 Today we're going to talk about school reopening this fall, more specifically, the public health considerations for these plans. I appreciate Dr. Razga being here today to talk about his research on this virus in schools, camps, childcare centers, and other group settings for kids. He's a pediatric infectious disease specialist, and his editorial in Pediatrics Magazine was brought up in our press conference earlier this week. We're also joined by Dr. Levine, as always, and Dr. Kelso, our state epidemiologist, to talk about their role in developing guidance for schools this fall, and how it's informed by science and data. Before I turn it over to the health experts, I want to talk a little bit about what opening means in this context, because I know there are many teachers, administrators, and other school staff, as well as many parents and kids who have concerns about what this might look like and the potential risks. To start, I want to be clear. Just like I have done throughout this pandemic, I'm watching the data and listening to the experts. With that in mind, we're keeping a close eye on what's going on around the country. And to be honest, I'm concerned. While our trends still look really good here in Vermont, we're seeing a forest fire take hold across the south and west, and I'm worried it will backtrack to the northeast and eventually affect us in Vermont. So I want to reassure you, we're watching it, and we're contemplating steps we may need to establish a line of defense if that proves to be the case. At the same time, given our current positive trends, we also need to aim for and plan for school openings, because if our data shows we can do it safely, it's the very best option for our kids. Next, we should recognize open has a different meaning since mid-March, whether it's retail stores, coffee shops, offices, healthcare practices, salons. Open doesn't mean the way it was back in January. Today's open comes with many conditions. These openings all include precautions and restrictions. Our public health experts have advised we include to help people keep safe and healthy. We're using the same approach as we work toward opening schools. There are going to be many public health measures we must implement to reopen safely, and just like in other areas, it will require some problem-solving by teachers and local leaders, because it's not going to be a simple return to the status quo. Classrooms might not be full for the foreseeable future, nor will school cafeterias or gymnasiums, and we expect to use a hybrid model in which remote learning and remote curriculums will be a major factor. But we also need the flexibility to include in-person instruction, which we know is valuable to our kids and is something we couldn't offer in March, April, and May when we began fighting this virus. Everyone stepped up this spring to quickly move classes online or to remote formats, and their efforts have not gone unnoticed. They did a great job under incredibly difficult circumstances, but we've said all along there is no substitute for the learning that takes place in our schools, and parents and especially our kids deserve the best education we can possibly provide. The unfortunate reality is we're going to be managing this health crisis for many more months to come, working constantly to limit the spread so our monitors stay safe while making sure we can do the things we must do to keep our society going. We know we cannot completely shut down while we wait for a vaccine. We've had success with a cautious reopening thus far, and if we're going to do the best we possibly can for kids, it's vitally important based on recommendations from health experts and where we are with the virus today to reopen our schools. Kids need the structure, the relationships with their peers, their teachers, and other adults for their academic, social, and emotional development. As well as everyone did to quickly move to remote learning, we know a fully remote format creates gaps that kids can fall through, and unfortunately this has a greater impact on some students than others. We know equity gaps already exist based on differences in kids' needs, their home environments, and countless other variables, and these are exacerbated when educating only through remote learning, so we must do all we can to make sure that doesn't happen. I have complete confidence in our education system, its teachers, principals, superintendents, school board members, parents, and kids to meet this challenge head on. It won't be easy, but a lot of work has already been done. We have six more weeks to get ready, and we have a lot of common ground that we can build on to help kids succeed as we deal with the adversity of this pandemic. I'd now like to introduce Dr. Levine to talk more about the health factors in school reopenings. Dr. Levine. Thank you, Governor. Certainly the topic of reopening schools continues to be in the news and has become somewhat politically charged at the national level. Many of you may be hearing what seem to be conflicting messages. In Vermont, the Department of Health and the Agency of Education have recently published guidance on pre-K to 12 opening. There is no question that educating students, making sure they are making progress and safeguarding their health, welfare, and nutrition has been made vastly more difficult by the presence of the coronavirus. But we also know much more about the virus than we did back in March. Have a good understanding of the prevalence of the virus today in our state, are able to track and monitor data real-time effectively, and have many strengths in the testing and contact tracing arena to build upon and that help mitigate the risk of reopening. In the process, we reviewed multiple sources of guidance, including Centers for Disease Control and the American Academy of Pediatrics, which continued to be revisited and revised as appropriate. Vermont's safety and health guidance is clearly and emphatically focused on the safety of students, teachers, and staff. The process we went through was comprehensive, thoughtful, and engaged a multidisciplinary task force to develop specific Vermont guidance. There was abundant input and feedback from Vermonters, who are pediatricians, including the director of our maternal child health division at the Health Department, Dr. Holmes, pediatric infectious disease experts, one of whom you'll meet in a moment, public health experts, psychologists, special educators, school nurses, and of course, education professionals. We also examined the negative impact of not reopening schools on the intellectual, social, and emotional development of our children. Our document represents our best judgment based on current information and it will be updated regularly as new information and science becomes available. At this time, our Vermont data continues to support the safe opening of schools and we are ready to reassess at any point. Now to put all of what I have said in context, I'm pleased to introduce two other speakers. First, Dr. William Rasker, a UVM pediatric infectious disease specialist, will discuss a recent editorial he wrote in the journal Pediatrics and the science and pediatric studies to date regarding transmission patterns of viral infection, some of which I've discussed here previously. He will also speak to the tremendous support Vermont's pediatric community is providing to this reopening process. Next, a familiar face, our state epidemiologist, Dr. Patsy Kelso, will address the epidemiological basis for reopening schools, our capacity to test and trace, and our use of data and decision-making. Dr. Rasker. Thank you very much for inviting me. So in May, Dr. Ben Lee and I wrote a commentary in the journal Pediatrics in which we stated that serious consideration should be paid towards strategies that allow schools to remain open even during periods of COVID transmission and spread. We base that on three distinct findings, the first of which that children are less likely to become affected. The second is that children are less likely to develop severe disease. And thirdly and critically, children seem less likely to transmits the virus that causes COVID-19. The data to support our recommendations are as follows. In multiple household context studies conducted in both Switzerland and China and other countries, overwhelmingly transmission of COVID within families was from adults to children. Very infrequently were there cases of children transmitting the disease to adults. That would occur in much less than 10 percent of the time. In Iceland, early in the pandemic, when they tested a large percentage of their population, very few children were infected, and they could only document that they suspected two children had transmitted potentially the virus to adults. In Norway, the Ministry of Health has found remarkably little data to support that children are transmitting the virus to adults. Several school-based studies, particularly in young children, have not shown significant transmission of COVID within schools. In France, one COVID-infected nine-year-old boy exposed more than 80 students. There were no cases of secondary infection. Also in France, three children under the age of 10 exposed multiple classmates in three schools. There were no secondary cases. In Ireland, three children and three adults had 924 child contacts and 101 adult contacts. There were no secondary cases. In Australia, nine students and nine staff infected across 15 schools had close contact with a total of 735 students and 128 staff. Only two secondary infections were identified, none in the adult staff. One student in primary school was potentially affected by a staff member, while one student in high school was potentially affected by the exposure to two classmates. I should temper that a little bit by saying that in France in one high school, antibody studies did suggest that high school students in that area had been affected frequently. This publication of our commentary more data has emerged. In Europe, many schools opened this spring using a variety of mitigation strategies once the prevalence of COVID within the area was controlled. The data in these countries with low COVID prevalence rates is reassuring. In Denmark, they did not see an uptick in cases or in school outbreaks. In Norway, they did not see an uptick in cases or school outbreaks. A study of 2,000 children in school using antibody testing suggested a very low rate of infection in those children who had attended school. In school systems where no mitigation strategies were implemented, however, there is data to suggest increased positivity rate in children, but teachers in schools have the same