 As I'm sure many of you are aware, yesterday we had our highest number of cases since the beginning of the pandemic. And while some of these cases should have been reported as far back as November 21st, it's clear the virus is widespread and very active right now. So first of all, unfortunately this means that our data does not support the return to school or recreational sports at this time. But we'll continue to evaluate this each week. Dr. Levine will also offer more on what we believe is driving this uptick, as well as an update on the outbreaks in our long-term care facilities. But the bottom line is, we've got to pay attention to what's happening right before our eyes. So I'm once again urging Vermonters to follow our health guidance. It's the most practical and impactful thing anyone can do right now. So we can get a handle on this virus and keep it out of our nursing homes and away from the most vulnerable. Because as we're seeing, more and more of our friends and family members are being impacted, with too many finding themselves in the hospital battling this virus, and even worse, dying as a result. As a reminder, this means we all need to wear a mask, wash our hands a lot, and don't travel unless we really need to. And if you do, plan to quarantine when you get back. And also, what is probably the most difficult, but maybe the most important, is stop social gatherings with other households until we can slow down this widespread community transmission. Vermonters, all of you, have proven to be the best in the country in following the guidance of managing this virus. So I'm asking you to please come together for what we hope will be a final push and get us through this latest surge. The vaccine is right around the corner, but until it's here and in our hands and can be distributed to the frontline workers, the most vulnerable, and a big percentage of the population, the threat of the virus taking over is very real. And while we've done better than any other state, we're not invincible. As outbreaks in our long-term care facilities continues, and case counts continue to rise, we continue to ramp up our surveillance testing, as well as contact tracing. Secretary Smith will provide more details in a moment. But let me just say, we hope these are precautionary steps and won't be needed, because contact tracing, 300 cases every day, will have serious ripple effects for the people of Vermont, our healthcare system, our schools, and our economy. Finally, I want to circle back to a question that was asked last Friday by Chris Roy of the Newport Daily Express about the toll this virus has had on our mental health. I know this has been among the most stressful events most of us have had to deal with, at least in my lifetime, and I see it each and every day. And it's much different than other crises we've experienced as a state. This isn't a 24-hour storm. It's been so prolonged, and we don't know when it will end. This forces us to be physically and emotionally separated from the people closest to us, those we typically rely on during challenging times. So if you're feeling COVID fatigue, the loss of not being able to get together with others, or the anxiety and pressure of losing your job or having financial problems, you're not alone. These are reasonable, normal responses to a very abnormal event. One thing we can all do is reach out to our loved ones on the phone or video or even just an email or text. But it's more important than ever to make that extra effort to stay connected. Because even if you're not feeling some of these things, the person on the other end might be. And checking in and go a long way. I also want you to know there are resources available. If you or a loved one are struggling with mental health, or substance misuse, or anything else, you should reach out. There is no shame in seeking help, no matter how serious or insignificant you think the issue might be. Vermont ranks first in the country when it comes to access to mental health care. That's because we have a dedicated community of mental health providers and physicians across the state ready to help. And if you don't know who your local community provider is, or don't have a primary care doc, you can call 211. Or we have people ready to help you and refer you to services. This is an incredibly uncertain time, and it's okay to admit it's taking a toll on you. It'd be strange if it wasn't. But please know, help is there if you need it. So with that, I'll turn it over to Commissioner Squirrel, who will now add some flavor to this. Thank you, Governor. Good morning, everyone. As the Governor noted, Vermont achieved the number one overall ranking for mental health access in the nation. This is something we should all be proud of. And like the Governor, I want to acknowledge the incredible work and dedication of our community mental health agencies and health care partners. But most importantly, I want to take a moment to thank our direct care mental health workers, who are truly the backbone of our mental health system and work courageously every day, providing care to our most vulnerable Vermonters. Now more than ever as the pandemic stretches on, it's important to focus our attention on our mental health and wellness and to be checking on those that we care about. The perseverance and commitment of Vermonters during COVID-19 has not been without significant disruption, sacrifice and strain on our daily lives. Our routines have changed. We're juggling childcare and working. We're stressed in isolation and we're worried about the future. And some of us have lost loved ones. We're all working hard and doing our best to continue to rise to meet the challenges and to keep each other safe. As Vermonters, we take pride in our strength and resilience, but the uncertainty and ambiguity that we are all facing makes it harder. Many of us are feeling additional stress and anxiety, sadness and depression, and many of us may be experiencing these feelings for the first time. What I can say, as the Governor noted, is that these are all normal feelings and reactions given the circumstances that we're under. None of us are immune from the impacts of COVID and our overall wellness and well-being. We are all struggling in one way or another. And additionally, we know that the pandemic may be especially challenging for those who are already experiencing mental health challenges, who identify as psychiatric survivors, LGBTQ youth, minority populations, our frontline workers, first responders and older Vermonters. It is also important to remember that mental health issues co-occur with substance use and developmental disabilities, and these are particularly vulnerable individuals. My message to Vermonters today is that you are not alone. It's okay to not feel okay right now. There are many valid reasons to be worried, overwhelmed, anxious and exhausted. And if these feelings are beginning to impact you, seeking help can be very supportive. But I know that's not always easy. Unfortunately, there is still stigma around mental health. Many of us who would benefit from mental health services and supports and treatment simply don't access it because of fear of judgment and labeling. We need to break down the barriers of stigma. We need to talk about our mental health. I urge you, do not be afraid to talk about it and don't be afraid to ask for help. We have a broad range of services and supports that are free and confidential and available to Vermonters on a daily basis. One of them is COVID support Vermont. To help with the extraordinary impacts of the pandemic, the Department of Mental Health and Vermont Care Partners have launched COVID support Vermont to help people cope with the pandemic. All the supports are confidential and free. They provide emotional support, a listening ear and connection to community resources. Anyone can find this information and access the support simply by calling 2-1-1. There are specially trained counselors who are ready to take your call. To date, these counselors have responded to over 744 phone calls. You can also visit covidsupportvt.org to find information, wellness groups, tips and advice, and also information about our 10 community mental health agencies across the state who provide mental health services and many are offering those services through telehealth. I also want to talk about suicide. While Vermont data continues to show a lower number of suicide in 2020 than the average of previous years, we know that Vermonters are struggling. The main message is that suicide is preventable. Research shows that interventions make a difference. Addressing mental health issues, accessing therapy and crisis lines are critical. To control the virus, it's all about testing and tracing. And for mental health and suicide prevention, it's all about outreach and screening. Remember that asking someone if they are thinking about suicide does not put the idea in their head. Instead, asking questions actually opens up the door for a caring conversation about how someone might be hurting and about how you can help. If you know someone or you are in need of support, you can also access the crisis text line by texting the letters VT to 741-741. You can get immediate counseling and support via text message. And if you or someone you care about is struggling with thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. And for our veterans, simply press 1 to access the Veterans Prevention Lifeline. We also know that as people experience stress, depression and anxiety, they may use alcohol and drugs more. The Vermont Department of Health has established Vermont HealthLink, a free and confidential referral service available to connect people to resources and substance use treatment. You can access Vermont HealthLink.org or call 802-565-Link. The data does show an increase in opioid-related vitalities compared to last year. With the isolation due to COVID, people may be using a loan. People who use a loan are at higher risk of dying from an overdose. People in recovery may also be at a higher risk. If you know someone in recovery, please reach out to them to see how they are doing during this very stressful and isolating time. Vermont HealthLink has resources for you and many of the recovery centers are able to provide virtual support. And please avoid using a loan if possible. If you are alone, connect to a trusted person by phone or text or call Never Use Alone at 1-800-484-3731. The governor noted pandemic fatigue. We're all feeling it. As a runner, I feel like I'm running a race and every ten yards they move the finish line. The acute crisis has been replaced with chronic fatigue. We're tired of dealing with uncertainties without seeing an end in sight. And we're tired of Zoom calls with our families. Which is why, just like protecting our physical health right now, we should also be vigilant in taking care of and monitoring our mental health as we continue to manage the pandemic and move into the winter months. I urge Vermonters to make a wellness plan for your mental health and to watch out for one another. Social connection is key. Think about social connection and physical distance, not social distance. Sometimes a good old-fashioned phone call is just the right antidote. And we can always use text messaging and online video calls. It's important to create routines. We're all missing our daily routines and rituals. We need to exercise, get outside, eat healthy, and get enough sleep. If you have children, talk with them. Like you, their parents and caregivers, children may be fearful or simply missing their routines. Ask them about their concerns. Their answers will guide how you talk with them. And if as a parent, you're worried about your children's mental health, reach out to your pediatrician or local school. There are many school-based mental health services and supports available. And for any youth or young people who are listening today, let your parents and caregivers know how you're feeling. They want to help you and they can better help you if they know what you're experiencing. If you feel like it might help to talk to someone, just say so. And we need to continue to address mental health needs. Depression is very common and very treatable. Know the common signs of depression, anger and irritability, loss of energy, loss of interest in daily activities. Look for the warning signs and seek help. Reach out to support, helping others makes us feel better. And engage in your communities in a way that is possible and safe. Helping others helps counter stress. I've mentioned a few of the many resources that are available to Vermonters. These are free and confidential. Calling Vermont 211 to get connected to COVID Support BT, the Crisis Text Line, the National Prevention Lifeline, and Vermont HealthLink. Vermont HealthLink also has particular services and supports for healthcare professionals and frontline workers. And for those who identify as LGBTQ, call the Trevor Lifeline at 1-866-488-7368. Or the Vermont Peer Support Line, which is open 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. 