare providers and teachers because those are the services and supports our society needs to get through this. We don't actually need bars. We might want bars, but we don't need them. We don't actually need parties or deer camp or in-person gatherings of any kind, but we might want them, but we don't need them. Not the way we need our healthcare system to stay afloat or our children to have access for an equitable education. Since March 9th, I've been yanked for my day job, weekends, holidays, and family to be a clinical lead for Vermont's contact tracing team. I'm not looking for thanks or accolades. I'm part of a team of many. What I need for you is to stay away from people you don't have to be in close contact with. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, ask yourself, am I within six feet for greater than 15 minutes of anyone? If the answers no, you're doing it right. If the answer is yes, then that contact better be a household member, a healthcare provider, or a teacher, because otherwise it is a non-necessary contact, and that's how COVID spreads like wildfire. And before you go and get angsty about out-of-state plates, sure, it's not a perfect system, but let me be very clear. This current spike in recent cases is related to the poor decision-making by your friends and neighbors, not out-of-staters. Even the nearly 80 cases we had at one college was relatively well-contained. It got in there from a community member, but it didn't get back out. So wear your mask, wash your hands, keep your distance from others. The end. So I will leave you with her words, and I'll only add that we got some good news yesterday about Moderna's coronavirus vaccine, which in a preliminary analysis may be nearly 95% effective. In addition to Pfizer's vaccine, which may be more than 90% effective. We know we are getting closer to distribution, but we also know that vaccinating all Vermonters is still a ways off, so in the meantime, we really need to keep each other safe. Remember the two parallel pathways I've spoken about previously. First, continuing to live in a masked and physically distanced, but socially connected way of life that intentionally avoids crowded indoor spaces. While second, we have gradually increasing numbers of Vermonters getting vaccinated in an equitable manner as more and more doses of a safe and effective vaccine become available over the first half of 2021. Please make these sacrifices now, keeping Thanksgiving and any other social gatherings within your own household, so we can have a holiday to truly be thankful for next year. I'll turn it back to the government. Thank you, Dr. Levine. We'll now open it up to questions. 26 reporters in the queue, so please try to keep your questions limited on topic and not repeating previous questions. Scott or Calvin? Thanks, Governor. So I guess data-wise, what would you need to see in terms of a case count or positivity rate to start rolling back some of these restrictions this course is, it's a long winter ahead, so what would you need to see? Yeah, probably back to where we were a pre-spike. We were on a path that I think was acceptable. It was inching up a bit, but we expected that, but we didn't expect was it to reach the levels it is today. So just getting back to what we had before. And I guess a couple of clarifying questions about the expanded testing as well. You said it's gonna be five different cities. I guess just kind of talk a little bit more, I mean, do you have to have an appointment? Can you walk up? How much does it cost? I'm gonna have Secretary Smith answer that, please. And maybe how many people they can process every day as well. Thanks, Calvin. Here's the ultimate goal. We hope to have 14 sites by the end of the month up. We expect, we are planning to have five sites up this week, as the governor had mentioned Burlington, Middlebury, Waterbury, Rutland, and a Burr-Oberle. We hope to have the capacity with all our testing to do 30,000 tests a week. That includes the testing that we're doing now, plus the additional testing that we're doing, about 5,000 a day is what we're having. The platform for registration will be going through sort of a website and doing it, the same as you do it now, in terms of registration. So we're building, as I used the airplane analogy last week, we're building that now, that capacity, but we have robust capacity. We're going through the roof on making sure that we increase that capacity for testing. The one thing I just wanna say, it's gonna be seven days a week. It's gonna be open at hours that are convenient for Vermonters. As you know, we build our system based upon the convenience sort of of the providers during, because we had to, we had no capacity and we built our robust capacity over the months starting since March. This is a little bit different. We're looking at how do we make it convenient for Vermonters, how do we make it that they drive no more than 30 minutes to get a test, making tests available at a time that's available for them. And so that's why we decided the seven days a week at hours that could expand into the evening. And I guess it's, what about the cost? It'd be zero. It'd be free. I thank you very much. Not sure who the best person that you could have is perhaps Dr. Mark Levine. I remember back in the spring, so much of what was talked about was flattening the curve. That was the phrase that was used as cases were going up then. I think many people feel like we just stepped into a time machine and went back to April in some regards. When does the curve in thinking about the curve and how it's preparing for a possible start in our healthcare system come back into play when we're looking at cases like this? Is that a terminology that we're thinking about using in Dr. Levine or Commissioner Pichek? Yeah, so Commissioner Pichek showed you the two curves actually on one slide. And the most surprising thing about this curve that we're in now is the rapidity with which those changes occur. Not only Vermont-wide, but region-wide to be honest. But certainly we're talking about Vermont here. So that is an epi outbreak, a kind of curve. So we anticipate every curve like that when your institute mitigating measures is going to reach a peak and then begin a downslope and then hopefully continue down before it plateaus out at a much, much lower level. So it takes two incubation periods to see the impact generally of any intervention. We'd like to see in that 10 to 14 days, which is one incubation period of a significant evolution so that we know we're going in the right direction and then in that second incubation period even further progress. But that's what we need to be prepared for. And while we watch that curve, which is only cases, we need to carefully watch hospitalizations and we need to then watch deaths. Not that I'm anticipating either of those are going off the charts, but at the same time, those are what we call lagging indicators and they don't respond as quickly. Cases go up and you don't see the impact on them as much. And then when the cases start to come down, the impact on those may actually persist because they're lagging behind. So we're going to very carefully watch that. Thanks. The second question would be, do we know if the additional beds at the Essex Fairgrounds are up and running again? I know I was given a time table last week at a point about this time this week that we have the other on it. To give you a specific number, I'll have a second place. Thank you. Actually, I was going to pass it off to Commissioner Schirling to ask that. I know that we added beds to our capacity to bring that up. We had 50 beds already in place. We're bringing on additional beds and Commissioner Schirling, do you have that information? I do. Thank you, Commissioner Schirling. That's correct. We have 50 beds employed now. The original plan was to do guard to deploy an additional 100 over the course of this week and make early next week. Because it's logistically just as easy to do 200, that number will be an additional 200. So by early to mid next week, we'll have 250 beds in multiple pods available at DVDM. Thank you. Governor, are you concerned with the judiciary stepping back their reopening of the court system? Are you worried that it's going to breach a point where we're going to have busloads of cases that are coming into the courts or are trying to deal with all of that? Yeah, well, again, it's concerning, obviously. But we have to deal with reality right now and it's not safe to get people together. It's the want versus need scenario all over again. And the court is doing the best they can under the circumstances. And as soon as we can get this under control again, as soon as we can reduce the case counts, I'm sure we'll get the courts back up and running again. But it is a concern. But it's not our highest concern at this point. I had also heard being a buried guy, I guess. But there were rumors going around that you were possibly planning a party for inauguration. Is that in the works or are you holding back on that thing? Yeah, that is not only inappropriate to have a celebration right now. That's just simply not true. Nothing could be further from the truth. Again, we go and talk about want versus need. That's certainly not a need. And at this point in time, it's not even a want. It's somewhere in the I'm not even thinking about it because this is this is a time for us to focus on keeping Vermonter safe, getting through this. I look forward to the day when we can have a celebration to end this pandemic. That's what I'm