infectivity rate as adults in the community. In areas where school mitigation policies were not or could not be followed or widespread community transmission was taking place, namely Israel, multiple outbreaks have been reported. The data all support reopening schools with appropriate mitigation strategies. In June, an interdisciplinary team with stakeholder agreement and buy-in from Department of Health, school nurses, principals, teachers met to discuss mitigation strategies to help minimize any potential spread of COVID in schools. A key recommendation was to require universal cloth face coverings, even in young children, not easily expected to transmit the disease. The data supporting facial cloth covering to prevent transmission is compelling. And for a few examples, on a United States worship, use of masking reduced infection rates from 8 by 30%. In Massachusetts hospitals, universal masking of patients reduced infection rates in healthcare workers. And most recently, in Missouri, COVID positive hairstylists did not transmit infection to more than 130 contacts because they were wearing facial cloth coverings. We believe that universal face cloth coverings will be an important part of any school mitigation policy. We have discussed school opening on multiple occasions on our V-CHIP calls. That's Vermont Community Health Improvement Projects and overwhelmingly pediatricians support reopening schools with appropriate mitigation strategies. Schools may be different next year and will be different. We believe strongly that with appropriate policies in place, that it will be a rich and robust environment for education and a safe one as well. Thank you, and I'll turn it over to Dr. Pelsa. Thanks, Dr. Arrasca. Vermont stands with the science. We have stood with the science throughout this whole pandemic response and we continue to do so. And as Dr. Arrasca mentioned, we have had, we've looked at the data. We've looked at other states and countries where they've restarted school. And we have, in fact, been, had a lot of experience over the last several months with childcare settings being open. And we strongly feel at the health department that the data currently supports opening of school. We are seeing more cases of children with COVID-19 nationwide and in Vermont, but that's not surprising as we move about more in society and interact more and as more sectors of the economy have opened. We have testing available more broadly in Vermont than we did before. It's more accessible to children through their medical homes and it's more acceptable to young people because we have nasal swab testing available rather than the NP swab, which is more invasive. And we know that in Vermont, children ages zero through nine years make up only about 3% of all of our Vermont cases and children between the ages of 10 and 19 make up about 7% of cases. So they are a minority of the cases that we are seeing in Vermont, despite the fact that we have broad testing available. And the governor talked about the concerning trends we're seeing with increasing COVID-19 transmission in other states. We're watching that very closely, but right now Vermont is in a different place than those other states. We have, through our community mitigation efforts over the last months, achieved a level of disease suppression in our communities that we think makes it appropriate to take this next step with opening schools. You've heard that the strong and healthy start guidance for school reopening was developed with broad support and feedback and input from infectious disease and pediatric health experts, public health experts, and education experts. And we had daily meetings to discuss all aspects of school reopening. And there are certainly challenges, and we feel like we've addressed those well in the guidance document. There are three main strategies. We want to keep COVID-19 out of schools, and so that's where things like daily screenings for symptoms come into play for students, teachers, and staff to keep COVID out. But we recognize that there may in fact be cases of COVID-19 in schools, and so to keep it from spreading the second strategy, we're doing things like testing people when they're symptomatic, using physical distancing and facial coverings, as Dr. Raskam mentioned. And then finally, when we do see cases in schools, preventing the further spread of that, and that is managed through the Health Department's contact tracing efforts, which we've demonstrated over the last months to be robust and able to take on situations as they arise. So we'll continue to monitor the EpiData, but we are in a different place in Vermont than when we closed schools back in March, and we're in a different place right now than the states that are seeing large increases. We understand more about this virus and how it's transmitted and by whom. We have robust testing capacity available and a robust contact tracing system in place to deal with situations when we see them. Thank you. I'm sorry, I was supposed to introduce Commissioner Pichett. Thank you very much, Dr. Calso, and good morning everybody. As a reminder for those again who are watching at home, today's presentation is available on our department's website, dfr.vermont.gov, along with resources from our modeling partners. As everyone knows, we have not only been closely monitoring our data here in Vermont, but we are also keeping a close eye on the regional and national data as well. It's been critical to keep this perspective because as we all know, Vermont is not an island and neither is the northeast. There was always a risk that what is happening in other parts of the country could have a direct impact on us here in Vermont. And as the governor said, the COVID-19 picture nationally is certainly concerning. We have seen a steady rise in cases over the last month, with our country routinely reporting over 50,000 cases on a daily basis. To put this into some perspective, just over the last 10 days, the United States has reported more COVID-19 cases than the entire population of Vermont. We can see that this growth is concentrated largely in the southern part of the United States, with new cases now far eclipsing the totals we saw here in the northeast in March and in April. But we're also seeing growth in the Midwest and the West illustrating just how interconnected we are as a country. To help us illustrate this, we have taken our travel map that we apply here to our states and counties in the northeast and maintained that same threshold across the entire country from the beginning of the pandemic. Similar to the heat map we presented a few weeks ago, the travel map shows that cases at the beginning were clustered largely in the northeast and a few other parts of our country before receding here and then spreading again throughout the Southwest and Midwest. Today it covers much of the country and in fact just 15% of U.S. counties would meet our criteria for non-quarantine travel into Vermont today. Again, like we mentioned, what is happening across the country can have a direct impact on us here in the northeast. Since the middle part of May we had been reporting a decline in week over week numbers of new cases in the northeast. However, last week we did break that trend with cases increasing just over 1%. That trend continues this week with cases in the northeast increasing by 9.74% compared to last week. But again, as the Governor and Dr. Kelso pointed out, this is simply a backdrop to what others are experiencing and here in Vermont our trends continue to be steady as we look at our four restart metrics. The percentage of Vermonters visiting emergency rooms or urgent care facilities to report COVID-like symptoms remains stable this week and today we sit at just 0.87% well below our 4% guardrail. Our three and seven day rival growth averages also held steady this week all trending safely below 1% and not demonstrating the sort of sustained growth that would give us concern. Again, regarding test positivity our rolling average is also under 1% this week, again safely below our 5% guardrail. Our fourth metric is hospital and critical care bed availability and like we've seen in recent weeks this continues to trend close to our 30% buffer and today in fact we are exceeding it. However, as we've pointed out in the past our non-ICU capacity remains high and generally with our other numbers trending well this is not a concern at this time. I'd like to turn now to our travel map and particularly highlight some visual improvements that we're making to the travel map this week. You can see the map generally has a cleaner appearance that more distinctly outlines the borders of the states that it applies to. But we also made a change to this platform because this will make the map more accessible to those who access it on smartphones or tablets and most importantly this platform will easily allow us to include Canadian health districts once the U.S.-Canada border is open so that they can be measured by the same standard we're applying here in the northeast. Again, I just want to provide basically a simple overview of what this map was trying to accomplish and provide the information for the update this week. We really were trying to measure what is the experience of the virus in certain parts of the area around us. If those areas were seen improvement the map would expand. If those areas were seen worsening case counts the map would contract and that's exactly what we've seen happen over the last four or five weeks. Here in New England we started out with about 3.6 million people that were able to come to Vermont without quarantine. That number increased to about 4.6 million then went up again to about 6.4 million before pretty much staying steady. We dropped a little bit last week down to about 6 million and this week we stand at again 5.5 million. So you can see that the northeast has opened up, remained somewhat steady but has seen a decline. Again when we look at the entire travel map picture it does paint something a little bit different. We did start with about 19 million people that were not subject to quarantine. That number went down to about 13.5 million people then went down further to about 11.5 million people standing today at 6.9 million people. So again I think this well illustrates how the map can both expand and contract based on the experiences that other states are having and as we pointed out earlier in the presentation we are seeing increased case growth across the northeast so that is something that is important to keep in mind. We also wanted to provide a comparison of how our travel map matches up with some of the other approaches taken in the region and across