1-833-888-2557. You can always contact your primary care provider, talk to a family member, a friend, a faith leader, a teacher, or a coach. And finally, if there is one thing that COVID has taught us, it's the importance of community and connection. The ability as us as individuals, families, and communities to be resilient, to continue to thrive in the face of adversity is now more important than ever. And as we stand together as Vermonters, with the finish line in sight, but still challenges ahead, we all need to take the time to ask ourselves, what am I doing to take care of my own mental health and wellness? How can I support my family, friends, and neighbors? And what will people say in the future about what we did today as Vermonters to take care of one another? Thank you. Thanks, Commissioner Squirrel. I just want to take a brief moment today and follow up on more details to things that I outlined last week in the area of testing and in the area of contact tracing. Today, there is scheduled a health alert going out to all Vermont health care providers and health care facilities. In addition, Dale will be sending out letters to long-term care facilities. And the Abbott Manufacturing Company will be sending out emails to all long-term care facilities regarding training of their BINECs now cards as we move forward into a different phase of surveillance. In this health alert, a new surveillance testing strategy will be outlined for long-term care facilities. The following goes into effect on Monday. For assisted living and residential care facilities, we are implementing a twice-weekly testing regiment for all staff using a PCR test. We will also make available angiogen tests so that the facility can use them upon identification of symptomatic residents or staff. In addition, we are making available BINECs now cards. Those are rapid angiogen tests to test staff daily at all skilled nursing facilities. In addition, to daily angiogen testing, we will implement once-weekly PCR testing for all staff. In addition, we are recommending using angiogen tests immediately upon identification for a symptomatic patient or staff person. For now, the BINECs cards, the distribution is scheduled for early next week. And as I said, all these communications will be going out to long-term care facilities today. I did want to update you on contact tracing as we discussed on Tuesday. Contact tracing is a critical tool to mitigating and containing the spread of COVID-19. We've worked hard to ensure that we're prepared to meet the rising cases across Vermont. And as we see case counts continue to increase across the country and the state, we're bringing on more staff to assist in this effort. We are on track to have approximately 100 FTEs by December 7th. Additionally, and I just want to speak a little bit about this, we're looking at opportunity to expand our call center and implementing a text notification to reach Vermonters with initial information so that they can have a text to Vermonters alerting them the fact they've been identified as a close contact and will help get the word out to impacted individuals as quickly as possible. This is not equivalent to our current contact tracing efforts, but it is a first step in reaching out to individuals to alert them of possible exposure. We hope to have that system in place next week, probably around midweek. So I wanted to give an update on both of these situations, both in terms of testing of long-term care. And Dr. Levine in a minute will tell, will give you the reasons why we're really focusing on long-term care. As you know, we've had several outbreaks in long-term care facilities and we think that more testing, more surveillance testing is necessary at this time. I'll turn it over to Secretary Frank. Good morning. This week, we're implementing the second phase of our COVID-19 surveillance testing for all school staff. Each week through December, we'll be testing approximately 25% of our schools each week through the end of the month. So we'll, by the end of December, have tested all our schools again. Each week, we're doing this. It'll contain a geographic sample of the schools statewide. This week, we're testing Harwood, Franklin, Northeast, LaMoyle, North, LaMoyle, South, Washington, Central, North Country, Kingdom East, Essex North, Baton Hill Valley, Bennington, Rutland, Southwest Vermont, River Valley Technical Center, Springfield and Windsor Central. We expect to test about 40 to 50% of all staff again in this round of testing. We have had some questions about why the testing rate is not higher. Both Dr. Levine and I have commented that we were very pleased with the uptake in the testing, considering the rapidity in which we've deployed it. But we've had some conversations with school administrators about this and there seems to be a variety of reasons for why the rate is not higher. Some staff did not feel that they need to be tested. Others were concerned about the privacy of their health data. Others found the testing locations not necessarily to be convenient, the registration process too challenging, or just the communications not clear enough. The biggest area of concern has been the registration process. Some staff have had difficulty using the website, passwords changing, thinking they had registered but ended up not being registered and so forth. So we've added additional IT support to this phase of the testing and we'll continue to adjust our procedures and communications to ensure that any school staff that desire to be tested can be tested. We have received a lot of feedback from school administrators regarding the implementation of our guidance on multi household social gatherings. As we typically do, we're now pulling together that feedback and we'll be publishing frequently asked question documents or FAQ documents to clarify some of those aspects. Thought I'd give you an example of one of the more common questions we've received pertains to what extent groups are allowed for education and childcare outside of school. Our response has been that we permit the gathering through what we call pre-established pods as long as they're related to education and childcare. Pods related to social activity and informal play groups are not allowed at this time and we're discouraging the creation of new pods. We're also working with schools to communicate that this approach towards social gatherings is not just about Thanksgiving. It likely will remain a concern throughout the holiday period. That could change of course if conditions change but we want schools to be prepared to implement this approach through the remaining holiday period. The availability of substitutes continues to be an issue in our schools. We formed a task force to take a look at this. That task force has members from the school board association, superintendent association, principals association, human resource professionals association as well as representatives from various agencies inside of state government. The task force met for the first time yesterday and we had preliminary conversation about possible causes of the substitute shortage and to start identifying possible solutions with a focus on what the state could do to help more. My observation previously I think is still holding up that there's no easy solution to this issue. The issues relating to labor shortages existed prior to the COVID emergency and certainly have been exacerbated because of it. But there might not be easy solutions but we're very interested in identifying creative ones so we'll be following up internally in our state government team to sort of identify those options and come forward with some recommendations. On a similar note we've had many school board members sign up to be substitute teachers. School board members are prohibited by the law to be regular employees of school districts but there's a waiver process where they can be employees. Today we've approved 29 waivers for school board members to be substitute teachers. We really appreciate school board members stepping up at this moment in need and really want to thank them for their service. And I put the larger message out to the member, the public, if you're interested in being a substitute teacher I know your school district is really welcome to your service at this moment. You should stop by your supervisor union or contact your school for more information. The schools are usually very accommodating in terms of what subjects you could substitute in or what schools. So I would encourage every firm honor if you have some time and interest to help your schools out by stepping up to do that. Looking ahead this period of school operations through new years will require schools to focus on a safe operations on a daily basis due to the elevated case counts in the region and now in Vermont. After the holiday period and with the implementation of vaccines we'll begin to put additional focus on addressing the impact of this emergency on students and their families. The emergent national picture is indicating the students are feeling isolated and at a greater mental health risk on top of the already rising anxiety and mental health issues that existed prior to the COVID emergency. It will be important for schools to be working as part of their school district systems in order to address these issues, particularly as we begin to deploy additional state resources to support them in this work. A good analogy to understand how this might play out is our approach to setting up the surveillance testing. For testing we asked districts to identify a single point of contact and we required a single point of delivery of the test kits. Districts then had some flexibility to further deploy the testing at the local school level based on an understanding of their needs and their specific logistical considerations. We will likely need to use a similar approach in organizing our education response and addressing the needs of students. We have existing structures and systems that schools can use such as educational support teams, but we will be looking for greater emphasis on these systems at the district level instead of the school level and then support districts of working with their schools. We are starting to see symptoms for our need to begin working more urgently on student support structures. These symptoms include truancy, attendance and student engagement concerns. With remote and hybrid learning, truancy and the broader issues of student engagement have become more significant and our pre-COVID systems are not necessarily the right tools since truancy in this context is no doubt the tip of the iceberg in terms of the larger societal and economic pressures that many families are feeling right now. We will also need to attend to the needs of teachers and other school staff who are experiencing significant fatigue at this point. We will need to identify strategies to support them in their work and dedicate adequate planning time for the schools to prepare for the next phase of our response. The next phase of our response will be more complex than normal school operations with a greater emphasis on supporting schools and looking broadly at the needs of students and staff. We will be coordinating with other state agencies and departments to support them in this work. We are starting the planning for this work now, but we expect to engage more directly with districts after the first of the year. That concludes my update. I'll now turn it over to Dr. Levine. Thank you, Secretary French. Good morning. Our website today shows 4,763 total cases since the start of the pandemic and 77 deaths, which I'll comment on a little later. As you already know, yesterday we reported a single day record high of 178 cases of COVID-19 in Vermont. Because of further additions from UVM Medical Center and other faxed reports that were reported late in the day yesterday that were backdated to December 2, this number has now increased to 224 cases. There are a total of 36 cases from UVM Medical Center in that number. Today we are reporting 73 cases. These include six more cases from a delay in reporting from UVM Medical Center. All cases stemming from the reporting delay are now included in our total case count. That would be 42 cases from UVM. The additional UVM cases are shown in gray, and the updated total cases are of course in blue. New addition to this slide is the number in our new category of probable cases, which are