really looking forward to. So celebratory chicken pie supper, perhaps. Maybe in the future at some point. I don't know when that's going to be. But it's something for all of us to look forward to. Thank you. Is that with Aaron from DC Digger? I find the hospital and ICU forecast to be really interesting and helpful for an understanding of how this will affect us. But it doesn't tell us exactly whether the hospitalizations and ICU needs are going to be within the capacity of the system. And the only information that we have in this presentation is that we are repeatedly close to hitting the open ICU buffer. I mean, I understand that we're reopening search sites to increase number of beds. But can you tell me a little bit about how our forecast comparison capacity for beds and staffing and speaking needs and players all of those kinds of things? Start with Commissioner Pichett. Thank you, Governor. And I'll let Secretary Smith add anything that I leave off. But I'll just mention today on the ICU capacity front, we have north of 40 available ICU beds. So that will be in our presentation online. And certainly well within a comfortable buffer of the type of growth that we would anticipate seeing over the next six weeks, I think, it shows us peaking at, like I said, in the low teens in terms of ICU. We also want to consider flu as well, which we've certainly looked at and forecasted and anticipate having a relatively mild flu season. But we'll have to wait and see how that develops, which is also good news in terms of hospital capacity. And then in terms of the potentially 40 to 50 general beds for COVID, again, that's within the hospital's capacity currently. And we project it to be in the hospital's capacity in the future, even when accounting for flu hospitalizations as well. So we can certainly provide that similar in the spring when we provided both the curve and then also the capacity as well. I think I would find that helpful. And if you're having an update on the PPE and ventilators as well, I know that we were kind of building up a soft tile. So I'd like to kind of hear how that compares to our projected forecast. Yeah, Erin, this is Mike Smith. Let me just interject. And then I'll probably turn it over to Commissioner Schirling. Every morning we get a update on not only the people that are hospitalized inpatient confirmed COVID-19 patients, but also those that are suspected, those that are in the ICU, those that are suspected in the ICU, and those that are vented in an ICU sort of situation. We also get daily updates on how many events we have available. For example, we have 246 events available. And events in use are two today is what I'm getting at. But on the PPE, as you have mentioned, we've been stockpiling. And I'll let Commissioner Schirling talk about PPE. Mr. Smith, and thanks for the question. The detail on reserve ventilators in addition to the 246 that are in use or are available statewide, we have purchased an additional 79 ventilators that are either in reserve or have been deployed. 74 are in warehouse run by the UVM health network ready for deployment. They've been tested and are in ready reserve. Five were dropped ship directly in the spring to North Country Hospital. So they went directly to the field. And we have an additional five that are on order, on back order at this point. Relative to personal protective equipment, keep in mind that the mental health measures warehouse is designed to backstop the health care system and to a more limited extent, first responders, luxury care facilities, corrections, and other high need users during the pandemic. They still have supply lines that are functioning. And the supply lines for medical countermeasures warehouse, the strategy that we undertook in the late spring was to be. Yeah, sorry, Erin. We may have a correctional. OK, on top of that, for a total target of 120 days, we're in pretty good shape on all supplies, and two exceptions that we've talked about pretty consistently. The first is N95 masks. And the second is medical grade and nitrile gloves. N95 masks, we have currently 69 days of supply on hand based on the current burn rate. And important to note that we feel that the ability to sterilize N95 masks, that was one of the strategies employed in the spring was to also buy sterilization units that have now been deployed statewide, which brings us to medical gloves. We have 36 days to buy on hand, 5.1 million gloves. And we continue to buy all of those items as quickly because they're available. But that goes to the supply line and remains constrained because of worldwide demand. So we're in bottom line with all that detail that we're in reasonably good shape, but there are areas of concern should the burn rate continue to increase and if the outbreak gets worse. Is that do it, Erin? OK. I know that's right, thanks. Thanks. All right, Cat, WCAS? The two exceptions are the second wave, the third wave, and you believe that it's legal. Cat, we didn't get that. Can you try again? Are you there? We've come back to Cat. Hopefully we're not having a technical difficulty. Cat, we'll come back to you a little bit later. Eric, Times-Argus? Yes, this is Leslie. For Dr. Levine, do you know why Washington County and Orange County are seeing the cases that they are? Washington County is seeing more cases than Cheson County despite having a third of the population. Eric, I'm going to let Dr. Levine answer that, but I want to be a little bit more blunt. I think this really did start at the scathing facility and then blossom from there, as you know, and then as well with Halloween and the number of parties that went on throughout Washington County for that holiday. Just exasperated the situation, so exasperated. So we learned a lot, obviously, about what to do, what not to do, and that's why we put into place a lot of the measures we did last Friday to counteract that. But Dr. Levine can answer further. Just so members of the public know what we put out in our press release, the incidence rate of cases in Washington County is 40 cases per 10,000 people, which is three times the rate across the state. In Orange County, it's 23.5 cases per 10,000 people, which is twice the rate in the rest of the state. Everything the governor said is true. We do believe it did begin way back when in the not too distant past with the ICE team's outbreak and then the subsequent issues regarding Halloween and our gatherings. The county was already starting at a higher level before Halloween, so Halloween could only have served to exacerbate what was already going on at a higher level than other parts of the state. Chittenden County does have the most populated part of the state, but you're correct that it is not the most active place on the map at this point in time, though certainly it ranks third more active than the brunt of the rest of the counties in the state, which all have numbers in the single digits for their incidence rates. Okay. All right, we're gonna go back to Kat, who I believe should be one of the line up. Kat, that was you. Sorry about that. I was asking, would you classify this as the second wave of the virus here in Vermont and do you believe it will be worse than its past spring? I think in some respects, it's already worse than the spring, as Commissioner Pichek showed on the modeling, we've exceeded the number of cases per day. Also, the number of cases of the dramatic rise as has been in the number of days has taken for us to get there is much more dramatic. So I don't know if you'd classify it as a second wave. I think we've talked about this before. It might be like the third wave, I'm not sure, but Dr. Levine. Yeah, not to mean the question at all. I don't know if the term has much meaning for us here at this point. If you look between the initial springtime issue and the current issue, we have abundant small blips. One of them with the Winooski-Berlington outbreak, a little bit larger blip of outbreaks that have occurred all along the way. Just reminding us constantly that there's a steady level of virus in our communities that has always been there, will continue to be there through the time that we can get everyone vaccinated and more immunity in the population. And that virus level always being there is only exacerbated by the move indoors as the weather changed and the move to more gatherings indoors as the weather changed as well. So it's really that confluence of influences. I don't wanna call one thing worse or better than another because these are very different times. The first peak, no testing, no contact tracing, no PPE, and we didn't know how to even treat people with this virus. And now we're in a wave where we have the opportunity to, as you've just heard today, massively expand testing, keep our contact tracing workforce endlessly busy, but still able to practice containment. And we have therapeutics that are different. And I was listening in on this conversation just a few moments ago regarding the ICUs and the ventilators and all of that. And I don't wanna poo-poo this virus. This is a serious medical problem and an issue for our society. But we know so much more about how to keep people who are in the hospital out of the ICU by the care they get on the way. And then if they get to the ICU, we have found there are less of them on ventilators because we have strategies to utilize and caring for them. And I'll just mention one thing. There is a new emergency use authorization for the monoclonal antibody that I believe our president made famous when he entered the hospital. We are expecting