the globe as well. We applied the metrics that New York, Connecticut and New Jersey are using on a statewide basis for the states in the United States on a county level basis here in the northeast and you can see quite significantly how that is a very different picture than what we have here in Vermont standard. Similarly when you apply our standard to the EU standard you can see theirs is more conservative but on a whole the Vermont metrics line up more closely with this more conservative approach which is really what we were attempting to accomplish balancing the important interests of health and safety of Vermonters with the important tourism industry that's critical to our economy overall and we continue to see the map respond in that way. So with that I would now like to turn the program back over to Governor Scott. I was not just elected governor. I'm going to wrap up this portion of the press conference with an update on the reports of the 59 people who had positive antigen test results from Manchester Medical Center. So far as of late last evening we know that 17 of the 59 people have since had a PCR test performed which is recommended to confirm the positive antigen results. Of the 17 people 15 tested negative two were positive. What does this mean? Although our investigation is not complete it appears that many of the positive antigen results reported by Manchester Medical Center might have been false positives. There have been a lot of questions about the difference between antigen tests and PCR tests and how they are used. So once again I'll just go into that. PCR tests are the most common type of test used to diagnose or confirm COVID-19 infection and it is the test used by our public health laboratory. Antigen tests are a newer type of test only recently approved by the FDA that provide results much more quickly than PCR tests. They are intended as screening tools for people who have symptoms and while they are a useful tool for screening patients antigen tests may have a higher chance of missing an active infection and need to be confirmed. Positive antigen tests must be reported to the health department for follow-up. The CDC, WHO and the Association of Public Health Laboratory guidelines do not recommend antigen testing for people without symptoms. Studies on antigen tests have only been done on people with symptoms. We don't have evidence about the accuracy of the antigen test on people without symptoms. It might turn out to be a great test for everyone but we just don't know. And antigen tests should only be administered if there is capacity to confirm antigen negatives with PCR. There are a number of possibilities about the current situation but many of the 59 people who tested positive with the antigen test did not have symptoms. Other factors that potentially could play a role might be systematic factors related to the performance of the test or the time elapsed between the two tests. Again, the antigen test is recommended to be used for people with symptoms by the CDC and the Association of Public Health Laboratories. Studies on antigen tests have only been done on people with symptoms. We don't have evidence about the accuracy of the test on people without symptoms. Finally, I also want to share some details about testing efforts on folks within the community. The health department offered testing to the public on Wednesday in London Dairy and Southern Vermont Medical Center has offered testing in Manchester yesterday and today and will come back as needed. So far, our lab has reported that all 405 specimens analyzed from these initial test efforts in the community were negative. This is a good indication that these cases are not spreading within the community. Remember, we know of two positive cases, only two, though there may be more. We continue to investigate the situation and are treating all positive antigen tests the same as any positive case. Reaching out to each person, giving them guidance to isolate, tracing their contacts, and above all, recommending that they get a confirmatory PCR test. Our epidemiology team has succeeded in reaching all but 11 of the 59 people with positive antigen tests. So far, we have not found connections that would cause us to call this an outbreak. We are learning more about antigen tests and they are a useful tool for screening patients who do have symptoms. But our recent PCR results are showing us why they need to be confirmed, so we have a more accurate picture of current infection in patients. Please remember, if you're concerned that you may have been exposed to someone who has tested positive, please contact your health care provider to see if you should be tested. And to conclude, I again ask everyone to continue to follow the same simple actions as all Vermonters to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Wear a face mask around others if you are able. Keep six feet apart. Wash your hands frequently and stay home when you're sick. Now we'll turn it back to the government. Thank you, Dr. Levine. With that, we'll open up for questions. Let's start with Calvin. Hi, thank you. So, Governor, new unemployment numbers out today show that it's fallen about three points from May to June. I'm wondering if you and maybe Commissioner Harrington can weigh in on this. But whether we can expect that to see or what we can expect that to decline. Or if we may be clasped out in terms of unemployment, especially since we haven't really opened up the statement. Very difficult to determine. Obviously good news that it's declining and moving in the right direction. But we still have 50,000 Vermonters unemployed on either traditional unemployment or the PUA. So we'll have to wait and see. Again, it depends on how the pandemic unfolds and whether it has any effect on us here. And whether we can continue to open up the economy so that people can get back to work, which is of great concern to me. Commissioner Harrington, anything you can offer on that? Thank you, Governor. The only thing I would add, I think you hit on all the major parts. It will depend on both what happens in our state but also within our region and across the country. And it's going to be a slow process. It was good to see that the rate has come down in the most recent jobs report between May and June. And we hope that trend continues, but there are still a large number of people collecting unemployment. And it will be a slow process over the coming months that those people are able to go back to work. And just a quick follow-up. So within the next couple of weeks, the $600 that Vermonters have been receiving, that will run out. I'm just wondering how the state is preparing for maybe people not being able to pay their rent or their bills or, you know, for, I guess, yeah, without that $600. Yeah, again, it's a concern. The additional $600 was beneficial to many here in Vermont. It kept us stabilized so that they could continue to pay their rent. And we also had some other provisions in our economic recovery bill as well that would help in that way. So what I'm hearing, and I, you know, there's no way to really know, but Congress is taking a look at this. There may be some action. I'm not sure that it would be the full $600, but there may be a move to do something less. But again, that might be a better question for our congressional delegation at this point. In terms of preparing, again, we're doing all we can here in Vermont to keep Vermonters safe, to keep opening up the economy as much as we can. But we do rely on the region. We do rely on the rest of the country in terms of how they're doing. And so again, when I see I'm concerned about what I'm seeing in the south and west of our country, as well as how it's migrating a bit towards the northeast, although nothing to worry about at this point. But we're always trying to anticipate that. And so we want, again, things to get back to normal. But until there's a vaccine, until we can really control this, it's going to be something we have to keep an eye out on. Governor, are you confident that the troubles with the Labor Department in filing for unappointed benefits, technical challenges and stuff, has that been resolved now? Are you satisfied? Well, within reason, yes. We are overwhelmed at first, admittedly. We had our share of problems with callbacks and with a system that wasn't designed for this capacity. But we found ways to work around that, give great credit to the Labor Department as well as the tax department for working together and trying to come up with a PUA assistance. That's been beneficial, and that's been almost seamless. But the problems still are there. We have a mainframe that needs to be replaced. It's 50 years old. It's going to continue to be a problem in the foreseeable future. We're hoping that on a federal level, because we're not the only state that is experiencing this. In fact, if you reach out and see some of the other states, we're far ahead of where they are. We're one of the leaders in the country. As many problems as we had initially at this point in time, things are going fairly well from that standpoint. I give, again, great credit to our expanded team because it wasn't just the Labor Department, which did Yeoman's work and working seven days a week to get through this, but also some of our other agencies and departments that stepped up to help, whether it was the V-Trans or Department of Financial Regulation, Department of Motor Vehicle and Tax Department, and others who just sent people in to help out. I thought it was a good joint effort and is part of what I see as an expanded team that works together to try and help when others need it. And if I could follow up with Dr. Levine on the Manchester case, if I understood you correctly, up to 59, you've reached all but 11. So that leaves 48. You only have results for 17 of those 48. So do you know enough yet to say that this is not a concern or that this was a false alarm or do you just not know enough yet? Yeah, obviously I prefer to have greater than 27% or so sample size to be more reassuring, but at the same time clearly the data is trending in the direction that we have a large number of asymptomatic people and they don't appear to have a positive PCR test and the interviews are bearing that out. But I don't think it will be a long amount of time before we can offer more because so much testing is happening as we speak, so stay tuned. Do you have more today or not today? Potentially more today, but generally the way these work over a six to eight hour cycle, it could be very late in the afternoon and into the early evening. Moving to the phones, Joe Barton Chronicle. I've had a number of calls from readers who are