very tiny in the gold at the bottom. I think you'll notice that there is a fair amount of volatility or liability in our case counts. At yesterday's press briefing regarding our experience, I did note that one day did not make a trend. I will repeat that again today as we've now had a change in the counts, and one day does not make a trend either. At the same time, when thinking about where these cases come from, we continue to have some of the similar concerns that I voiced yesterday regarding the fact that it is winter, people are congregating more together indoors and indoor settings. I'll speak about Thanksgiving in a second. You'll notice that our 7-day average percent positivity rate has crept up in the twos now. It had been for so long, much lower than that, although on December 1st it was 1.6%. And as we get towards these couple days that I've just elapsed, that number should go down a small amount based on the number of tests and the number of positives. Keep in mind that we can't give you the up to the date percent positivity because we need to have all of the test data in and recorded comprehensively. I bring this slide up today with more importance because we are entering flu season. While we did have an uptake in COVID-like symptoms earlier on, that seems to have settled down a little bit more recently. We now have the CDC providing weekly assessments of flu symptoms in states. And we are now at the level that is regarded as sporadic. Sporadic is just what it says. We may have an occasional case here or there. It's not in every region of the state. It's certainly not widespread throughout the state. And that's pretty much how it's appearing in the rest of the country as well. So at the present time, we don't have to have undue concerns about influenza further complicating our situation with COVID-19. But obviously that's why we've been so front and center about urging vaccination early and making sure that we can do everything we can to prevent that. Now people would like me to comment about Thanksgiving. And as I said at the press briefing yesterday, Thanksgiving was but a little over a week ago. And if you look at it as a holiday weekend, it's even a shorter time ago. We generally would start the clock ticking about seven days after Thanksgiving to see some impact. But clearly the 10 to 14 day range would be equally if not more important. And we're not quite there yet in our timeframe. And as I said, one day does not make a trend. Yesterday may have made people be very concerned that Thanksgiving's impact was hitting. The most recent number I gave you of 73 would make you less concerned about that. Clearly what we have learned so far is that there is not a major impact of holiday Thanksgiving gatherings in our current interviews of cases and contact tracing. But we're sort of on that threshold. So I caution everyone to to be patient. Hopefully not be patient looking for the worst though, be patient just waiting for the data because we have lots of reasons to believe Vermonters were very compliant with the executive order. Earlier this morning, we recognized 29 hospitalizations, seven suspected COVID hospitalizations, three patients in the ICU, and no patients on a ventilator. A number of the cases I've just reported were in long term care facilities. And as we promised, we're not going to present this data twice weekly at each of our press conferences. There are the eight facilities that have had the major outbreaks in the state. The majority of them are what we would call skilled nursing facilities. Some are lesser acute levels of care. And as you can see, the numbers are quite heterogeneous, but some of them are quite large. I'll also note, as the first slide noted, that there were two deaths yesterday and both of those deaths were in a skilled nursing facility. Our efforts to stem this tide are ongoing and threefold. First and foremost is to decrease the prevalence of virus in our communities, which of course is the reason for our continued emphasis on restricting travel, on making sure that if there was travel that a quarantine period follows that, and of course focusing on restricting multi household gatherings. Second part of the strategy is the promise of a vaccination strategy, which is literally weeks away. We were heartened to see that both the advisory council on immunization practices and the CDC yesterday published a consensus on the makeup of what priority group 1A should look like. And that of course includes health care workers and residents and staff of long term care facilities. Those are actually in complete alignment with the decisions of our own advisory panel and our priorities in Vermont, supported by the data like you just saw on the last slide. And finally, as Secretary Smith discussed, an even more aggressive posture with regards to testing in our long term care facilities to identify cases as early as possible and mitigate the impact of COVID-19 in these settings. As you heard, but just to repeat, for lower acuity assisted living and residential care facilities, twice weekly testing using PCR, antigen testing available for identification of a symptomatic resident or staff person. These recommendations are completely aligned with everything we've been saying about PCR and antigen testing all along. For the higher acuity skilled nursing facilities, daily antigen testing for the staff. In addition, having that available to make sure that if someone becomes symptomatic, an antigen test can be performed quickly because it's likely to be a true positive if it comes back positive in that setting. And then finally, in addition to antigen testing on a daily basis, once weekly PCR testing for all staff, if antigen testing is not available, twice weekly PCR testing for all staff. So you've heard from many times that we expect numbers to increase, and yet I know it can still be jarring to see the kind of spike in cases we had yesterday. Many of us may be experiencing similar feelings right now, knowing the impact of being indoors more where the virus has more chance to spread easily. But hoping our efforts to avoid social gatherings and travel will help bring this spread down, or even to a halt. As with Thanksgiving, the CDC is now asking Americans to avoid travel with the upcoming holidays. As cases, hospitalizations, and unfortunately deaths all continue to increase throughout the country. Quite rapidly actually, to the point where yesterday CDC director Robert Redfield stated in his strongest language to date, we're heading into the most difficult time in all of public health history in the nation. So while we look forward to flattening the curve in Vermont, Vermonters should take our current guidance and the CDC's advisory into account as they look ahead to the holidays. Staying home within our own households is the best way to protect ourselves, our families and our communities right now. Having said that, though, I want to add to Commissioner Squirrel's comments, the effects of this pandemic are truly waiting on us all, hitting us at different times in different ways. We may be overwhelmed by the news, constantly having to consider the risk of every aspect of our lives, wondering if that headache or that cold is something we need to worry about. I see the stress in my own staff who are working so hard and care so much about protecting Vermonters that it feels nearly impossible to stop sometimes, take a break and take care of themselves. And I know they are not alone. From health care workers to grocery store employees to teachers, so many Vermonters have their own version of this. Then, of course, there are the economic stresses. And I would like to focus on something we haven't talked about this morning, food. Many Vermonters are at risk for food insecurity, struggling to find help feeding their families. Luckily, Vermont has resources available, including the Women's Infants and Children's Program, WIC, Three Squares Vermont, SNAP, and more. More programs, such as Farmers to Families and Everyone Eats, are helping to fill the gap. All these programs can help keep healthy food on the table. Healthy eating is important for all of us, especially during times of stress. So I encourage anyone who needs support to contact the Health Department, Hunger Free Vermont, or Vermont 211 for more information about some of the programs I've mentioned. Acknowledging that we are not alone in any of these struggles and that it's okay to not be okay right now is so important. And finally, Commissioner Squirrel talked about the need that's critical to overcome stigma around mental health. I also want to highlight stigma related to COVID-19. I've spoken a bit about this before, but as more and more Vermonters are getting COVID-19 or are exposed to the virus, we all need to make clear they will not be judged or blamed. Normal facilities, schools, or businesses that may be associated with a case by no fault of their own. We cannot let fear, gossip, and negative attitudes harm our efforts to stop this virus from spreading. Stigma can lead to people actually hiding their symptoms or their illness and keeping them from seeking appropriate healthcare immediately. It can also lead to people not being coming forthcoming or fully honest with family, friends, or of course our contact tracing workforce. So I want to reiterate, it is essential for Vermonters to follow our guidance to slow down the current surge. But if you do attend a social gathering, or if you travel, we are not here to judge. What we care about is making sure we can stop the spread. That means helping us identify close contacts, notify them quickly, and make sure they get tested. If we fail to do these things, it will only allow the virus to spread more silently through our communities. Thank you again for your help. I cannot say enough that we are all truly in this together. Governor? Thank you Dr. Levine. We'll now open it up to questions. Just a reminder for everyone, we have 25 people in the queue. It's 150 out, so please be concise. Christina Gessford, WCAS. We're talking a lot about mental health today, but we're wondering, are there really enough providers to meet this huge demand? And if people do take you guys up on your advice, we've heard from counselors that they're booked. We've heard from people trying to get counselors that they're having a kidney for kids. Are there really enough providers? We've heard pediatricians that are saying they're having a hard time requiring their kids to providers. And we've heard that very recently as well. Are you guys, do you have some kind of resources available to increase staffing or make these resources more available? Yeah, we're always concerned about having enough people to help. This was pre-pandemic. But we've taken steps to implement, put people into place that we believe can help in different ways, whether it's telehealth or whether it's with 211 calling to that venue. Commissioner Squirrel, do you want to add to that? That's a great question. Thank you. I think one of the opportunities within COVID that is presented to us is that we have really pushed ourselves into telemedicine quickly. So one of the advantages is that we have been able to expand mental health supports because we have more telehealth services available and clinicians can work from home and provide those services more readily. The other initial information that we have which is very interesting and I think will bode well for the future of mental health support in Vermont is that telehealth is actually preferred for many individuals. So we actually have individuals who might have been more reluctant to receive services before that are now coming forward. When we chatted with our 10 community mental health agencies across the state, over 40% of those people served have requested telemedicine. I would also say to the good question that, yes, demand has increased. We do have a workforce that is fatigued. But I would say that our community mental health agencies, our private providers are really rising to the occasion. We've also been fortunate to have several federal grants coming into the state of Vermont that we've been able to leverage additional services and support for Vermonters. Yes, it's a mix of both. So we've been able to utilize grant funds to actually bring more clinicians to provide support. That's evidenced in COVID support for Vermont. We've also actually utilized our grant funds to do more mobile response. We had a SAMHSA grant where we provided services and supports to Vermonters more readily in a mobile outreach capacity, which has also been successful. Thank you. Governor, and this is probably for Commissioner Harrington, but as we're getting closer to the end of the month here and our unemployment response, where are we now as far as some