in a week or so that states will begin receiving this from the federal government. I don't wanna put too much false hope or potentially false hope on this one new intervention because we haven't been able to view a lot of the literature that supports its use. It's just premature. It hasn't been totally released for peer review. But at the same time, the promise of the monoclonal antibody is to take people who are classified, if you will, as moderate illness in their homes or in our society and help prevent them from having to be hospitalized. Because if it works effectively at the stage of moderate illness before you're sick enough to be in the hospital and you get it at the right time, you may never end up in the hospital. So that is the hope. I'll stop there. It's probably more than you asked for. The question was that it appeared like in the spring, a lot of people took this really seriously. And right now it appears like either there's the fatigue that we've mentioned in past press conferences or that people feel like with the abilities to treat the virus better, that there's some flexibility to be more lacked in how they respond to it. That was the impetus for why we asked about whether this is gonna be worse than this past spring was to make a comparison. Great frame of reference to this. To that end. Yeah. To that end, how are a lot of doing in comparison to this past spring and are we able to handle the amount of tests and positive tests that are coming through? Yes. You're saying how are the labs doing? So our public health lab is cranking it up but certainly working very hard. We have access to the lab in Boston, the Broad Institute, which you just heard a little bit about with the new test sites we're setting up and some of the surveillance testing we've been doing, both in college students previously and now in teachers from K through 12 and other school staff. And our public health lab have turnaround times that are consistently below two days. And then we have the access through the pharmacies and other healthcare settings to either their labs on site in the healthcare settings example or out of state labs. We can be very honest. Some of the out of state labs have longer turnaround times and we're concerned about that and that's why we're trying to direct as many of the labs as possible to the sites that have faster turnaround. But we have no problem in terms of labs running out of the collection kits, labs running out of the assay materials to actually do the test. And we have actually stockpiled them at least at the state level for our own public health lab. Thank you so much. Rebecca, I just want to add as well to put this in perspective, when we first started back in the spring, our public health lab was testing maybe 200 or 300 a day. And recently they hit a high mark of 1,300 in a day. So they've made a lot of changes and obviously for the better. That with expanding some of our commercial labs and so forth to take up some of the testing has gotten us to the point where again, we're contemplating 5,000 a day. We weren't hitting that in a month in the beginning. So we come a long ways and we do have a lot of inventory due to the hard work of many, Mr. Shirling and others throughout our administration trying to get as many supplies as possible to make sure that we're prepared. So now we have in the inventory, I believe, we have almost 100,000 tests kits available at this point in time. This gives us a ways to make sure that we can provide for Vermonters over the next couple of months. So regardless of what happens. The question is for Ed at the Newport Daily Express. Okay, Karen, how about it? I, you know, as you can see in your voice and you're talking about center and you'll urge people to be responsible. All right, I don't doubt that the inferior yourself and your administration try to keep that kind of goal. The question here is that it will change people's behavior from Thanksgiving through the holiday season and Christmas, like in New Year, people are gonna go out, they are gonna, you know, combings or if you will. Is there other stuff that you can take to close down the economy during this time period so to do what you can to keep this virus from continuing and spreading? Yeah. You close the bars. Are you gonna close the rest of your last thing? If at some point, what are you gonna have to do to protect people from the bell? Yeah, well, again, we're doing the best we can based on the data in the science. As I said earlier, we aren't finding that the cases or the root cause of the cases is in our restaurants or in our schools and so forth. So we feel we can continue to keep them open. It really is about a behavior change on our own part. And I would say, I know it is difficult. We're a victim of our own success because we've done a lot and protected for monitors where they had the best track record in the country as far as the state is concerned. So again, victim of our own success and we've let our guard down. And what I, you know, when you said we can't change behavior all the time, I would agree except we did this once. We did this back in the spring. We changed behavior. People did adhere to the guidelines and then they became complacent or they got fatigued with the pandemic, one of the two. So I believe that we can get back to where we were before. It didn't take us long to get to this point in some respects in a negative way over the last three or four weeks. And we can get back just that quick if we just take it on right now, fight this virus, be proactive and take the safety precautions that we've laid out and stay separated. That's the whole answer. 71% of the cases over the last few weeks have been associated with social gatherings, not in restaurants, not in schools, not in businesses. Mike Donahue, the Islander. It's a terrible interest of monitors and seeing the daily lives of the top individuals, outbreaks, he had mentioned 80 situations, while we had 17 outbreaks on Friday. We asked for a list also looking for the schools and everything like that. I mean, that came after there was no report on that. Nursing home down in Ruffins. Now that's 26 patients and 12 staff. Now we just learned from the California record that the police department had half of the officers on the sidelines because the officers read a positive or informed key. What are we gonna get the list of places that are seriously impacted? And are the police fire rescue squad still hit and miss as to whether they're reporting those cases in the state of the month? Yeah, I would say these days is tough to keep up, Mike, but maybe Commissioner Levine can add to that. Mike, we did get your email and I believe you got a preliminary response which will be expanded upon. When we're talking 156 situations, fortunately not all of those are 25 people in a long-term care facility. A great many of them are two or three people, perhaps in a school, perhaps in a business, perhaps in a police department. The release of information when you're dealing with a very small number of individuals is potentially and usually potentially identifying of individuals. And we are still in an era where we must be protecting those personal confidentiality rights. So it's not as simple as saying we have abundant numbers of infections around the state and you can know who has every one because that's actually not protective of their information and nor will protecting their information be harmful to any other Vermonter once the identification process and contact tracing has occurred. Email that you just mentioned and I'll look forward to that. But I know you're going at numbers like 40 for 10,000. That means really nothing to Vermonter but if you say there's four cases in a specific school and if you can relate more to that. And we do do that on the school website where twice a week we update in every school that has had cases identifies those cases. And just to move on with my talk about protecting individuals. Those cases, if there's two cases in a school we're not going to necessarily say that those are two siblings in two different grades and they shut down the entire grade, et cetera. We're going to say that there are two cases. They may be students, they may be a custodian, they may be a teacher. But when you're down to small numbers like that within a community it's not helpful to and it can be harmful to either a school, a business, what have you to be very specific about such small numbers? Well both, both two of the schools in the island they're pretty small numbers. Everybody knows who the students are but contracted had the positive test and everything like that. So I appreciate you're trying to hide it but in a small community everybody knows. But it's my fault. I understand. An Islander reader is concerned about the delay in getting back to capital for their children, for their child. Parent reached out to say their child was in quarantine due to close contact with a positive student in one of the schools in the island here. The occupies were to wait 14 days or to test at seven days is not symptomatic. The student was brought in for testing on Thursday at eight and nine a.m. and as of yesterday, more than four days later there were still no results available. And that parent is saying that's unacceptable and it takes a serious financial impact. When are parents going to be able to start getting quicker tests when parents are being heard go out and get a test, you'll know right away. Yeah, thanks for that question and I appreciated if you'd send the contact information to the