concerned about this report saying that a federal government has asked for data about hospitals, admissions and various factors connected with the COVID pandemic to be sent not to the CDC but to a separate database. And what they're curious about is whether the state also receives that data. I think the concern is that it be kept in by someone they trust. Yeah. I'll let Dr. LaBear answer that. So we're all trying to sort through this right now because if you begin to read, you see concerns about politicizing of this data, taking it out of the CDC, moving it to HHS. But you also see some reports about perhaps the platforms and the data platforms weren't robust enough and they will be more robust with the move. I was fortunately out of phone call with the leaders of medical centers around the state and with the head of their association of hospitals and health systems who conveyed to me the knowledge that the hospital association nationwide actually is not concerned about this and does not feel that data is not going to be appropriately protected. So this is all like breaking news essentially so we don't have the final word to understand it as best we'd like to. But on both sides now we're seeing that there may be actually reasonable reasons for this to have happened without concerns but still some expressing some level of concern that we have to respect. But we don't know how it's going to play out just yet. But Vermont's data doesn't go through the states then. It goes directly from hospitals to the federal government. That I'm not 100% sure. In terms of the, you're trying to see if it probably would simultaneously come to us and the feds as opposed to just directly to the feds. Okay, so Commissioner Pichot may have an answer to that. Just that we get it directly as well. We do. So we do. He's confirmed we do get it directly as well. Okay, that's exactly what I wanted to know. Thank you very much. Sean, the Chester telegraph. Thank you. This is for Governor Scott. The CDC now says that it call Americans for masks for the next eight weeks. And Dr. Ratka was earlier noting the success of universal masking in light of this. Is the state having any just the administration having any discussions about mandating mask wearing? I have another question. Yeah, it's always been, you know, a tool in the toolbox. No disagreement in terms of the use of mass. My only resistance has been whether making it mandatory makes itself. I think we both want compliance. But just just leaving the magic wand and saying instantaneously that for monitors must wear mass again doesn't necessarily make this compliant. Or many for monitors compliant. So, you know, it's always been in the tools toolbox, so to speak. And I'm continuing to watch the numbers right now. The numbers don't warrant it. But again, what I'm seeing across the country, certainly what's happening, you know, as it migrates towards the northeast, it's another measure we could put in place if we have to. And we might just do that. But again, it's really, you know, no disagreement on the use of mass. I think everyone should be wearing a mask. And I've said that numerous times over the last few weeks. It's just the question of whether the compliance will increase if we made it mandatory. Or if there would just be more frustration and friction and resistance. Another question. We're hearing that houses in the area, especially in the resort sections of the area, are being rented by the weekends to people from state-by-large, vacation rental companies. And I'm wondering, is there a way the state is monitoring this and that it's understood that by these companies what the state's regulations are? Yeah, I'm going to, we do monitor in some capacity. We have guidelines for that monitoring. I might ask Deputy Secretary Brady or Commissioner Sherling if they have anything to add to that. Thank you, Governor. This is Ted Brady. I think the number one thing we're doing is educating people. And we're doing that by educating those large national platforms like Airbnb and GRBO. But also by educating the owners of properties across the state about what the rules are and what the laws are. And also, you know, our guidelines specifically require the lodging properties to have customers certified. They've met the quarantine requirements or the travel policy requirements that we have. And they require them, we've provided an actual certification form so that everybody that comes to the lodging property is looking and understanding that they have to attest to these specific measures or travel policies. I've met on a website for a large international vacation rental company today. And they have something like 300 homes in Vermont that are available for rental by the day. And I couldn't find anything that said anything about any restrictions, regulations, guidelines, anything on that. Excellent. Well, we'd like to know about that specific piece and you can contact each of the commerce and contact me and we'll follow up on it. Thanks. Yeah, Sean, if you could provide that information, that'd be helpful to us so that we could follow up. We'll do it. Thank you. Mike, down to you, the Islander. Thank you, Rebecca. Dr. Levine, we can start with a follow up. You had a pending question from last Friday and last Tuesday. You said you'd have an answer for it today. You're referring to the fire marshal, Mr. Yeah, we were discussing the ongoing refusal or lack of cooperation by some of the police fire and rescue to come into compliance and reporting to emergency management and in particular what your contractor documented in their investigation, including what happened at the Vermont Fire Academy. Right. So the Vermont Fire Academy incident actually, we're quite comforted by the reports we got from the Department of Public Safety and the commissioner that there was no significant incident that occurred. The individual did not remain on the premises for a very long time. And there was no need for any follow up public health investigation because there was no significant public health issue. We have not been having abundant need to investigate other public safety officials, if you will. Quite frankly, we wouldn't be going out looking for these incidents. These would be something that we were alerted to and hence had to follow up on. I think what I'd like to say though in general is our public safety officials are really heroes. They clearly are first line contact with people who may or may not harbor the virus and be able to transmit the virus. And we should applaud them for that. They put themselves into circumstances that most of us don't need to on a daily basis. No, I agree 100% on that. But it's interesting that, I mean, if in fact you're in the front line, if they have in fact been some in contact with something. There was a news story about the eight volunteer firefighters down in Heinsberg that had to go into self-quarantine. I mean, what do you think about that? Right, so I mean when those situations occur, we make our recommendation which may well be quarantine based on the degree of contact and the duration of contact with the individuals. And whenever anybody is asked to be in quarantine, they're invited to use the SARA Alert system to connect with us and get the proper education and advice that they need and reporting mechanism on a daily basis. So just like any other Vermonner, they would have access to that and be involved in that system. Again, that system is not one that we police everyone and track their movements every moment of the day. We've discussed that at press conferences previously where that's not the way we do that in this country using apps that would monitor their behavior and check their compliance. It would seem that in the Heinsberg case, and I don't know how much you guys did on that one of the Rotten City Police, that there would be, your contact tracers would be reaching out to them and doing full investigation. Just wondering what your investigations have shown concerning those cases and any others. As far as we've been told, no public safety agency has been reported or is self-reported, even though I think the Heinsberg and the Rotlin ones. Yeah, I had no further information to give you on those. Okay, thank you. Governor Scott, you probably saw earlier this week former Vermont National Guard supply sergeant was sentenced in federal court in connection with stealing about $180,000 worth of taxpayer property from his job. And the Vermont National Guard gave the sergeant a general discharge under honorable conditions, court papers say. And earlier this year, another National Guardsman was sentenced for stealing C4 explosives, and he was hoping to stay in the guard until he made his 20-year mark. Just wondering what those two cases and any others that you might be aware of show about the level of discipline currently at the Vermont National Guard. And I know the Guard has a lot of good people, but it appears there are some bad actors. And just wondering what these kind of cases say about the current discipline over there. Yeah, I didn't see the results of that case and out of Rotlin, I believe it was. But I remember the case when it was unfolding. I have a great deal of respect and appreciation for the Guard in particular. And as you said, we have a lot of great people there. Those who step up, put their lives on the line to help all of us. I mean, you can see what's happened with the National Guard through this pandemic. All the good work that they've done and continue to do, even with the tracing or the testing strategy. They had their, I think the 10,000th test this past week. So they're a vital part of our recovery and any emergency we have. General Knight has, again, drawn a bit of a line in the sand. And since over the last year or so, he's been able to accomplish a lot in his expectations. And I have great faith in what he's doing, what his team is doing as we move forward. But with any entity, with any sector, it isn't perfect. And people aren't perfect either. So there are some isolated incidents and we hope to keep them to a minimum or to eradicate them if we can. But at this point in time, I think their track record is pretty remarkable. Yeah, we've tried to get General Knight, but the Guard has not made him available this week. But to do bad cases there, where one guy's trying to stay in the Guard just to get a 20-year in whatever benefits and everything like that. I mean, you're the Commander-in-Chief, technically. Just wondering if you think that's acceptable. Well, again, I haven't spoken to him directly about either of those cases. I haven't spoken to him this week since that decision came down. So I will do so. If there's anything different