of those cases that have needed to be adjudicated and, you know, trying to get that stuff taken care of before we get going? And before I refer to Commissioner Harrington, I'll reiterate I'm very concerned about the number of those who are on utilizing unemployment assistance over the state of Vermont are in jeopardy because of a lack of federal action. It's encouraging to hear that they're trying to come together as we speak, and hopefully they'll clarify that so that we can continue to offer this assistance that is much needed here in Vermont and in other states across the country as well. Commissioner Harrington, can you comment on the other appeal processes? Sure. Thank you, Governor. I share the Governor's concern about the end of the month federal program. That being said, individuals who are either going through the appeals process or the adjudication process should not be concerned in terms of losing benefits as the way the system is set up is based on the weeks you are unemployed and the week you are filing for. So while these programs end as of the week ending December 26, if you were filing for a week prior to December 26, we're still able to make someone eligible for those weeks and issue payments for those weeks. So just because somebody's going through an adjudication or an appeal does not mean that they will lose out on benefits as long as they're determined eligible for weeks that occur prior to the end of the program. And one final question. Santa's trying to get out there and find out what's going on with the kids and what the wishes are and everything. Do you have any guidelines for Santa and how he should go about getting his job done? Yeah, I think just adhering to the guidance that we put into place would be effective just making sure that everyone's safe and socially, physically distance is going to be important. But we, again, this is going to be a normal year, not the typical holiday season. And we just want everybody to be careful, be safe, and be aware of how this can affect us individually and collectively and how we have an impact on that. So just trying to get everybody to be safe. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Anything you want to add to that? We're going to have some more stuff on the website this week. Okay, yeah, we'll be talking about the holiday season in particular next week. And as we receive some of the data as a result of Thanksgiving holiday, so that will impact what we do in the future. But for right now, just everyone just adhering to the simple basic guidelines that we put into place will be extremely helpful. So very much like the doctors with telehealth, maybe we should be doing tell us, tell us Santa. I don't know. Yeah, I think they've been doing tell us Santa for quite a while now. So very good. Thank you. All right, we're going to move to the phone now Andrew McEever. I believe my questions for Dr. Levine. I was wondering, is there a rapid PCR test that's available that gives results back fairly quickly as in a few hours? Just to give us some context, I was speaking to a friend who said one of their employees has gotten a rapid PCR test, nasal swab, and the results came back within an hour or two as opposed to a couple of days. I wondered, I guess, does this test exist? And so is it being widely used or supplies limited? Yeah, so rapid PCR, you may recall, I can't even think of how many months ago it was, where we had a piece of equipment that the federal government had shipped to the states that was going to do rapid PCR testing. And very shortly after they shipped it, more news came out about the performance characteristics of that platform, discouraging most of us from wanting to use it, though it is still available. So that's the only rapid PCR that I'm aware of that got emergency use authorization, and the majority of PCRs are done in a lab, so it does require shipping to the lab. And the goal now is really turn around time from those labs and making sure that people can get a result in an actionable amount of time, meaning 24 to 48 hours maximum would be the goal. And that's why we've been very meticulous about watching all of the labs that different health care providers throughout the state use, as well as what we use for our own state samples, and making sure that we adhere to those kinds of metrics. But I don't know of anything new on the market with regard to rapid PCR, and what's really the newest thing is rapid antigen tests. And I do have to accept the fact you're saying rapid PCR for your friend, but the odds are heavily in favor of them having had a rapid antigen test. Okay, I see. Thank you very much. Chris Roy, Newport Daily Express. Yes, good morning. Thanks for answering my question from last week in such great detail. As we come wondering, we keep hearing a lot about a vaccine, and when that battery becomes available, would that mean things were too early to turn back into a complex than that? Yeah, I would say it's going to be a lot more complex than that. Dr. Levine will elaborate, but just think about this. This hasn't been okayed yet, even. I know that they're seeking emergency authorization as we speak. Pfizer, for instance, I think it's the 10th that they will be determined whether they get authorization and Moderna soon after. But it's not as though they've been continuing to create the vaccine, the serum, and have a great amount of it in stockpile. And that's the problem. Like when you consider the number of people we have across the country that are in need of the vaccination and this vaccine serum, we'll have to manufacture this, get it to the states, and then actually vaccinate people at that point. And then a second booster shot on top of the initial one for these first two platforms. So this is going to take some time. This is going to take months. So this isn't instantaneous by any measure. We have to get to a certain percentage before we have that herd immunity that Dr. Levine has talked about before. So again, from my perspective, this is going to take many, many months before we get back to normal. Could be up to close to a year. But from my standpoint, the sooner we get at it, the better. And there is hope in terms of having the vaccine in our hands by the end of this month, even, for a limited number of people. And I'll keep my additional comments pretty short. Trying to have optimism prevail. Most national experts are talking late April to May that we would have achieved this amount of vaccination throughout the country. Those who are less optimistic but still optimistic are talking about late summer, early fall. So still a fair amount of a timeframe, which is why we've been really emphasizing adhering to all of the things we do every day now is a must, even as people start to get vaccinated. Because when people start to get vaccinated, there's three groups of people. Those who have just been vaccinated, those who are still not in the highest priority group and are waiting for their priority group to come up and imminently going to be vaccinated. And then the people who are just not getting vaccinated till later in the phase. And all of that depends on how rapid the manufacture can be of the drugs, of the vaccines that are available. We do hope there will be more than two. And we hope that shortly after the turn of the new year, some of the other phase three studies will come to completion. They will also go through the same review process and authorization process and then be available. And as you know, through Operation Warp Speed, the government has invested in a number of these vaccine platforms so that there's already millions of doses manufactured waiting to be used if they get authorized. Sort of gambling on that, if you will. But having said that, there are not millions of doses in a country of $360 million or something to that effect and still a drop in the bucket, so it has to gear up. But everybody's confident it will gear up and there will be enough vaccines that there will be enough of them being produced that an aggregate will have enough to take care of the whole country. But we all have to practice masking and physical distancing and avoiding crowds for a pretty long period of time as we get into the vaccinations occurring, so into the spring for sure. Okay, thank you. Kat, WCAX. Hi, I too have been dealing a lot of questions this week from viewers who want to know more about the state vaccine rollout. They want to know how they're going to know when they're among the groups that's allowed to get the shot. So, for instance, how are we letting people know which groups they'll fall under when they can get that vaccine? So, for instance, do people need to show an ID that proves they're a frontline healthcare worker and to show up at a doctor's office or do you reach out directly to all the different providers that you know are part of that and tell them, hey, all your workers can get one now? Like, kind of, how are those logistics going to work here? So, the initial logistics are pretty easy because it's healthcare workers across a spectrum of healthcare workers and it's those who work or live in these long-term care facilities. And for the former group, we're working closely with the hospital community to deliver the vaccine to their employees. For the latter group, there's a federal partnership with pharmacies that is going to effectively deliver to those facilities on site. Then you move into the next set of priority groupings, which federally have not even been nationally announced, if you will, though there's plenty of background work that everybody's aware of that involves people who are over age 65, people who are under age 65 or over 65 who have other conditions, chronic medical conditions, compromising conditions, et cetera. And then beyond that, you move into priority groups that involve public-facing positions, whether that be a teacher, whether that be a grocery store worker, whether that be somebody else whose career is in transportation and they're driving a bus or what have you, and that list can be very long. And then there's a whole bunch of other groups that I won't go into right now. So you're kind of saying, when does my turn come up and how do I know the vaccine is here? So for a lot of those groups, there are going to be involvement of the primary care community since we have such an effective vaccination program that they've all participated in already and have a lot of the logistics taken care of. But we have a number of teams that are specifically looking at each of these phases, knowing that some of the people you've just talked about and that I've just talked about are not going to have any vaccine on site here till January, February, March. We really can't say yet not knowing how many vaccines will be authorized. There will be a lot of legwork that will proceed this because your point is very well taken. We need to have the logistics meaning how does the vaccine get to the person who's administering it to the patient. We need to have the communications under hand, meaning that everyone will know when their places, the timing is right for their group and their eligibility. And we need to have the information systems to make sure that people who get dose one of vaccine A know when to come back for dose two and are getting only vaccine A and not vaccine C. So all of that work is actually well underway and I don't want to get into the mechanics of it. At this point in time, I just want to reassure you that all of that has been taken under account. But it's going to be some time for some of these other groups, unfortunately. So people should be bottom line when people ask me this. Should I just tell them that they should wait for communication from their doctor? There will be a lot more communication than just from their doctor because there's going to be a lot of health department communication, a lot of communication at sessions like this. We'll be able to gear that up without much difficulty. Through lots of media because it's the way we communicate about most health issues. So I don't think that will be too unclear to people when it happens. Got a quick other question. If you already had COVID-19, are you still going to be asked to get the vaccine? Yeah, you know, we get asked that question all the time. So nobody knows how long after you've had COVID-19, your own immunity is lasting for and is it durable or not. So the guidance right now, and this particularly impacts some of our nursing home residents, because some of the nursing homes had outbreaks many months ago, and there are people who are still there that might want to know also do I get a vaccine or not. The best data right now is that we're going to universally vaccinate and not worry if someone has had COVID or not. Knowing that we want their