same email you used to get me that other question you had so we can probe into it. But generally what we're aware of is that if some of the tests have been sent to one of two labs that are commercial labs outside of state, their turnaround time has increased. And we can probe into that to see if that's what the cause of this is or not. I also want to make sure that the parent you're talking about has tried to connect with the healthcare provider of that child because they would often be getting that result and be able to talk about it the moment it arrived in their office or on their computer screen. So those are the two recommendations. Send the information to me as well as make sure that the healthcare provider is looped in. Thank you. Okay, I'll read that to the parent and do what they want. Okay, thank you. And the other part of that question, I don't know if Victor is drilling, is it still getting missed as far as whether police, fire, and rescue are reporting their cases to the state of Vermont like they were supposed to be doing early on? Thanks for the question, Mike. There's never been a specific requirement we sort of put an open line of communication. They had cases, they had a way to advise us that I'm not sure a hit or miss is exactly the right moniker but there's not a specific requirement that that happened. I would also observe that what we are seeing, not only the first responders, but in other places is folks that are advised to isolate as a result of potentially being a contact and not necessarily getting a positive test. So when we look at reporting outbreaks in which locations or facilities have outbreaks, some of the impacts are a result of preventive measures to ensure that an outbreak doesn't occur. Are you second? And last thing, how many troopers have been impacted by this? I'm sorry, there was two people talking. How many troopers have been impacted by COVID? I don't have a total count but I can tell you that there hasn't been a handful of employees at the Department of Public Safety that have been impacted by COVID either directly or as a result of the family members' exposure. Thank you. Thank you all. I just want to follow up a little bit because Vermonters need to understand this. It depends on where your provider is sending your specimen to what lab and it's important because I think we need to really sort of hone in on this and that's why we're increasing our testing so dramatically. Labs throughout the country, depending on what lab your provider uses, will have variances in the turnaround time. For example, the Vermont Department of Health Lab has a turnaround time and we monitor this almost on a daily basis. It has a turnaround time of 1.1 days. For example, Rutland Regional Medical Center has 1.1 days where we, and the Broad Institute that we're using for the expanded health, for the expanded testing capacity that we're doing has 1.8 days. When you look at other labs throughout the country, they are starting to become overwhelmed by incidences in other parts of the country, male, quest, those are starting to see backlogs in their labs. So it's important for your provider and you to know that it's important where the lab results go in terms of turnaround time. And I guess, Mike, what I would ask you to do when you ask your constituent or your reader, when they contact the department, ask them where they got their test and who was the provider, because that is important. Thank you. It was for the UVM Medical Center. We gotta move to the next color. We have 17 people left in the queue and it is 1230. Next up is Stewart at NBC. Yeah, good afternoon. Question for Commissioner P. Jack. Regarding Hazard Day grants, I guess the deadline has now been extended till tomorrow. Since the three senators went public the other last week, which of the big name employers have applied in the last couple of days? I understand you've been reaching out directly. Are you expecting any more? Can you give us a little update? Yeah, for sure. So we also mentioned just that we have been doing outreach with those companies as well. And we've been making sure they have all the information that they need and that they understand what the process is, what the implications are for their employees and for the company itself. So at this point, we have received an application from Shaw's. That was one that was a big one outstanding. We received just the beginning of the press conference and application from Walmart, which was another one that was outstanding. CBS has applied Walgreens, Lowe's. So many of the larger out-of-state companies have decided to apply. We had a number of them that were still trying to get internal sign off on Friday and we decided to extend the deadline largely to make sure that they could get that deadline or get that sign off and meet the deadline, which is tomorrow at noon. Home Depot, Costco now? Costco has applied. Home Depot, we're still waiting to see their decision. Okay. And just to clarify on the five new testing sites on your way north of that, who should go get tested at those sites? As Stuart, anyone who wants to test, I should go to those sites. Especially. Okay, thanks a lot. And especially, I might add, anyone who's been to a gathering will want to get tested. Wilson, the AP. Hi, everybody. Governor, when you started talking earlier, I was listening to you at your description of how the KS members have gone up and tracing it back to the, don't look, the small social gathering. I was going back and forth between deciding, trying to decide whether you, I thought you sounded angry or frustrated. And I was wondering if you could perhaps tell me which one would be the more correct way to describe that. And then having said all that, this is something we've asked since the beginning. Obviously, things are, you're asking people to do the voluntarily. Is there any thought, if it doesn't work, that maybe you would put some sort of find behind these gatherings that are in violation of at least common sense rules? Yeah. I think more frustration than anger. We were doing so well here in Vermont and to see us spike and go in the opposite direction is, you know, again, frustrating for me and it is for our whole team because everyone's been working so hard. Vermonters have worked so hard. And I feel, again, that sense of frustration because I know the majority of Vermonters are trying to do the right thing. But we let our guard down and we tried to warn against this as well. When we saw that Halloween was coming, we tried to warn against that but many people didn't heed the warnings or we didn't get the message out or whatever was the root of the cause. So, again, I just know that we can do better. I think that that's the bottom line and because we did it once before, we proved ourselves and we need to do it again. We need to dig deep. We need to, again, take this time to write the ship and so that we can be better off in the coming months than we are today because it can go sideways very quickly as we saw, especially in Washington and Orange County. But that could have happened, again, that could have happened in Wyndham County or Bennington County or Windsor County or Broadland County. It just happened to be in Washington County. What was the other part of that, Wilson? Oh, fine. Yeah, you know, it's always an option, Wilson, but it's not my first choice. Obviously, I think, again, we were able to do this without fines in the beginning. We were able to comply, take the guide to take this seriously and do the right thing. So I still believe in Vermont's willingness to put this behind us and so that we can get back to whatever the normal was over the last three or four months as we await a vaccine, which is really the end goal, which we really need. And there is some hope on the horizon for that. So, again, if we can get Vermonters to just take this a little more seriously than they have, I think that this will have beneficial results. We'll see them in the near future. Probably, you know, the lag time is about two weeks from anything that we do. So we'll know in about two weeks whether Vermonters are taking this more seriously or not. Otherwise, we'll show what Commissioner Peechak showed for Thanksgiving in Canada. We hope that that's not the case. Thank you very much. Lisa, the value of Florida? Good afternoon. In our community, a local retail and delivery business had at least one employee diagnosed with COVID recently. And there was some confusion about what should happen next. Several employees were surprised that it took a few days for the state to contact them. What should people expect in terms of timing if there is a COVID case that their office replaced an employee? Yeah, I'll let Dr. Levine answer that. But again, it depends on how forthright everyone is in some of the interview because the more forthright, the more honest, the more communicative you are, the better off we'll be. And the quicker we can turn that around. The contact tracing teams are overwhelmed right now a bit, or I shouldn't say overwhelmed, they're doing okay, but it wouldn't take long. That's why we're beefing up the contact tracing teams as we speak because we don't want to become overwhelmed. But they're at capacity at this point in time. So doing the best we can, but everyone who is contacted should answer the phone and again, be honest and forthright about what they've experienced. Just thank you. Is there a specific time frame? Yes, so the only thing I'll add to that is, we still have a very admirable rate of that first interview phone call where we get the history and understand the person who got the positive test back, exactly what their circumstances are, are able to guide them and begin to get the information we need regarding the contact tracing. Our rate for within 48 hours of the test positive result is in the high 80s, I believe right now, which is still sort of the admiration of all of those around us. As the governor pointed out, and as I'm guessing from your question, this result didn't come too long ago. We literally had a doubling of our daily number of cases in a 48 hour period and then a further doubling before the next 48 hour period ended. So there was a backlog for sure because there are so many cases that all of a sudden happened in that true surge. So that's why we're beefing up that workforce tremendously. But people still should expect to have that initial connection within a 48 hour period and there's a reasonably high rate as well in the low 80% of within the first 24 hour period. So that expectation continues to be met. Thank you, that's helpful. I have a second question probably for Commissioner Sherwin and it's about the state getting a protocol check. What has been found in those protocol checks that's here in the local lodges and hens? Good afternoon, thanks. I'm very briefly in the interest of time. As of yesterday morning, I haven't checked on today's numbers. 