that I can expand upon, I will. But at this point in time, I haven't spoken to him. Great. Thank you very much. Cap, WCAS? Hi, this question is for both Commissioner Picek and Dr. Levine, since I think you both then briefed on the material. I've been following the research from the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine. Their most recent study of about 500 people used both the PCR and serology testing as well as a survey to measure how prevalent the virus may have been in Chittenden County. They found in their sample about 2% of those people had antibodies to the coronavirus. Extrapolated county as a whole, that would mean potentially 3,600 people in Chittenden County could have been exposed to COVID-19. So far, we only know of 660 or so that were tested with the PCR and got a positive result of about 18% of the potential cases. Should we be doing more studies like this on a larger scale in Vermont so that we get a sense of how widespread the virus may have been? I'll start, Cap. Thank you for the question. Glad you got to the study in your inbox quicker than I did because I haven't read the full study yet, although I'm part of the steering committee. The 2% number is very comforting to me. I've been talking for months now about the level of virus in our state and concerns about needing to do more serology testing, antibody testing to figure out what level we're really at. And I've been using some national data talking about places like hot spots within New York City in the 20-plus percent range, places like that are active but not quite as hot as New York City still being in the teens percent for what they believe was their contact with the virus. I've kind of step-fastly assumed and held steady with a below 5% number for Vermont which has big implications for a lot of things but we've usually been discussing it within the context of achieving herd immunity. Herd immunity is 60-70% so the bottom line was we're trying to protect Vermonters from any of these significant complications of having this virus or even getting ill with this virus because we know that the majority of them have never seen the virus would be eligible for a vaccine when it's developed and clearly aren't going to be comforted and to stopping using the masking, stopping the physical distancing because of the fact that they feel we've got a lot of immunity in the population. We have very little immunity in the population. One thing that could be invoked is another type of study bigger than what UVM is doing called a seroprevalent study and we have actually discussed that with CDC. Since our state epidemiologist is here maybe she'll just make a quick comment about that because we've been discussing that internally over time as these questions about serology testing continue to come up. Thanks Dr. Levine. It would be ideal to have a sero survey where we could randomly sample a proportion of the Vermont population at a statewide level and see how many have antibodies. It would give us an indication of what we've seen in Vermont with virus transmission over the past months and how much vaccine we might need. The challenge is a couple things. We don't yet know a lot about antibodies and whether they're protective against the future infection or for how long they may be protective. And we honestly just haven't had the resources to stand up that kind of a study given the challenges with doing the PCR testing and contact tracing that we've been focused on. I would love to have that data. We simply don't have it. The Red Cross is testing blood donors to see if they have antibodies and so we've gotten some results from that and again those results on a small number, a very small number of Vermonters also indicate a similarly low proportion of Vermonters having antibodies. So UVM developed their own serology test that is far cheaper to administer and has a pretty high accuracy rate according to the researchers I spoke with. Would they be considering using the serology test that they developed given their findings about if accuracy and a slower cost and of course the fact that Vermonters supporting Vermont researchers? We certainly have partnered with them interested in this study and interested in the results and understand that the test platform they were using and indeed they've been part of our antibody serology testing workgroup that's been making recommendations to us every several weeks. The last time they met, their recommendation was obviously not to use these for individual decision making but again to consider a serocrevalent study but with the caveat that we should be able to piggyback on or partner with a larger study that was already in effect and hopefully involve Vermont residents and get Vermont data from that study. So the study that you're just quoting today was only meant to be the sample size it was to have the power to show what it's going to show. It wasn't meant to be this more expensive larger and potentially more expensive study on a larger population. And the C has no plans to implement a larger study on the population yet? Not independently for sure. We have actually broached the subject with CDC but they're not poised to help us with that yet either. Thank you. Ed, Newport Daily Express. A couple of questions on a topic and that is if a person receives a false positive test and that probably gets tested and they find out that the first test is false positive do you go back and re-attest the data? We are not counting probable cases in our case counts that we report at the state and federal level. So we are not in a position where with the Manchester cases we need to retract anything at this point. We are waiting to count those as cases until we have either a confirmatory lab result or they meet a case definition that allows us to report them. But right now we're only reporting out confirmed cases not probable cases. We're still following up on probable cases with all the appropriate public health recommendations and follow up. We're just not reporting those counts. We're encouraging testing with PCR which would lead to a confirmatory diagnosis and counting those cases. Ed, you're not... Ed, can you repeat the question? We only got about a third of that. The gentleman in a small community was positive and it showed up on the data. He was tested on negative, so it was a false positive. So I'm asking if once you have that confirmation data then you go back and re-adjust the number? I'll let Dr. Levine answer specifically and correct me if I'm wrong. But when I receive the data on a daily basis there are times when I see corrections made when something comes out of false positive or whatever it was they will make a correction to the record, so to speak. I'll let Dr. Levine answer. I think the governor answered that pretty well. Obviously, we have a whole epidemiology and health surveillance division that is very data driven and their job is to gather and analyze the data. So there are times that you may see a number on the website changing or not changing. Sometimes that has to do with what the state of residence was of the individual who tested positive or other aspects of their case. It's hard to generalize, so it does happen but it's not frequent. Can you add to the follow-up? Because I'm not seeing or using does have a failure rate. Does that seem to be symptomatic back in time to verify that it wasn't a false positive? Yes, so as Dr. Kelso was alluding to, there is a broader case definition that decides if a case is presumptive, probable, confirmed. We generally accept a positive PCR test as a positive PCR test as our standard and do the appropriate case investigation surrounding that. Thank you very much. Wilson, the AP. Hi, morning everybody. Another question about the antigen test in their use in Manchester. Given all the background, I guess Dr. Levine that you provided on their use, do you think they were used properly in Manchester? Did you get the question, Dr. Levine? Yeah, were they used properly in the bottom line? Yeah, so again, we're dealing with an incomplete sample size at this point in time, so it's very hard for me to generalize 100% across all 59. All I could tell you is of the ones that we have negative PCR tests on, the majority of them had no symptoms or no COVID appropriate symptoms for the case definition. And we'll see when we have hopefully the entire 59 assessed maybe better able to answer that question. But didn't you say that the antigen test is not supposed to be used with people without or asymptomatic patients or potential patients? And I think that's correct, right? So a lot of the people were asymptomatic in using this test. I don't know if you want to consider it a failure rate or an accuracy rate, but 217, that seems to select a pretty high percentage. No, I'm completely with you. I'm completely with you. I'm trying to, you know, think about the factors that as positive tests were reported in the community and people getting concerned and more people showing up and wanting to have a test, that demand was there. I can't say much more. I will just stand by what I said that it is not a recommended test to be used for an asymptomatic population, especially an asymptomatic population in a low prevalence setting. And Vermont continues to be a low prevalence setting further confirmed by what Kat just mentioned about the 2% zero prevalence rate in the state, but certainly supported by our PCR testing efforts and 1% positivity we have around the state. So it wouldn't be an appropriate test. I guess I could mention that, you know, this test is being used a little bit more broadly now because it's out. It's been approved. And I know that from an employer standpoint, it's often considered as a test to reassure the employer that their employees who may be public facing are infected and to reassure the public that frequents them that they're not dealing with infected individuals. Probably would not be the best use of that test based on what we know about it because most of the employees, by definition, if they're showing up for work, would not be symptomatic. So would they be falsely reassured by having a negative test because they got a negative result? Probably not the best time to use the test. But its convenience is the other countervailing factor that I'm sure is making it very popular because you can tell the employee within 15 minutes if they test positive or negative. But this should be, you know, I'm sure the FDA is looking at this across the country now and realizing the kind of use that the machines are getting. And if it turns out that they're getting used a lot for asymptomatic populations, they have to weigh in on that. Certainly if you use it in