immunity to be great for the future. And we're not sure beyond three or four months after a COVID episode, how good the immunity is. So the default is going to be vaccinate rather than question it. Thank you, Eric. Times Argus. Yes, this is Leslie for his secretary. Any updates on that email that was sent out very recently? Let me just back up a little bit and talk about what we've done. Obviously, as you remember, there was a approximately 249 test results that didn't make it to broad end time. What we did was telephone all those participants that were in that group and arrange testing, including an additional testing opportunity in Barrie. I haven't got the update of we then made sure that those testing results went to the state lab for a 24 hour turnaround. I expect today that that whole situation should be resolved in terms of those people who have been given the opportunity to test, got tested and will get their results today. Or if they took their last final opportunity for testing today, at least by tomorrow. So those sort of situations have been corrected. As you know, we have corrected. There was a shipping label issue. We have corrected that by using courier service for now. We'll look at education as we move forward in terms of the incident where we had somebody communicate via email trying to alert people that this situation had happened and unfortunately made a mistake and put forward other people's names. We're looking into that right now to see if in fact that is a violation of HIPAA. We have my general counsel looking at that and we'll do all the reporting mechanisms that we can do in terms of any personnel related matters. If we find that there's a performance issue or anything along that line, that will go to the Department of Human Resources. But I want to generalize some of the things here. We've done about 500,000 tests in this state and there's no doubt that there was a mistake made on 249 tests. In my knowledge that was the first sort of general mistake that's been done in terms of the testing and we've sort of resolved that as we move forward. I will say this, there was some calls last week for people to be fired or people to be dismissed or people to be reprimanded and maybe that happens. But I can tell you right now a lot of people are working hard and working under extreme conditions and some people are just fatigued and mistakes are going to happen. They shouldn't and we should acknowledge them, we should correct them, I should take the blame for them, which I did last week or this week. But we've got to remember that there's a lot of people right now that are humans and mistakes are made. And if there's something that we need to do on a personnel issue, we'll take care of it. But I looked at the drop down box that we on the labeling mistake and I'll tell you, I may have made the same mistake. It was next day delivery, it was the label, but you had to drop down another box to do Saturday delivery on that. And we're running 24-7 for 10 months now and people are fatigued and they're running at rapid pace. And I think if they make a mistake, we can't ignore the mistake, we've got to acknowledge the mistake, we've got to fix the mistake. But we've got to remember humans make mistakes. What supports are available to state employees who might be going to rundown after? We have a variety of employee assistance programs throughout the state. So there are various programs within the state. I'll refer it to DHR, Eric, to get back to you on what those specific programs are. But there's ample reach out programs for those state employees. Eric, I can help you hide that information as well. Okay, thank you. Lisa Raffi, DAP. Thank you. My question for Dr. Levine. I think today is the deadline for states to request the amount of doses of Pfizer-B and they would like. How much does the state request and do you expect to get that amount? We're kind of told the number of doses that we can request. So it's not like we really want more than 6,000 doses, maybe 60 or 600,000. So we don't actually get to request the number of doses. We're kind of told what to do. And it's more a matter of us telling where they're going and how we're going to utilize and allocate them. But yes, we know the timetable and we're hot on that, making sure that that gets in today. And do you know how much for what we'll be getting? Yes, it's something about 5,850. Which is half of the dose we're allowed to get because you have to reserve the exact same amount for the second dose for the people who get that as their first dose. This is Pfizer only. And this is only Pfizer because it's the only one that's made it through the process until Moderna does or does not shortly thereafter. And again, we're, I shouldn't even say made it through the process because we're actually ordering vaccine that hasn't yet received its emergency use authorization. That'll happen next week. Right. Do you know how much of the Moderna vaccine from what was again? I don't at this moment, no. Okay, thank you. Any of the informational meetings that I attended virtually have indicated that it's all about supply. Whatever they have in supply and inventory is going to be distributed to the states based on population. So everyone gets the same percentage based on the supply they have shipped to their states. So I know as soon as they get authorization and they're probably preempting that as we speak, they're creating more, manufacturing more of the serum to have to distribute on a weekly basis from that point on. So we should be receiving at least a few thousand every single week and hopefully stepped up after that. And as Dr. Levine had said, hopefully more manufacturers will get approved so that we have again more supply, more inventory for each and each and every state. Okay, thank you. Tim and Quiston, Vermont Business Magazine. Hi, Governor. The phone line on my side is breaking up a little bit. There's some interference there. I'd like to ask you about the 40 million dollar shortfall on education funds. Is it tied to, I mean, there's a lot of consumer taxes going into it now that's increased in recent times. There's an income sensitivity part. Is it tied to restructure how that is done and to either move it more or away from the property tax? Yeah, I mean, obviously a couple of things. First, we're spending an incredible amount of money for education, $1.8 billion. And that keeps increasing every year. So we need to take a look at that. We're always trying to distribute that a little bit across the board so that it isn't just affecting property taxes. There are other areas of sales tax and so forth that will help out as well. So we'll have some of these conversations in the upcoming legislative session. But as well, we have to contemplate how much of this shortfall is due to the pandemic, which there is a significant amount due to the pandemic. So we need to reflect on that and what might be available in the not too distant future that could be utilized to backfill some of the shortfall. So we've been through this before where our economy is a little healthier at the time and we were able to reduce the amount of increase to, I believe, I don't believe we increased it at all in one period. But so I just want to say we're all going to be working to reduce that so that there isn't any impact on property taxes. Well, sort of the follow-up to that is that there's an awful lot of companies going to look different to a lot of those sales and sales tax that are likely not going to look the same going forward for some time in this climate. And that's sort of what I was getting at, and to read that, that's looking at the actual structure of how the revenue produces. Well, again, I think that we did, with the Wayfair decision, did contemplate that and there is more money going into the Ed Fund as a result. So I think we were ahead of that a bit, so I'm not sure that that part will change. But again, anytime we can distribute this a little bit further and so it isn't on one particular sector would be important. Stuart Lundvetter? Yeah, good morning. I'm wondering if Dr. Levine could sort of help us understand what Burlington reported yesterday on the spike in detectable COVID in the wastewater. And I mean, it was, you know, straight up. I'm wondering what that foreshadows. Thanks Stuart for that question. Put it in context for everybody. Wastewater sampling, we've talked about here before, but it's a new concept to you. It's basically looking at the wastewater treatment plants and measuring the genome of the virus in the wastewater. And doing that consistently through a season so you have a baseline level and know when there's going to be changes in that. Burlington's been doing it for quite a number of months now and basically found that I believe after Halloween saw a little bit of an uptick in that and now after Thanksgiving saw another uptick that was much more dramatic. Now these are not sick people. This is finding the COVID RNA in the wastewater. And I believe they found that across their three treatment plants so it wasn't just localized to one part of the city or another. The correlation between finding the virus's RNA in the wastewater and finding actual human cases that are then tested with PCR testing because they are ill or just carry the virus is a challenging one to make and that's where the science in this field is really being contributed to by what Burlington is doing to be honest and is growing every day. We didn't find a lot of correlation at some of the other times that there have been peaks and valleys in the data. This one looks so dramatic that we would expect to find some correlation. We won't know that for a number of days because the reason this is supposed to be a valuable modality is it precedes the actual illnesses in the population. So if you assume it precedes those illnesses by three days, five days, seven days, whatever interval you choose and you want to use this for what it should be used for you would say I need to do something now that I found this rise and that's what Mayor Weinberger did. He basically I believe had a press conference and he informed the population that this might be a good time to get some testing especially if you've been in social gatherings and things of that sort because it would be great to try to identify people early on not only help from a public health standpoint understanding what's going on in the community but help people as well so that they could isolate they could know if they needed to see a clinician they could know if they could protect somebody else who might be more vulnerable than them in their community and prevent any increase in spread of a virus that might be happening right then and there. So that's the intent of it and I agree completely with using the data in the way he's used it and there is ample testing now in Chittenden County and he drew attention to the various places people can go for that testing and we will see hopefully not that I want to trash the science but hopefully we won't find a correlation between a lot of people in Chittenden County or in Burlington specifically having COVID just because the wastewater showed it but this is part of the ongoing learning we do every day in COVID-19 in this pandemic. Okay, and just one question for the Governor you've been living this thing for nine plus months now you've worried a lot about how the rest of Vermont is managing and you talked about the emotional and mental health struggles that many are going through how are you doing? Yeah, well I'm doing as well as everybody else I guess these are trying times for each and every one of us I'm very blessed to have a good family as well as a great team where we really are working on this seven days a week and trying to get through this so I'm doing fine and we're all working together trying to support each other and just trying to get through this and I can see again I have some optimism about the future what I see in terms of light at the end of the tunnel with the vaccine coming into play I think is part of the answer so we've been talking about this for quite some time and now it's becoming real and so we'll again, if we can see the finish line I'm confident we'll get there but we're all going to have to work together in order to help each other and support each other along the way and so I've been fortunate to have that support Thanks as always Peter Hirschfeld? I've been in touch with the family member of a resident at Elderwood who tested positive for COVID-19 and they were told by a regional administrator that the resident would not be retested for 90 days because elderly patients give off false results as they shed the virus are you familiar with this protocol and is it an appropriate one? So I'm presuming this is a person