237 assessments have been done. Again, the vast majority of folks are largely in compliance a few places with some need for additional education. They're ongoing and now we'll continue to report those numbers as they commit. Thank you very much. Andrew, Caledonian record? Yes, thank you. Good afternoon. My question is about the school surveillance testing. I'm wondering if there are any advantages or disadvantages to doing this baseline testing on the eve of the Thanksgiving vacation. And if you have any forecast or predictions for what this testing may reveal, I'm thinking with an above 1% positivity rate if you test say 10,000 teachers and staff this week, are you expecting that you might see as many of the hundreds or more positive as a result of this round of tests? Again, I'll let Dr. Levine answer that. But from my perspective, the sooner we can get this on the ground and exercise, the better off we'll be. It will also create some sort of baseline for us to go by for the future. Precisely. This is called surveillance testing. This is getting a pulse on the population just like we're doing in long-term care facilities, just like we've been doing in our correctional facilities, et cetera. The take-home message here is that each population, whether they're the ones I just mentioned, or the teacher and school staff population, don't look at them as teachers and school staff. Look at them as members of their community and they represent what's going on with the virus in their community. They still have to go to the supermarket. They still have to go out in public to do certain things in their life. They don't need to go to small gatherings at other households, admittedly. But again, they represent their community. So whatever the positivity rate in their specific community is, is probably gonna be reflected in them because we know the nasty thing about this virus is that it is not always symptomatic right away and people walk around with it not knowing that they haven't. I have complete faith in the education community to already be doing the masking and physical distancing because that is so drilled into their daily life in their work site. So they can't help but be making that part of their habits all of the time. But they still have to live in their communities and that's what we'll see. I think the timing, as you refer to in your question, is perfect because we'll see where it is now when we're certainly in a major battle with this virus. We'll see where it is right before Thanksgiving and we'll see where it is right after Thanksgiving. And that will all be really, really helpful for us in addition to just the usual daily case data that we get from people who've opted to get a test. I guess with a quick follow-up, if contact tracing is beginning to get strange, the capacity, and there are a number of positives that result from this teacher testing would you ever envision prioritizing what cases get the tracing investigation? For instance, would you push school staff and teachers to the front of the tracing line in the interest of the state in priority to keep schools open? Yeah, so the schools actually are kind of there anyways because we have a special outbreak response team that would generally respond when there's a case in a school setting as opposed to an individual getting a positive test that's not associated with such a setting. In addition, the schools at this point in time are very well versed in how we communicate with them and how to respond when they have a case in anybody who works there. So we often find that the contact tracing process is already underway because everybody's very interested in knowing if they can keep the class open, keep the school open, et cetera. And superintendents and principals have to make hard decisions the minute they find there's a positive case. So they generally are a little bit ahead of the game anyways and often put things on pause for a day where they just wanna collect all the information they need so they let their school community know that either the school or a specific class is on pause until they can gather all the complete information they need to make the most accurate decision in this position. To be certain as well, there's not gonna be a congressional stimulus back until next year, the fight that won't be a vaccine. And what can you tell Vermonters about the economy over the next few months given that we're sort of in this place where there's not gonna be assistance for the near term anyway? Well, there will be some assistance in some respects. We did get approval through the Joint Fiscal Office or Joint Fiscal Committee to implement our economic plan. That was about, I think all told, about $100 million there. So that's quite an injection into the economy over the near term. Obviously, we need more. I mean, that wasn't anywhere close to what we need to get the economy back going. I believe that Congress gets it. Certainly, President-Elect Biden does as well and current President Trump does too. So there is still a little bit of hope. I've spoken to some of the congressional delegation about this. There's still some hope that something might get accomplished in the lame duck session but the time will tell. So again, we have our own budget that has been supported. We're doing okay in the state in terms of keeping our head above water and making sure the revenues are still coming in. So all of the safety provisions we have in place are funded and we are still doing work within the state. So we'll be okay but we're just anticipating what's going to happen maybe in January or February. But right now, we're doing all we can with the money resources we have. And if there's any further dollars that are leftovers that we need to make sure that we disperse before the end of December, we'll do so. We'll go to the Joint Fiscal Committee with another package if we have other money available and make sure that we put it in the right places. Is there a day that you are very, very reluctant to shut down or the economy doesn't exist sort of the last resort? Well, again, we want to be targeted. And as I said earlier with the contact tracing that we've utilized, nothing is pointing this to the business, the economic center, the restaurants or anything, the businesses that are open at this point in time, that's not the problem. It's the social gatherings that are the problem right now. So I'm very hopeful that we'll get through this. And as frustrating as it is for everyone, we can do it. We've done it before, we can do it again and we can keep our economy going. We can keep people employed and feeding their families. And we have a safety net, the unemployment system is still fully intact. We've only spent a quarter of a billion dollars out of that, but we have a quarter billion dollars in reserves right now as well. We have reserves and some of our rainy day funds that we can utilize. So as a state, we're in better shape than many, but we need some federal help if we're going to get through this. John Dillon, BPR. Patriotism and sacrifice and the meaning of freedom, we're, they're the most forceful I've ever heard you make. But, and I apologize if this is a rhetorical question, but how do you reach people who don't care? How do you combat Wilco Igner and break out sort of beyond this bubble of people who believe it's a problem and those who don't? Yeah, you know, it's, it's a, that's the frustrating part, right? When Wilson asked me earlier whether I was angry or frustrated, I'm angry with the virus. I'm frustrated with those who don't believe that we can, we can mitigate this because we did it before we can do it again. So I think it's going to take all of our efforts and I, and I don't, I don't believe it's going to be with a financial penalty of some sort. I don't think that, that gets it. I think that, I think people just have to realize what we're seeing throughout the country. I mean, the incredible spike that we're seeing all across the Midwest in particular, what we saw before in Florida, and it's still happening, by the way. I mean, they still have thousands of cases in Texas and Florida and in California. I think they had a 10,000 cases in one day over the last couple