an asymptomatic population in Florida right now, that's a very high prevalence setting so things may turn out differently than they would in a state like Vermont. Okay, thank you very much. Eric, The Times Argus. I don't know if this is for doctor living Dr. Kelso, but there seems to be some confusion in the public when it comes to antigen first antibody test. People seem to be conflating the two and it's kind of understandable because even if you Google antigen test you'll get results for antibody tests in the search. So can someone explain what the difference is between those two? Sure, I'll take a crack and defer to the medical doctors. Antigen tests like PCR tests look for a current or active infection. They detect bits of the virus itself in the swab that was taken from the nose. Antibodies, on the other hand, are what we produce in response to having an infection. And with some diseases like measles, antibodies last for a long time, lifetime likely, and protect against future infection with other diseases like influenza. They're less robust, they don't last as long, they don't protect very well against future infections and that's partly why we need a flu vaccine every year. So antibodies are what our bodies produce in response to being infected and can prevent against future infection. Antigen or PCR tests look for the virus itself. One is the antigen and PCR are looking for current infection while antibodies can tell us we were infected at some point in the past but not when. And serology is a blood test whereas antigen and other PCR tests are typically a nasal or throat swab. And I'm getting the thumbs up so we'll leave it there. Okay, and I don't know if anyone there has any information but it seems like there hasn't been, it seems like there's a big question about these antibodies and if they will stick around and there's been talk of maybe antibodies only being good for a few months and that this will turn into a kind of a every kind of season kind of vaccine. Do we have any information on that in Vermont? We're going to give Dr. Rasko an opportunity to get to the podium. So we don't have that information in Vermont. There is some international data about that and the original information came out of China and in that situation 37 symptomatic Chinese adults were hospitalized in a particular hospital and 37 infected but non symptomatic, asymptomatic adults were hospitalized per protocol in China and they measured neutralizing antibodies over time. And neutralizing antibodies are the same thing that Dr. Kelsel talked about but very, very specific in the sense that we think they're binding to very particular pieces of the virus. And that study demonstrated that if you were symptomatic that 42 days after onset of infection 90% of the time you still had antibodies. However, if you were asymptomatic meaning that you were hospitalized because of code infection but had no signs symptoms only 50% of those adults still had persistence of antibodies. So that was a little bit concerning. There is another study that was just I'm not sure it's actually been peer reviewed yet it's just been released out of Italy suggesting particularly again that these antibodies arise reasonably quickly by three weeks most people have antibodies but they are waning and that by two to three months there has been decay rates so everyone's looking at this to see what are the implications for future infections and even for vaccinology. Thank you. If I could just, Eric just from a lay person's perspective and what I've learned over the last four or five months is this is such a new virus that the science is evolving and unfolding right before our eyes so they're learning more every single day we've learned more every single day and I think it's just too early for anyone to come to any any conclusion that you can count on so I believe they're working at it and hopefully we'll learn more as time goes on but everyone is trying to come up with a vaccine plus learn more about what it means when you've been infected. Thank you, Governor. Liam, VPR. Hi, this question for I'm just wondering a little bit about why it's taken most of the weekend we still don't even know or have been able to test all the 59 folks in the Manchester region who had the antigen test just I guess what's taken so long and when do you expect to have all this complete? Yeah, actually I think things are moving along pretty briskly but that's my perspective but the bottom line is we had testing Wednesday we had testing yesterday we had testing today we're hoping to capture all of these 59 needless to say we can't go to their home grab them by the arm and say go get tested so I can't even guarantee to you that we will have all 59 tested but that's our goal and that's the council we're giving all of them you need to understand that once the test is done it's been collected probably between nine and three o'clock during a day then it has to be transported several hours north to either the public health lab or the UVM lab and then it has to be run as an assay and if it comes in too late on the day that the testing was collected the specimen was collected it will be run the next day and there's a six to eight hour process that needs to be gone through for the testing to actually occur so there are there's still an opportunity and I'll stand by this but those tests when they are collected on a Wednesday they will be run on a Thursday if they actually got back early enough on a Wednesday some of them could be run on Wednesday but generally they'll be run on Thursday so the results will be out by the evening on Thursday so it's as good as it gets and it's as fast as we can go with this the important point though is nobody's health is being put at risk everybody who had a positive antigen test was getting the same advice the same instructions from the health department regarding what they should be doing and not doing and the contact tracing and interviewing processes were underway so it's just a matter then of awaiting the result to see if one can change their behavior or not based on if the result comes back positive or negative as these tests from Manchester were starting to roll in were you in real time contact tracing this antigen test and encouraging people to go get the PCR test it's a little unclear and confusing until at what point did the state see that there was a situation they needed to step in here so the Manchester Medical Center reported their positive antigen test to us that is the signal for us to get into gear and connect with the individuals whose test was positive and begin that interview process and any necessary contact tracing so that happens real time just as if they had a PCR test positive we would be notified by the lab that the PCR test is positive and get into gear with the individual who tested positive the public health behavior is not modified or changed whether it was a PCR positive or an antigen positive we still do the things we need to do and the only additional advice is to make sure that the antigen positive person knows that we would like them to get a PCR confirmation and just to be clear the numbers from the state that you're reporting every day those are reflecting the PCR test to do not the antigen test precisely so out of the 17 that I commented on there will only be two that show up on our update for new cases from there 15 will not I mean so then I guess what does that kind of do for modeling and sort of thinking about Vermont's average case loads and positivity rates we have all these antigen tests going on that we're not capturing I guess this is maybe more of a modeling question for Commissioner Pichak at what how do you take those into consideration if you're seeing all of a bunch of positive antigen tests that could indicate that Vermont is not doing as well as the modeling that you set up sure I'll let him answer that I'll just say though that again his modeling is not based on presumptive cases it's based on confirmed cases so we would want him to have only the data that he needs to have to do that modeling which is confirmed cases I think another sort of underlying question there that goes to you rather than Pichak is are there Liam indicated there are abundant antigen tests being done so far I'm aware of only one other site that's doing antigen tests though that may be growing if we believe news reports for sure but I'm not aware of abundant sites across Vermont that are doing the antigen tests just yet Commissioner Pichak did you have more to add? I think you covered it pretty well I think you covered it he confirmed he relies on our data which is confirmed cases Tim McQuiston Vermont Business Magazine hi two economic data questions one for Commissioner Goldstein one for Commissioner Harrington Commissioner Goldstein what are the latest numbers for the ACCD and the tax department grant the number of applications and if there's any money left over and for Commissioner Harrington I noticed that the labor force declined significantly and I was wondering if he might have an explanation for that hi this is Commissioner Goldstein thanks Tim for the question so happy to say that as of last night $33 million was sent out to the tax applications and that takes care of 800 applicants in total they had a little over 1500 applicants and on the ACCD side we have about 1,637 in process 333 were approved and yes there's money left over in both programs so we would urge folks to please apply it's the ACCD is taking a little longer but we will be dispersing talks next week that's great thank you regarding the labor force there are a couple of different components here that just need to be considered one we are seeing in terms of unemployment that people are going back to work there is also some of it is in the definition and what the Bureau of Labor statistics defines as labor force we do know that the number of jobs and employers has gone up in certain areas it certainly doesn't outweigh the number of people that were displaced due to COVID but even in the most recent numbers we've seen jobs in the leisure and hospitality are up over the month by 1500 education is up over the month 5.6 so again when we look at the total of being down 41.5 that is the loss in the employee population over the prior period which is due to the layoff and either the closure of businesses or the loss of those jobs that's not to say what may come back over as businesses either reopen or expand over the coming weeks, months and years but that is remains to be seen at this point I'm guessing that it doesn't include the USCIS for those that are coming correct it would not include that job numbers are compared on a year to year basis so when