who tested negative and we're told they wouldn't get tested again for 90 days No, they tested positive Well they tested positive? Okay Yes So there really is no need to retest them immediately I assume they were tested with PCR so we're pretty confident they are a true positive result in a setting where there's an epidemic going on so I'm not sure where the cause for concern is because there really is no reason to test them again they need to be treated for the next several months as someone who currently has COVID and had COVID in hope that they do very well by the way but by the same token that dictates where they will live in that facility who will take care of them because the guidance that our health care facility outbreak prevention and response team would give them would be to try to cohort like with like so that there's no chance of spreading the infection further to other parts of the facility that may not have the infection For the individual themselves we generally don't worry about their turning negative in the test because the fact is they have been COVID positive and they're going to continue to be COVID positive for some period of time and there's a risk actually of them turning COVID negative and us assuming that there's no problem any longer and that notion leads to the fact that people can have varying levels of the RNA in their nasal secretions after their illness so sometimes they'll test negative sometimes they'll test positive and the best way to avoid that is to not test them at all because it still won't influence how the facility regards them having had COVID The 90 day thing all I can think of that they're thinking of is the fact that we generally consider three months to be the interval before we worry about someone perhaps being able to get reinfected which has been reported in the literature not a huge amount but reinfection can occur after three months so that's all I can think of as to why they were told that otherwise I'm not really familiar with a protocol that would test you now find you have it and then say three months later we're going to test you again Thank you I have a question for you Governor as well you're encouraging people in crisis to reach out to the state for mental health counseling can you assure folks that do take the initiative to do that that said counseling will be available to them promptly? Well obviously we hope so and if it isn't we want to hear from them to make sure that we identify the areas that we need to have some shortcomings and we're able to read a fortify that but again I might ask Mr. Squirrel to answer that as well Thank you great question so we have I guess a continuum of crisis services for verbonners as I mentioned there is Vermont 211 which folks we have dedicated clinicians who are there to answer those phones both the crisis text line and the national suicide prevention lifeline are available 24 hours a day seven days a week and you will absolutely get an individual who will talk with you and counsel you we also have a robust network of community mental health agencies across the state so when you call 211 if you need to be connected to a counselor or to receive therapeutic support they will work very hard to connect you to the right individuals and if there are any delays if you access in care due to workforce issues or challenges we are certainly committed to working with verbonners to ensure that they get the care that they need Thank you all Lisa Lemus I have a question from a leader about why you do our youth programs such as Genetics Ballet and Life Hockey Lessons are allowed but other programs such as Outdoor Youth Training are not allowed I wonder if Secretary Moore might be on the line I am and we'll be having to answer that question Governor so private lessons and semi-private lessons actually fall under section 8.1 of a CCB Work-Based Guidance and that is what governs those particular types of activities there are expectations that participants will remain physically distant at all times excuse me will remain physically distant at all times and facilities need to put in place systems to ensure there is no congregating during the RISAL or departure and if all of those systems are in place those activities that are allowed to be under section 8.1 of the Work-Based Guidance does the guidance provide any work allowance for youth training we can raise programs it does not there is a specific to training not competition so to the extent it needs to be private or semi-private so really individual skills and drill course would be allowed under this section but there are no competitive events that should be taking place at this time nor any types of programs recreational or competitive that have large groups of people gathering to participate to be clear so gymnastic and ballet classes must be private or semi-private I can hear you Lisa I'm not sure that secretary my apologies I hit the mute button by accident the ballet lessons or other such things would need to be conducted in a manner consistent with private or semi-private lessons at this point in time Courtney Cramer Local 22, Local 44 a federal stimulus package we hear almost every day with money especially as we're hearing the end of the year some programs are set to expire and with the continued surging cases I'm wondering if you echo those sentiments and if you could talk about how this money would benefit for learners specifically I've said numerous times over the last few weeks on another additional stimulus package is vitally needed to get us to the end of this throughout the vaccination period and so forth immediate concerns are of course unemployment and a lot of those unemployment benefits will run out by the end of the year as well as some of the programs in terms of food security so we want to we're hoping and again getting a little bit more optimistic over the last few days seeing this bipartisan group getting together in Congress to try and come up with some sort of compromise to get us at least a bridge some bridge funding to get us between now and maybe further a stimulus when the new administration is sworn into office so I'm again optimistic but I'm still very very concerned particularly with the unemployment benefits that are destined to run out by the end of the end of the month All right it's about 25 minutes to one we still have 12 people in the queue we're doing a great job so let's keep it up Mike Donahue thank you I will go to one of the ones that are close to 12 uh it's now been more than 11 weeks since the state police at Isabel Seward a 16 year old from Atlanta, Georgia across the WLO line on Route 7 in Chisholm County in Kildon Elderly, Vermont couple there's a place like St. George's office the administration suspended a significant part of the Vermont State Police transparency policy that you helped grab and commissioner said he would ask for a quote swift and quote legal opinion from Attorney General P.J. Donovan back in September it's been about three months still no written decision from A.P. Donovan's office does A.P. Donovan in the state are more lawyers needed in the process when expedited legal requests are needed from state agencies and departments available for temporary hiring and I guess if you did hear another continued follow-up down to that question and have you done any work when the prompt response will be provided to your public safety agencies? Yeah Mike I have not been updated lately on that and uh something that I should uh but maybe Commissioner Shirling can you give us any update at this point in time and and uh again it's a reminder that I need to get back involved in this one Yes, I can Governor thanks for following up Mike as you indicated we haven't received a written response from the Attorney General's office but notwithstanding that our legal team has continued to work on that in between all of the other enormous volumes of work related to COVID and everything else so well 11 weeks is definitely too long and uh it is a part and parcel of everything that's going on right now we are working on updates to policy that flow from the various conflicting and overlapping statutes relative to juvenile records and hope to have something finalized in the next in the next few weeks But your former your credit as their commander then Attorney has a legal opinion out there that clearly uh answers that question why is his opinion been discarded uh his opinion has not been discarded Mike his opinion was uh on point to one specific case did not relate to the various overlapping conflicting statutory frameworks that exist and just getting back to the question is there with money available for temporary hiring it seems like A.G. Donovan can't get things out for expedited requests I mean are you seeing that it's another agency other state departments asking for help or is it just getting the response I have uh I don't believe I'm not sure that we've received our request from this office for more support more attorneys at this point time obviously throughout government in response to COVID there are a number of areas where we do need support some of that the most visible probably was the Labor Department and we were able to utilize uh numerous uh employees from throughout the administration to help backfill but we had to go outside of that to get some help and to to support the Labor Department in particular I might I might ask Secretary Young if she knows of any request from the A.G.'s office for more attorney or more positions Thank you Governor I don't have a right to run with me but as part of the hiring for the U.S. Institute this spring we are seeing you know every request from agencies and departments for additional resources I just believe that there has been approval from the A.G.'s office for positions that my members were related to the COVID response so we can verify that for Mike for being useful Thank you all very much In terms of whether there's we don't have a lot of COVID money left we're trying to figure out as we speak what is the balance in the bank that we can utilize and distribute for the end of the month but we've done pretty well in spending that allotment knowing that the everything would have to be committed by 1231 so we've we've done a pretty good job of that and so we'll we'll see as we move forward what the new stimulus package will look like but but I don't know of any money that that is not it has to be COVID related in order to to utilize for anything of new hires Okay, well if you do check in with the Donner that'd be great because this secrecy thing is now spread to the Pickle Wildlife Department and there was a case where some state owned property was destroyed and Pickle Wildlife is now withholding information about that arrest too so it is turning to spread so any help you can do to ensure transparency would be appreciated Alright, thank you Mike Erin Boteko, BT Digger Looks like the Mike Smith, maybe some other people would provide an update on how organizations for the homeless are hoping to see a possible expiration of funds to steer and if there's any progress on more permanent solutions to housing getting people out of hotels and hotels getting people out of shelters the ones that are open and other solutions like that Thank you for the question Erin as you know we have significant numbers of people in our hotel motel program that's because we want homeless not congregating, not on the streets in this COVID environment we've done this since the beginning of the pandemic we're continuing in the second wave of the pandemic, ultimately we hope by July when things are hopefully when there is a vaccine by July we'll start moving towards a more localized solution to bringing people into permanent homes as well as other facilities as in shelters and those sort of things. We are as you know we invested significant amounts of money through ACCD and their housing area and other areas in permanent housing and we continue to try to move especially families try to move families into permanent housing but those things take a little bit of time to get up so I would presume through the winter months we're going to have a fairly significant amount of people maybe even over 2000 people into motels hotels during the height of this second wave of the pandemic and then start moving people into permanent housing towards spring and summer as we move forward. Are there any kind of concrete plan to fund that transition to hotels and hotels during the third potential? Yeah there will be funding obviously. We're using FEMA funding and we'll use some general fund in order to do that. Greg the county courier Good afternoon Governor I think I have a question for you with one question for Dr. Levine starting with you Governor in your introduction you talked about mental health