of days. So, you know, it continues to be a problem, not just for us, but the whole country. But the frustrating part for me is that we, we did things better. We, we got it and we can get it again if we all pull together and pull in the same direction just for a little bit longer. You know, we can see the finish line ahead of us and it's not time, you know, I think about this in terms of my stock car racing career. You know, we're, we've got like five laps to go and we need to be running those laps as well as we did our first five laps in order to get to the finish line. It's not time to let off the gas right now. We can win this, but it's going to take all of us, the whole team, the whole crew, to get us to that point. And, but I'm, I'm confident we can. We just need some cooperation. The messaging around this to that point, you know, maybe have Monica, the contact tracer doing PSAs. I mean, that was powerful too. We need to have a shift in how we're talking to people about this. Yeah, I think it's going to take, you know, all of us on all fronts. I think that was very powerful from Monica, somebody on the front lines. We contemplated some of that, well, whether we need to bring people out and tell their stories. We need people to step up. Meet people like Ken Squigert last week who decided to become public with his, him being positive as a reminder that it can, it can, it can affect anyone. It doesn't matter who you are. So I think people need to use their voices, their experiences. And if they, if they had a tough time or they went through this, tell others and tell them how quickly it happened to them and how they let their guard down. Be honest about this so that we can prevent it from happening in the future. And again, we, we have, we have what it takes to counteract this. We have what it takes to overcome this. We just need to step up. 55 with 11 left in the queue. So one to two questions for the remaining folks. Right, the county courier. Hi, governor. I'm looking at the current cases and respect to population. There's about nine times more cases in Washington County than here in Franklin County. At what point would you be considering more racialized restrictions either by relaxing orders in likely affecting counties or rashing up orders in more heavily affected counties? Yeah, we've talked about this a little bit, Greg. And we've been resistant in some respects because it could happen so quickly, right? As I said earlier, this, what happened in Washington County and Orange. And I think it's almost one community in some respects. What happened here could have happened anywhere. It could have happened in Franklin County. It could have happened in Rutland County or Bennington or Wyndham or Windsor, Caledonia. It could happen anywhere. And it could happen even next week. So we're trying to utilize the strategy. And I know it might seem unfair to some, but if we're not all vigilant, then it will come to us. This virus doesn't understand the counties and the city limits and towns and so forth. It doesn't know the state boundaries. So we have to be wary of that and we have to respect that and then fight the virus as best we can with what we have. So at this point in time, we aren't anticipating that, but obviously it's always on the table. But we do have, as you might recall, more stringent measures that could be implemented by communities. We gave them that authority. Burlington took advantage of it early on and other communities could as well. So if we're, and we're urging those folks in Washington County and Orange County to implement those in their communities and their cities if they feel that it's necessary to prevent the spread. So again, we're just taking a statewide strategy at this point. It seems like hearing from people locally that it's a reaction to what's happening in other parts of the state, not necessarily what's happening here. And looking at the case count here is very similar to what happened mid-summer in Burlington and those weren't instituted then, so. Yeah, we heard that in the Northeast Kingdom all summer and we're not hearing that today, by the way. Because they've been affected by New Hampshire in some respects. Dr. Levine? I just want to reiterate Commissioner Pechak's comments and show the map. I mean, Vermont is red. So whether there's a difference by some order of magnitude between Washington County and Franklin County, everybody's turning red and it's happening in a very rapid fashion. So the same measures that apply in one county need to apply across the state. And as the governor said, one could get stricter. For instance, on our call last evening with the two counties, we've learned, as I had suspected, that the majority of the municipalities are either disgusting or have already decided to close their town offices and do everything remotely. The people who work there and hopefully the transactions that their citizens need to accomplish do that remotely. They made that decision very consciously and acutely because they knew what they were dealing with. That's just one example. But I don't believe there was anything in the executive order that said, close all of your town offices. So that's something that they have opted to do. And it's probably going to turn out to be a very good public health measure. But we wouldn't want counties with lesser activity to think they've kind of escaped it and they're off the hook. That's the take home message. For instance, moved back into what would be a green county with the administration considered doing more regional audits. Orders? No, I really don't think so. I think that everyone who lives in Franklin County would pat themselves on the back but say we've got to maintain this because we are surrounded by a sea of rent and we can't let ourselves slip back so we've got to do everything we can through our own behaviors to keep up our track record of success. The town-by-town case map seems to be about six days old. Is there a reason that with all the portrayal of urgency with this new spike that we're not updating this on the daily basis? We'll get back to you on that. We've got to move to Lisa at the Waterbury roundabout. Hi folks, thanks for coming. We can. Okay, I have a question about keeping schools open. In our school district, since it's such a huge priority, I'm wondering where we have a school this week that's gone to all remote learning because they didn't have enough teachers to teach in person this week, at least for a few days. Our district substitute list normally before COVID was around 80 people for the district for our seven schools and it opened this year in September with about 20 or so substitutes on its list. I know of people that are applying to be substitutes that would like to step up to do this and they're hung up waiting on background checks. I know one recent college graduate who's waiting, at least I think it's now into this fourth week that he's waiting for his background check to get cleared and the school district office told me that they generally take between four to eight weeks to get the background checks processed. Is there some way that state agencies could help kind of speed this along to get the people who are qualified and willing to do this into the classrooms to help keep kids in the classrooms? And another suggestion, the second part of that, there was a good report on this on BPR yesterday after some discussion where educators are talking about how there could potentially be a way to share lists of substitutes so that maybe substitutes could be willing to work in more than one school district and they could share that information to try to make sure that they could keep classroom staff that keeps the school open. Lisa, I'm gonna see if Secretary French is on the line but from my perspective, yes, we can do more. In fact, we've talked about this over the last couple of months anticipating that if we had a rise in cases, we wanted to make sure because there's a ripple effect of rising cases and it means that there are going to be fewer people available for work. So we talked about this, maybe Secretary French can talk about it a little bit further. Yeah, thank you, thank you, Governor. Yeah, and the issue of the background check is an important bottleneck. We've worked on this all the time. Kevin, Commissioner Harris and I were working on a case in Franklin County, assisting a support tenant to get access to bigger clinics and so forth. Some of the delay does come from the federal end and the national sort of criminal information system and how quickly those checks can come back. But it is a bottleneck. On the other hand, we do have to ensure safety of our students. Your point about sharing stuff is a good one. Most districts do share their stuff with and rosters among the schools and their districts. A lot of times in my experience, those steps are only willing to work in certain circumstances or certain geographic locations. So it does become a little more challenging, but that's a good idea. One that will all pursue with superintendents of it. Okay, thank you. Julie, Local 22. Hi, can you hear me? You can. Thank you. I was also wondering about the specific teacher shortage. So Lisa, thank you for asking. My question, Dr. Levine, Dr. Fauci and me mentioned of going back to relative normality by April or July of 2021. I just wanted to know your opinion of that and if you agree, what are you seeing from your perspective, that kind of thing? Yeah, thank you for that question. My projections have always been summer to fall of 2021, going back to