we look back we're looking back a year not just the prior month well two things that created me one is that sometimes that number will go down if people quit looking for work and the other thing is are you still seeing layoffs you know that the layoffs were coming early in the pandemic that there wouldn't be so many layoffs but our company is reporting to you still fairly significant layoffs yeah so two pieces there that you mentioned one is whether we're talking about jobs or we're talking about employed or unemployed individuals again some of that is is lost in translation when we talk about the definitions used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics so again when we start talking about people who are able and available for work or people who are looking for jobs at this point in time we run into an issue as people aren't necessarily looking for work during this period because they in many cases are temporarily displaced due to COVID-19 so it is kind of a weird spot we are in at the moment given the pandemic because the definitions don't necessarily line up with the condition we're faced at this point in time we do see a continued number of unemployment claims coming through but we are also and many of you may have seen that the department is taking extra efforts now to validate the identity of individuals filing new claims because we suspect that there is a portion of every series of new claims that we get there are those in that population that are fraudulent and so we are working to confirm identities on a lot of these and this is not any different to Vermont than what we are seeing across the country and from our partners in other states that there is a significant portion of new claims coming in that are fraudulent in some way and so that's why we are taking extra efforts to protect the system and protect claimants do you have a percentage of the number of projects that are across the country we don't we will yeah we'll know more I don't know across the country we'll know more as we review the claims on a daily basis what kind of triggered for us is that we are seeing a consistent amount pretty much every day and every week and it averages somewhere around 300 at a high to 150 out low for each day but an average of about 1500 new claims each week and yet we're not necessarily seeing that in the actual labor market and so now looking at different ways we can validate that information we had other steps in place but one of the pieces we're wanting to employ now is actually reaching out to all of those new claimants to validate their ID and I can tell you just in recent days you know sometimes we'll call a number and go to a hotel room sometimes we'll call a number it may be out of the country so again it's not uncommon based on what we're hearing from other states that there are a portion of new claims coming into each state that are fraudulent in some way all right great thank you all right just a quick time check we are about an hour into the Q&A portion it's only halfway through our list so just please bear that in mind folks next up is Lisa from the valley reporter good afternoon thank you for all the antigen information today it's super helpful is it possible to get the total number of positive antigen tests that have been reported in Vermont I don't know that off the top of my head but we'd be happy to get that for you thank you I appreciate that guy page good morning governor I know the treasurer is the constitutional officer with the most oversight over the state pension fund but with the state employees retirement fund losing 11% in value during the first quarter of 2020 the unfunded liability may be even higher than the 4.5 billion that's been talked about does your administration have a proposal to turn around this long-standing problem of unfunded pension liability well again this has been very of concern for all of us whether it's from the legislature the treasurer or the administration something that we've been contemplating for quite some time Dave Coates has brought it to the attention of many over the years maybe we'll get some attention this year because it is losing money but I'm not sure that any investment at this point in time isn't losing money so it's not as though it's the only here in the country but obviously it's still a concern and we'll continue to work with the legislature and the treasurer in ways that we can bring that into into reality what are some of the things that you might quick forward though too early at this point that guy certainly I'm not sure that they'll be wanting to take that up in their abbreviated session in August but this will be I'm sure something that will come up in January and depending on who is in office at that point in time and what the circumstances look like we'll I'm sure it'll come up and we'll try and work together and try and provide relief in any way we can thank you Chester Chester telling last week that state highway workers removed roadway graffiti saying quote BLM is racist giving her administration's direction to not remove graffiti that is not profane or grotesque or unsafe to traffic are you concerned that v-trans may be now selectively eliminating graffiti based on the content of the message well you know I have any racist comment that we want to remove are you suggesting that black BLM is a racist is racist isn't a racist comment I don't know I do for there are people who have a point of view that says that that they believe that BLM is racist in some ways but my point is you've got a political point of view that where it seems that v-trans may be discriminating this message it's okay this message isn't when the original direction was not profane or grotesque or unsafe to traffic inflammatory racist I would categorize that but your point is well taken I mean this isn't a perfect system we wanted to alleviate some of the tension here in Vermont across the country that we've seen we took this path forward so that we could tamp this down a bit I think was successful but we're going to have to come up with some provision in the future be happy I've spoken to some of the legislative folks about this I want to task our racial equity task force with this as well to get their input because we have to come to some conclusion where we go from here obviously we want to protect the investments of the state of Vermont we don't want to face everything we want to make sure that we provide equity across all perspectives so this isn't over I mean this is something that we're going to have to have some dialogue and discussion about and love to get the legislative input as well thank you Courtney, local 22 go ahead, Courtney I'm sorry I wasn't sure if I was on there just a quick question for Dr. Levine I know you had acknowledged in the past that some test results take longer to come back I was just wondering if that was still the case in how it affects Vermont's testing strategy and if there's any extra attention or priority to people with symptoms for getting tested versus people without symptoms for getting tested there was a lot of questions I'm hoping you can cover them so the so with delay in getting test results so either that's because the lab isn't processing the test quickly enough or because the lab processes it it gets a negative result and the person doesn't hear about it quickly enough so regarding the lab issue unless a specimen is being sent to a private lab a commercial lab which often happens in some of the smaller practices in the state who send their specimens directly to my knowledge we're not having delays in getting tests done by either the public health lab the UVM lab or the lab that UVM predominately uses for send outs which is the Broad Institute in Boston with regard to actually testing negative and not hearing about it because relying on the U.S. mail to arrive at the door which we've told can sometimes take a long time that has been taking care of very nicely with a totally redone call center so that not only will the person's negative result be known quickly to someone who can call the person but we have extensive hours each day for literally we're talking well over a thousand phone calls generated every day by the number of negative labs that are coming in so we now have a bank of people who can help accomplish that and I don't think you're going to hear that people were waiting for the letter by the way but not knowing what their news was because they're getting a quicker call so that was that set of questions then you asked about both antibody and antigen just if there's any priority to people getting tested like getting their results if they have symptoms versus if they're asymptomatic so the largest group that has a priority if I could put that in front of you is when we're countering an outbreak situation like what we're doing right now or we have a vulnerable high risk population and it warrant something happening for instance if we're testing within a correctional facility if we're testing in a long term care or a healthcare related issue where that result really needs to be known quickly to protect others and to enable the workforce etc so there are those higher priority groupings but that doesn't necessarily mean everybody else waits five days till their test is run it's just a relative issue where one is run faster than the other thank you Dan Wallace Allen, BT Digger Hi this is a question for Commissioner Harrington I'm still getting emails occasionally from people who say that they haven't been paid benefits or they're not getting their benefits for one reason or another and I'm just wondering if the DOL has cleared up the backlog or how that's going and part of it is I just might be related to fraud I don't know but on your insurance summary you guys have that 107,000 claimants have qualified for benefits and only 92,000 have received benefits and I was wondering what that discrepancy is short to a couple different pieces let me take the first one there is no significant backlog that remains in the system all initial claims are being processed yes you are correct there are people either deemed ineligible or due to some issue on their claim their claim hasn't been processed sometimes it is a known issue and that claim is in adjudications or appeals to determine eligibility sometimes it's an unknown issue that comes by way of something through our mainframe system or another issue we run into and I think the governor explained this pretty spot on in the beginning of the press conference that we've done a great job using the system that we have in place but it is not a perfect system and there are times where certain claims get caught up for one reason or another we