and wellness and we've been hearing from a lot of veterans upset about the closure of the SW from American region we're being told that many of the veterans use these facilities to help communicate with others that are going through similar PTSD issues like they are and although it's an informal mental health environment for them people have wondered why is it that they couldn't socially distance and be spread out through tables like restaurants in order to be able to stay open Yeah you know again with some of the the clubs some of the activity in the clubs that led to a number of cases and we saw that that social gathering was one that wasn't really well supervised in some respect so they're amongst our vets some of them are amongst our most vulnerable populations we're trying to keep them healthy I know this is difficult we hope this is just temporary and that we can open up these facilities just as soon as possible but we're going to have to get through this increase in number of cases the way we're seeing this coming at us and I think about this every day and in particular those veterans that are extremely important to me personally but as well as to us as a society and we're not trying to penalize anybody we're trying to help them protect them so that we can open the doors again in the not too distant future but we just think it's necessary to take this step at this point in time with the hopes again of opening them back up all the clubs back up as soon as possible Are you looking at any changes in policy that would allow partial visiting or is it all or nothing to your view? Well at this point in time we're going to complicate things we hope this is really temporary in nature so that we don't have to take additional steps so at this point we'll pay attention we meet on this almost on a daily basis in all sectors to try and determine how long we have to do this what additional steps might be necessary or what we can back up so it's not not on our radar it's just that at this point in time with the numbers we're seeing particularly with the numbers that we saw yesterday we're concerned and we just want to get through this this next wave Thank you Governor and one for Dr. Levine we're hearing from people that are concerned that as schools are doing much of their own contact tracing they're being told to use a 48 hour period for contact tracing so 48 hours before a positive test for those that aren't showing symptoms or 48 hours before someone is showing symptoms and that's essentially the period that is being worried about for spreading fires within schools so why not say using 48 hour periods not a more than we hear about especially for people who are testing positive that are asymptomatic Thanks for bringing this up because there's always a risk of over simplification of something which I think could confuse people if we're talking about an asymptomatic person that's a very different situation because you don't actually know when they might or if they still are have been infectious when you're talking about somebody who goes to get a test because they're having symptoms and the test proves that they have COVID you can pretty much know when their symptoms began and when they were in that 48 hour at risk period of being able to transmit the virus to others but didn't know it because they felt completely well so that's why we do work with schools very closely but I don't want to just say schools businesses you name it very closely and allow them to do some of that early up front work when somebody finds out from their doctor that they have a positive test and wants to do something to help others in their environment we encourage that but at the same time we don't encourage to exclude the contact tracing workforce we want to do it in parallel and in concert with the contact tracing workforce so the contact tracers will then make that assessment when they've heard the whole full story and be able to help do the appropriate contact tracing and telephoning of individuals knowing that the school did sort of the first phase of that if you will so we support both but it's more complex than just a pat rule that you can have and then everybody goes with that we definitely want it to be parallel to have the contact tracers and those in the schools or work sites do their work does that make sense it does but it answers something different than what I was asking it sounds to me like it's a 40-hour period before a positive test especially for an asymptomatic person that's being looked at as part of the contact but we've heard from us that you could be spreading it for 14 days so why in the state now looking back 14 days versus 2 days right so again in a symptomatic person you can define the 48-hour period in the asymptomatic person you cannot and that's how I answer the question okay so the state is also doing it with asymptomatic people and that's what I was specifically asking thank you thank you Olivia Lyons WCAS hello I'm a questioner so earlier on the state is working on the district levels to provide mental health services and to use an additional state resources so I'm wondering what specifically are those resources yeah thank you this is my point we're in the initial phase of planning that but we do expect to bring additional resources to bear Commissioner Squirrel and her team and my team have been meeting fairly regularly through this first part of the emergency in anticipation of this next phase but certainly working with the Department of Mental Health or designated service agencies other departments in state government that are often represented in some of those more complex conversations so my point is we're we're starting to work on the plans that will make that interface with state resources more effective and efficient I want to use the word triage but we want to make sure that there's a systems approach to that available at the local level so that we can be more impactful with student needs so would this include bringing more counselors into the schools or would this be more like setting up programs that teachers would be able to easily follow to assist students in giving them the help they need I think it'll be some of all of the above I think there'll be a delineation of consistency from a state perspective what those resources might look like but then allowing the locals to figure out how to be the most responsive they can based on their unique needs so it'll be a combination of both I think also speaking of funding schools have received several pots of money if you will under the coronavirus relief the CRF funds which we've talked about today school districts also have the SR which is the elementary secondary education relief fund dollars those dollars have a longer tail to them so the focus with CRF funding in schools has been to basically use those funds to reopen schools and address issues like HVAC and some of the student meals programs the SR funds school districts are just now starting to take a look at those and I expect those funds particularly will be used to address this next phase you know dealing with the impact of this emergency on students and their families so by approaching the faculty district levels would they be able to better allocate the funds to the schools that need it the most or are they seeing the most issues of mental health occurring yeah particularly when we look at the SR funds districts have a lot more flexibility with those funds as compared to CRF as well our point is that we want to start doing that planning very intentionally and part of it's going to be impacted certainly right now you know looking at the resources we have and the resources in state government to make sure on a regional basis all districts are getting supported as they need those supports but we have some planning still to do on this whole effort but I think it's really fair to say that's sort of the next phase of the work in front of us we've known all along this phase was coming and we have to start preparing to do that work just one final question to this do you have a date when you'd like to have this roll out no we started thinking about this actually at the end of September when we made a transition from step 2 to step 3 but clearly with the increased case count we have to make an assessment about the capacity inside the education system to do planning while we're actively involved in the daily sort of safety implementation requirements so right now with the increased case count coming up districts really I think need to focus on sort of the safety operations and I think hopefully at some point I anticipate you know optimistic I'm optimistic as well if we can turn that corner and particularly with the advent of the vaccine that we'll have a little more capacity in the system to start making that pivot but we're working on the planning right now at the state level thank you alright just a quick time check five minutes to one we still have eight people in the care we'll keep it for you thank you my questions I believe are for commissioners for Dr. Levine the first question is with regards to Vermonters along our mental health theme of the day in terms of Vermonters reaching out for mental health services for counseling I was wondering if there was an age demographic of the population that you're most concerned about we've heard a lot about younger people students was also wondering particularly if you're hearing about the needs of seniors many of whom might be isolated so might have already been isolated somewhat as before COVID but certainly are more isolated now yes thank you for that question and certainly when it comes to the mental health needs of our children and youth that is a top priority even prior to COVID we're all aware that particularly for adolescents the youth risk behavior survey has already indicated that adolescents were at higher risk of anxiety and depression so that is certainly a group that we continue to focus on which is why just the fundamental provision of our commitment to keep our public schools open is so essential so those adolescents have structure and access to services and supports related to our older remoners that is also a priority population one of the things that we were able to utilize we were able to pair CRF funds with funding within our department of mental health budget to actually expand our elder care clinician program across the state in partnership with the department of aging and independent living so we have clinicians that are doing outreach in the communities outreach specifically focused on our older remoners to ensure that they have access to the mental health care and services that they need great thank you one quick follow up question there was a discussion about use of opioids and about using alone the danger of that I'm wondering if what the findings are in terms of the use of alcohol and in terms of folks who are in recovery from alcohol and the discipline that they're having and if there's concern about the what appears to be increased use of alcohol during this crisis yes I think that is yeah I can start certainly it is of concern remoners increased use of alcohol and substances which is why the Vermont department of mental health and the department of health have advanced Vermont health link we want to ensure that remoners who are under stress who might be worried about their alcohol consumption can reach out for support and I will defer to Dr. Levine for any additional comments thank you I think we're awesome yeah Austin Danforth from the pre-press yeah this is a student for Governor Scott Governor I know you said earlier you are going to continue to evaluate the status of allowing sports each week but I'm just curious what sort of timeline are you and your administration envisioning right now to allow the return of recreational and school based sports is there a sense that this could realistically happen next week or two weeks or is it further down the road it really is dependent on the data that we see and we have to get through that two week period after Thanksgiving to evaluate that so we'll know a lot more a week from now and we know again that time is short in some respects because of the upcoming holiday the new year and so forth and there will be a break in between so we're sensitive to that so we're looking at this and we'll continue to evaluate the data and make a decision hopefully next week and give you more information based on what we're seeing is that data tracking in the right direction or is it still really too early to tell somewhat too early to tell as Dr. Levine had said we had over 200 cases yesterday and then we had 70 something today so it's hard to track hard to determine and then we saw that of course there was some of the municipal sewage treatment