normal, assuming the vaccine trials continue the way they have been and the enthusiasm continues. Based on the fact that we could have two vaccines or at least one of the two actually distributed before this calendar year ends, I wouldn't mind moving the projection up to the spring, but I wouldn't want to hold that out to people and say, just get to the spring and you'll be fine and then turn out to disappoint them. So I'm not going to over promise that by any means, but I will say we do anticipate if the Pfizer vaccine continues to look as safe and efficacious as it's reported to be and it passes muster across numerous aspects of the scientific community, we could have perhaps 20,000 doses in the state before New Year's. Now 20,000 is not a lot when you look at the population of the state, but in terms of getting our highest priority groups, that would be phenomenal, if you will. So I just put that out there as one of the reasons why Dr. Fauci may perhaps feel more optimistic than he has until this point. Thank you. And the science behind prohibiting outdoor mass gatherings, and is that something you'll consider changing? Maybe just, can you elaborate on that a little bit more, Katie? We've gotten a lot of questions about why people can't necessarily, you know, what the science is and thinking what is behind not being allowed to meet outside or go for a walk with a friend, particularly if they're massed. I think we've been talking about that for the last two press conferences. The rate of the spread leads us to believe that we need to eliminate and prevent these mass gatherings because that's where the most spread is. People aren't masking up when they get together and we're seeing more spread. We've seen the evidence of that with our contact tracers. So I think that's everything. I mean, that's what we've been talking about. The state currently have at nursing homes and assisted living facilities. I'm not sure that we have that information here, Katie, but Secretary Smith might be able to get back to you, you know, offline if he'll give you a call. Okay, thank you. Joe, the Barton Chronicle. Good to know. I have a couple of questions from a town that I, readers, the first of them want an explanation or at least a clarification on rules concerning religious services. This person goes to a church that shares its services with another church. So this is their month. They will have about 30 people in a building with no singing and doors open and social distancing. And the reader wants to know what the support with the state's guidelines are present. Yeah, we haven't changed the religious services. That's stayed the same. So we haven't done anything different with the guidelines with religious services. So that should be all right then. As far as I know, yes. We'd be happy to provide those guidelines to you if you don't have them or if you can't find them on the ACCD website. I can find them, but thank you very much. A second question may not be for you, but it's from a person who says that the fact that EBT payments are not accepted by Instacart is making her life difficult because she can order groceries through Amazon at a higher price, but places, other supermarkets in her area don't offer curbside pickup using the EBT card. And is there any way of changing that or something the stores have to do? Let's, Secretary Smith, try and answer that. Thank you. Thanks, Joe. I'm not familiar with the answer to your question, but I will get an answer for you from DCF. So let me, when I go back to the office, I'll contact DCF and we'll get an answer for you. Thank you very much. Avery, WCAS? My question is about quarantining. Obviously we're gonna have some college students returning home, potentially college students out of date returning to Vermont, and as well as just other people that can be wondering, what exactly are the rules for quarantining? Does this mean even if you don't have symptoms, do you need to be in separate rooms? I was hoping Dr. Wiggy could just elaborate. Thanks for letting me elaborate because one thing we've tried to make very clear for many weeks now is the need for college students who are coming back home to Vermont to quarantine. The quarantine process itself, I will give you some of the details, but its very detailed description is on our website, healthvermont.gov, and there's a whole page to isolation and quarantine what it is and what it isn't. But quarantine for these students means coming to their home and having hopefully their own bedroom to themselves, preferably but not mandatory to have their own bathroom to their cells, and to basically not interact with the rest of their household during the quarantine period. That means clearly all of the usual rules about masking and six foot distancing, but not just coming home and celebrating Thanksgiving by having their usual seat at the family table. Meals would be at something that they would take separately apart from the other members of the household. Quarantine does not mean they can't leave the house ever, but leaving the house doesn't mean getting into the car and going to do errands, leaving the house means if there are woods behind the house, taking a walk in the woods, et cetera, being apart from other people but getting fresh air and being able to keep active in that way. So that's kind of a nutshell quarantine, and it does not, as everybody in Vermont should know, have to last 14 days. If the person does well for seven days, has no symptoms, feels fine, they should get a test on that day, and then if the test result comes back negative, they're out of quarantine. So it can be an abbreviated process. Do you feel like people aren't following the quarantine would potentially be a weakness and the containment of the virus? Oh, I think there's always that potential. And one thing we didn't mention when we were talking about the ice team outbreak and the ways those counties got to the condition there and now is we do believe there were some instances where quarantine was not abided by and people who had no idea they had virus because they felt fine were able to be the transmission person to other people. So obviously nothing is perfect as the governor has said on a number of times. We don't have a rigid enforcement that we track you with the minute you cross the border and take care of that. But we would hope certainly knowing that most students are coming back to be with their families for a prolonged period of time, that their families having listened to us many times understand the importance of this process to protect themselves and to protect their communities. I hate. Thank you, governor. There are reports New York officials take cell phone numbers from people going into quarantine and when that phone leads to quarantine home, home is made asking why they left the home. Here in Vermont, our contact tracers or police or other state employees using quarantine people's cell phones to track potential quarantine breaking. I don't believe so. We do have our Sarah alert, but we don't have the system you're describing. Thank you. Also, can you tell me or Secretary French how many homeschoolers we have in Vermont now? How many students are being homeschooled? Well, this is Secretary French where I'm still about 100% increased over the prior year. I believe we're up to about 4,000 at this point. Thank you. Lola, BT digger. Lola, BT digger. All right, we'll go to Colin at seven days. Hi, thanks. Can you hear me? Yeah, go ahead, Colin. Okay. Dr. Barry, this is about the question of endemic fatigue and how exactly you all as the officials know about batting that and you've been raised a few other times. Already today, I think you've been pretty clear by now that enforcement posture would be a worst case scenario. If frankly I imagine it would be quite difficult to believe 11 people are having neighbors over for coffee or horses or beers or things that you said last week, do you feel to a degree that this is out of your hands at this point that beyond these public pleas, there's no restrictions if you really put in place to crack down on the behavior and that you really just need to do everything you can to tell people that this is in there. The state state is essentially in their hands? Yeah, you know, I've said that a lot. I mean, this is from the very beginning, I think we talked about what it would take to prevent the spread. And I said, this is literally in your hands. Well, it's still the case today. This is literally in your hands. We can give guidance. We can give support. We can provide more testing. We can provide more contact tracing. We can provide more grants. We can put all the protective measures in place to protect the most vulnerable. But we can't really in some respects change your behavior unless you want to be, unless you want to help. And that's what we continue to try and do. I think the point was made earlier, maybe a different approach, maybe more people need to communicate to their peers and others be a role model right now, try and do whatever you can to help one another because this is, you know, we're not far off from getting to the end of this, but we could lose some lives along the way. And I'm sure each and every one of us doesn't want it to be one of our family members and or our friends or our neighbors. When I don't know how, you know, each and every one of us would react to that if we were the cause of that death in some remote or some direct way. So think about that when you're not masking up if you can mask up. And I know there's some people who can't mask. I