plants in Burlington that were seeing more activity so that that gives us a little bit of concern as well so we're just waiting to see what's going to happen we'll know again in the next I'd say week or less what correction we're going in and if we can safely reopen some of the practices in terms of the school sports and just lastly just to be completely clear is this affected anyway UBM's plan to start winter sports competition on December 19th or is that covered by a different set of the guidance based on APCD regulation I believe that's under a different set of guidance but I'll ask Secretary Moore to comment on that yes, thank you Governor college sports are subject to an entirely different set of guidelines from recreational and school based sports courses great thank you, I can make sure, I appreciate it Joseph? Martin Chronicle Hello, I have a question from an educator up here who denotes that earlier in the school year the Northeast Kingdom had very few cases of COVID at schools where I did the hard work able to quickly move to five day a week in-person instruction as the amount of COVID has increased even up here it's getting harder to keep schools going that way and people at some schools are having to move to hybrid education and this person wants to know given that we didn't need much of the way in support for child care hardest early on is there any provision that can be put in place now to help families that need child care and given that the carers money will expire at the end of the year is there any support for these hubs going beyond the new year? Secretary Smith? Joe you raise a really good question that we're going to have to take a look at as you know we didn't place a lot of hubs in the Northeast Kingdom at the time because you were going back five days a week the one thing that we're going to have to do Joe is to look at that and see what we can do in that area in terms of ongoing funding you know we were in the process of starting to shut down these hubs and in many cases we did shut down these hubs in a lot of areas where they weren't needed anymore so I think you raise a good question that we're just going to need to look at and I'll keep you in the loop Joe on what we're doing so a little briefer than I expected I've got another question which is from another reader who has two children who go to different schools one is quite young one is older both schools contacted the parents about both children having been exposed to COVID they weren't approached by Department of Health contact tracer but they did receive an email from the Department of Health with general instructions and this person who by now at the time has expired was having a great deal of difficulty his 10 year old child was staying isolated perfectly perfectly well his 4 year old was having a great deal of difficulty isolating away from the family and they only had one bathroom and I'm wondering whether he might have misconstrued the instructions and whether having a real contact tracer rather than an email speaking with the family might have this person's life easier and may make the life of other people easier if that's the direction things go in Joe, for a sake of time could you get that information to me because I think it's probably going to all be in the details sounds a little atypical to have one form of contact, not another and then I'm wondering if isolation was what was required and how challenging that was and if they were informed of the supports that are available which is normal part of the contact tracing operation so if you could send that we can actually dig into it Joe, I can help coordinate that this is Ethan okay, well I will do that, thank you alright, last five thank you Governor, Amanda ran for a law for achievement county state senate reported on social media recently that when she had her children who were out of laundromat not masked because they had extensions another patron who was an attorney threatened to report her to the department of children and families and I'm wondering, has CCF received complaints about unmasked parents and children and if so, have you investigated and what has been the outcome Secretary Smith Guy, I have no knowledge of any reports coming into DCF but that doesn't mean that there hasn't been let me double check for you and get back to you thank you, Commissioner Levine are there any breakthroughs on the apparent factual disagreement between Department of Health and the Armesburg church pastor any resolution of that I think I gave the resolution at the last press conference we were aware of a positive case we provided communication so that the greater religious community could benefit from that communication but it wasn't provided by the House of Worship and we put out our press release just so that the greater community could be aware that they might be at some risk for their extended services so we haven't actually been having a back and forth at all and I think that was the resolution I've not heard anything since we're satisfied from a public health standpoint that we try to protect the public self thank you Angie McGregor yeah, thank you, good afternoon quick follow-up question on sports do you envision recreation and school-based sports resuming at the same time or do you think that they might be stepped back at different times? it could possibly Andrew Tuff to answer in some respects but it's a possibility they could be separated okay and then for Dr. Labien a question from some folks that would fall in the earlier phase of the vaccination once you get vaccinated that individual's life returns to normal no masks, travel wear-out, social gathering do they get the green light at that point? yeah, that's a great question so the real answer is it depends first of all how many doses they've gotten and we'll assume since most of the vaccines are true dose they would not be fully protected after one dose so they'd have to wait the requisite number of days for the second dose which could be 21 days, could be 28 days it's going to vary by vaccine and then you have to allow the appropriate time for the body to mount the immune response so that you can measure antibodies and know that you're kind of fully prepared if you come in contact with the virus which most people are saying should be two to four weeks and there'll probably be something more finite than just a range as we go along in time based on the results of the phase three studies so we're talking today you've got your first dose still probably a couple months before you would consider yourself to be ready to face the world so to speak without the protection of everything having said that the Pfizer CEO just recently acknowledged that one thing that he was not aware of yet from the trials is can you still be infectious to others even though you've gotten the vaccine so that question is yet unanswered which means I can't fully answer your question either but I've been preaching to everyone in the state that from the day one the vaccine arrives in the state we are all still on the parallel paths of increasing the number of Romaners getting the vaccine but the same number of Romaners doing masking and physical distancing and all the other guidance we give Grandparents 6 to 8 weeks it's not necessarily a green light to start spending meaningful close contact time with grandkids that would be the our preferred knowledge that would be the message now knowing it's subject to change as we get the results of all the phase three studies okay Tom Ayers the Vermont standard press star 6 unmute we're going to move to Steve Merrill Steve can you hear me? go ahead Steve great thanks I guess this one for Dr. Levine when you've mentioned I'd ask you before about the PCR cycles do we have when we send the stuff out of state labs do we have a cycle threshold I guess even Dr. Fauci is recommending in the 30 to 35 range because I guess if you get up to 40 you might be like catching minnows and reporting them as whales I get you just Steve for the public the higher the cycle threshold it means it took longer to find the virus implying perhaps that the person had less of an infectious dose of virus so the lower the cycle threshold the more concerned one would be so every lab that is involved in doing assays for the state of Vermont population at large has its own platform and its own cycle thresholds I will find out what we know about the cycle thresholds of the major labs that we're using so I can report that back if that's okay with you yeah that's great I really appreciate it and I had another one, a quick one if I may I have a friend who has a scanner and I'm not sure how they do this but it came over the scanner that they went to pick up someone who had trouble breathing and I don't know if they did a rapid antigen test or whatever to protect first responders but it came over the scanner that the person gained where they were and that they were positive for the virus do they how would they know that before they go to pick someone up that's a great question there are now home antigen tests we don't think they've been available in Vermont yet but there are on the market home antigen tests where you can get a rapid result or the person could have actually been to a place got a test result whether it was a home whether it was a commercial antigen test or a PCR test but not been very sick but the reason for the phone call was they suddenly got much more symptomatic so they already knew they had COVID and were needing to be transported to a medical facility that's all I can think about the good news is no matter which scenario we choose the EMS staff are well versed in PPE well supplied in PPE it wouldn't dare make the call without PPE so I think the right outcome would occur for both the person and the frontline provider obviously we want to protect our first responders and recently the working paper that just came out by the National Bureau of Economic Research I found that 91% of the major media outlets the reporting on the virus was negative in tone versus 54% by non-US media outlets and 65% in scientific journals the title of it was called why is all COVID-19 news I know that sensationalism sells but with this kind of reporting don't we risk like scaring people unnecessarily I mean we also be protected but still that's a pretty high level don't you think yeah Dr. Levine has retreated leaving me here to answer the question so well that's great yeah I think you know we're pretty I guess we're pretty fortunate here in Vermont I think that the media represents the information that we've been able to provide in a very strategic way in trying to get the message out to Vermonters and having these press conferences two times what used to be three times a week was helpful in trying to balance the transparency so I don't you know there may be other states that are outliers but here in Vermont I can say that I think they've portrayed the information that we've received quite well and honestly so that's all we can ask for we want people to pay attention it may not be good news it hasn't been all good news and that's what we need to get across now we see a little bit of hope at the end of the tunnel with the vaccines coming into play we're hoping that this will provide relief and that we can give back to normal so again here in Vermont I don't think we've seen that negativity that maybe was used for some of the information for the article yeah well we appreciate the press conferences and I'll go get my yappy dogs from outside good luck with that interrupt them thank you all very much Derek, 7 days yeah hi we just wanted to know about vaccines supply do you have any idea when the states will be able to reach residents of long-term care homes with vaccines and is the plan still to have private pharmacies administering that there's one care home you know till the end of December and don't pin these numbers down because like I say they change every day we're anticipating in the range of 20,000 doses coming into the state a portion of which is already been pre-allocated to the long-term care facilities so the best case scenario doses will come in before New Years or around that time all depends again on the federal timing the second part is that the federal alliance with pharmacies we are taking advantage of all of the highest acuity facilities already signed on to that so we're very enthusiastic about the fact that they'll be getting the vaccine and be able to deploy it to the staff and residents fairly early on we'll say that process of them actually getting it into the arms of residents in the best case scenario would be around Christmas time to be accurate but that would be great that would be another piece of good news thank you very much for tuning in and we'll see you again on Tuesday