mean, they have some help reasons why they can't and we have to be sensitive to that. But for those who can, please do. And if you can avoid interacting with one another, please do just do the right thing. And we'll get through this a lot and save for it a lot quicker than going the other direction so that we can keep the economy going so we can keep kids in school and we can go back to somewhat normal until the vaccine arrives to save the day. Great, and I just really could follow up. Thank you. I don't mean to put you on the couch here, but you've really been widely praised how you've handled this. I think a lot of people think you've taken the right steps at the right time. Do you feel at all that there's homelessness when you're more exposed than at any other time given what we just talked about that, that you're really putting calls out into the void and helping that people listen? No, I don't feel hopeless at all. I feel confident we can get through this because I believe in Vermont and I believe in Vermonters, I believe in my team. We've all done so much, again, the entire state. It's not, the vast majority of people are doing the right thing, so that gives me hope. And I'm confident we can get through this, so I don't feel helpless whatsoever. I get frustrated and I get angry at the virus, but I don't feel helpless at all. Lola on? Okay, we're gonna move now to Steve at N-E-K-T-V. Can you hear me? Go ahead, Lola. Oh, Lola. Can you hold Steve? Sorry, Lola's on now. Thank you, I appreciate you guys coming back to me. Just really quickly, do we have any evidence of school-based transmission after the union cases or all of the new cases that we've seen still, you know, cases of virus coming into schools? Dr. Lee? From the community. Yeah, Lola, I am not aware of any evidence of school-based transmission since those events that you described. Okay, great. And a quick question about the surveillance testing, which is underway right now in K-12 schools. At what point do you think you'll start reporting that data? And will that data kind of be reported through the mechanisms that we already have for school data and community-wide data? Or will there be some sort of separate report of here's what this massive surveillance testing effort is telling us? Yeah, so so far, obviously any positive case in a staff member or a teacher at a school would automatically get posted twice a week to our school website that we maintain to report those. We haven't yet talked about any greater overall report, but I can tell you that I think that would be useful, you know, in terms of an aggregate report, probably not something we'd wanna come out with every three days, but something to assess our experience at some point in the future. Can't be precise, because we haven't really discussed that as a team yet. Let's talk to me, thanks. We can, thank you, Steve. We could hear you. Now we can. Oh, can you hear me? We can now. Can you hear me now, please? Yes. Thanks, a quick one for the governor and the doctor, if I may. The governor, I've been working at charts for the past couple of days through different websites like covidtracking.com and Rational Ground. And it shows that there's virtually no correlation between shutdowns and mass mandates and the rise in cases. It seems to me that the rise in cases is due to the rise in testing. And I mean, we can do these precautions, but it doesn't seem like that there's any correlation between the lockdowns, the mass mandates and the exponential rise in cases in different countries and in different states. I would fundamentally disagree with you. I believe there's a direct correlation to a mass mandate and lower case counts. I think what the problem is, is that not everyone's doing the same thing throughout our country. And we're so mobile, both in this state and throughout the country. And if you have, let's say North Dakota, South Dakota, even New Hampshire doesn't have a mass mandate, we have border crossings every day from a number of folks from New Hampshire and they don't have a mass mandate. And they've done things differently in terms of closing down or not closing down some of their businesses and so forth. They've just taken a different strategy than we are. And you should know that, Steve, because we're seeing an outbreak up in the Northeast Kingdom. And I believe it's because of the infiltration of those from New Hampshire that became red in their county before it came into Vermont. So it leads me to believe that that's where we're seeing the transmission. So I just fundamentally disagree with you. Well, anecdotally too, we're seeing a lot of out-of-state place from as far away as Texas and stuff. That more so than I've been seeing to me after place. But anyways, the charts don't seem to bear this out. Maybe you could double-check. I'm not gonna double-check. I just don't agree with you. Doc, you get the next question. Dr. Levine, on the PCR method, I had a question from a viewer about the cycles on the PCR machines. The FDA recommends 40 cycles, but some people claim, or some groups claim that 30 cycles would be more accurate. Would us using out-of-state labs for testing, are they all using the same number of cycles or do different labs do different PCR cycles? That's a very good question. They do each platform. So let's now look at the lab, lab quest, lab core quest, our public health lab, UVM's lab. It's really the platform that lab uses to do their testing. And each platform that received emergency use authorization from the FDA does report slightly different, what are called cycle threshold CT values. Some can be in the 40 range. The majority are generally in the 30s, but there's going to be variation from platform to platform. Just so the viewers and listeners understand the reason cycle threshold is important is they're lower the cycle threshold, that means the more rapidly the assay will detect the virus. And some people use that as a surrogate for saying that was a more infectious sample. There was more viral load, person could get sicker from it, versus a high cycle threshold that might not be true. So there's controversy about this to be honest. And where should it exactly be set? It should there be more of a consensus across all of the platforms. But the way they've all gotten authorized is through this process that it's been very consistent. So this is the situation we find ourselves in. Have we done any retesting to double check that we're not getting false positives? Yeah, so the issue wouldn't be as much false positives as it would be. Is the platform detecting fragments of virus that actually are left over from an infection don't have any capacity to really actively cause disease in a person? And that's where it becomes more challenging. Just like if I tested you today and you were sick and you were positive and then I tested you in two weeks when you were feeling completely well again, but you were still positive on the test. Well, what does that mean? It means your body is dealt with the infection, but the virus is still in you even if it's not in a viable form. And then it becomes particularly confusing. If three months down the road, I tested you again and you felt well all along and you still have the virus detected. Probably doesn't mean you're still capable of infecting yourself or someone else. It just means there's evidence that you had the infection. So these are the things all of the laboratory field is dealing with right now and none of them are totally resolved, but we are learning as we do every day more and more about how to manage the virus and the pandemic. Thank you. Our final questioner, Malia, from the Burlington Free Press. Hi, can you hear me? We can. I'm Dr. Labine, I'll try to speak short, but towards the beginning of the call you've characterized some of the behaviors that were exhibited in those 71% cases where social gathering was happening. And I just wanted to see if you could further characterize what these things look like in general in terms of gathering sizes that they tended to be indoors and outdoors or just anything else that can kind of give us a sense of what those look like and sort of what happened in the last month and a half or so. Yeah, I think I'll let Dr. Labine answer or sum it up, but primarily indoors, all sizes. We had, I believe there were some Halloween parties that had maybe 50 people or so. And so it was just full range, but primarily indoors versus outdoors, I believe. Dr. Labine? Yes, a variety of sizes of parties. And remember if you were like us who chose to move our table of goodies to the end of our driveway and stand outside for two and a half hours, Halloween was not a warm night. So even people who had planned on an outdoor gathering, which admittedly they may have thought was safer, we're not going to do that because it was quite cold that night. But I want to emphasize not to take the blame off of Halloween, but we have well-documented dinner parties, baby showers. People in the high single numbers at a deer camp. The story goes on and on. Opportunities for people to gather together from different households in very modest-sized circumstances. And I would say that a modest-sized circumstance can be a Thanksgiving dining room table with six people at it, three couples from different places. That's all it would take. It's very, very well-documented. Great, thank you so much. Well, that's it. We'll be setting the record once again for the length of the press conference. But again, thank you very much for tuning in, hanging in there, and we'll see you on Friday.