are usually able to resolve those within a three day period once they get to a specialist sometimes we are seeing where people have called our call center and they either get a mixed answer or their issue isn't resolved right away and they are able to eventually get to a specialist and we are able to dig into it a little bit more but see your question and there aren't large populations of people that just aren't being served and hanging out in the system it's usually due to either a system related issue that has tagged or marked a specific claim non-payment for some reason or it's because they are moving through the prescribed process but in terms of us having large groups that just aren't being processed that's not the case with regards to your second can you just state that again I didn't quite touch the whole thing sure I'm the DOL unemployment insurance summary it says that 107,000 requirements are qualified for benefits and 92,000 have received benefits so my question is if 107,000 have qualified that's about 15,000 that haven't received benefits and I was wondering why so qualified means they get a weekly benefit amount so they are eligible under the monetary determination but it doesn't necessarily mean they are eligible under the determination so again it could be that it's a claim that got caught in our system that we're still working through and people are calling our call center to resolve those issues it could mean that they are going through the prescribed process but really the eligibility amount in the record simply means that they had wages in our system that made them monetarily eligible but there are not be eligible for unemployment insurance it just means that they reach the monetary threshold got it thank you I guess do you know how much fraud has cost the DOL since the pandemic started and yes I know this is happening in a lot of states and people were just waiting for something like this to come along I don't know a definitive number I think we will know are over the coming week so we are working with a vendor they've done an initial scan of the PUA system and are in the middle of the traditional buy system and then we will be sending them all new claims on a weekly basis once we review both of those initial scans and are able to track those claims that are only identifying potential fraud we then have to go in and investigate those to determine if they truly were fraudulent in nature I mean the one still relining I would say in this if there is one is that because of the size of our state the small size of our state we won't see numbers as big as some other states because a large bump in claims on a particular day would raise a red flag for us and we would immediately begin investigating where in other states they can see a large bump in a day and it doesn't necessarily alert them to a specific issue so we do know there have been losses we do know in our tracking when we come across it amounts that have been paid out some have been recouped others are sent to law enforcement so we do know there have been loss some of it is federal money coming through the PUA program some of it is trust money that came through traditional UI but we'll know more in probably the next two to three weeks when we can actually dissect the data we get from our vendor I think the bottom line for us from what I've seen it's not widespread at this point the ones that we have determined are fraudulent it's not an acceptable number as compared to other states so this may change but at this point in time it's not enough again to be really concerned about but we want to keep our eye on this okay the governor absolutely correct it's not widespread and the numbers are relatively small when you compare them to other states that are reporting millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars we're not there we're not anywhere close to that okay alright it is 12.52 and we still have six colors in the queue Steve any KTV can you hear me Ken thank you quick one for the doctor and quick one for the governor if I may Dr. Levine I had a question from a viewer did we stop counting traditional flu the data in January or February it seems to have dropped off the map that's a great question for our epidemiologist I can tell you the short answer but she may have a longer description for you thanks for the question one of our metrics that Commissioner Pichek presents every Friday is our COVID like illness we have a similar measure for influenza like illness we stopped reporting out of that in March or April because it was essentially zero flu season is seasonal it typically goes away at some point in the spring and then picks back up in the fall so we will be reporting out the influenza like illness measure in the next few months as we start to see flu activity again which is a reminder everyone get your flu shot when it's available we don't count in Vermont individual cases of flu so we never report out on the number of cases of flu we use this syndromic data which you'll start seeing again soon okay great Governor I had an old Yankee tell me one time that you shouldn't hit your horse to a wagon unless you knew it was in the wagon you should do it prohibition but going back to Guy's question about Black Lives Matter have you actually read their mission statement what they believe on their website and are you aware of their parent company which is a thousand current and their vice chair with a convicted terrorist named Susan Rosenberg that's quite a colorful history with bombings and stuff from the 70s I can say with certainty no so you haven't read their official website what we believe huh well that answers that thank you all very much Andrew, Jeanette hello I had several questions lined up about the situation in Manchester but most of them have already been discussed so I'd like to direct a question to Secretary of Education French if I may he's felt pretty left out here today so he'd love to answer a question I see him working on the sideline there I was just wondering about the original announcement that you started the press conference with about the reopening schools and whether or not the teachers union folks have been consulted about this and to what extent they're on board with the idea there was some concern expressed earlier that I was aware of that they were a little bit apprehensive about the idea of going back into the classroom in September and I just wonder kind of where those discussions might have landed hi Andrew it's good to hear from you we're neighbors I appreciate the question just to reiterate our guidance as it was developed and it's great to be on the stage Dr. Rasko in our state epidemiologists these folks really and their colleagues really and it's just wonderful to work in a state like Vermont where we can bring that expertise to bear and really create I think some really excellent quality product in terms of guidance so the development of our health guidance through open schools was a very collaborative process and the teachers association had a critical role in its development I think what you're referring to is the conversation that occurred after because our guidance was developed I think by the second week of June the conversation that occurred recently about a question prompted by Vermont NEA should there be an additional state planning council and I did not believe it's appropriate I still don't believe it's appropriate in particular as I mentioned you know we've already had very collaborative relationship with Vermont NEA and a lot of stakeholders on developing the guidance I didn't see the need to have a second group necessarily involved but I think more importantly what I'm observing now across the state and including in your area the work now is really about implementation and that work isn't necessarily in my view organized well at the state level because there's so many variables that need to be taken into consideration based on the local school conditions and so forth and importantly the relations between district leaders and their employees and their teachers and so forth so that work's happening now and that's was precisely my point why I was skeptical about the ability of us to handle those kinds of issues at the state level when really that hard work that's now unfolding at the local level is going to be critical through our success in reopening schools okay thank you very much Darren, Manchester Journal good afternoon everybody I wanted to confirm the numbers that I had heard earlier total number of tests is that 405 yes yeah 405 okay was that a combination of London Dairy and Manchester locations yes I believe it was 286 in London Dairy and the remainder in Manchester okay great and you could add to that another half a dozen or so at Grace Cottage Hospital thank you Dr. Levine the there's a hundred and five tests completed in the last few days is an impressive number why is this such a struggle to get the 59 antigen recast completed it sounds like perhaps they're not giving them priority or maybe they haven't even been retested is that accurate yeah I'm not sure it is a struggle I won't know it's a struggle until I know what the final number is we're fully expecting to see more of their results in the ensuing days if we don't that will be disappointing you're right but I wouldn't call it a struggle at this point because we've been in contact with all but 11 and they've all been informed that their next step should be to get a confirmatory test so I'm fully expected at least all of those will have tests and then we're continuing to try to contact the 11 who we couldn't interview initially and will continue to make efforts to work with them as well okay I guess I was under the impression that all 59 had been tested and that the results just were not coming in more quickly than they are on the antigen testing you said it's not for non-symptomatic people what is that what is the science that makes it not work that produces these false positives sure so in this case I would focus more on the false negatives than on the false positives because it is a less sensitive test than the PCR so there will be more cases of disease that it does not pick up because of its lower sensitivity and if you add to that having no symptoms of prevalence area you further reduce the likelihood you will pick up those cases so you want to use a test that has less of a false negative rate in that setting okay but you got 15 people that tested positive with the antigen that have now been tested negative with PCR are those not considered false positives yeah so we can call those a false positive but the question will be what is the reason for the false positive is it the fact that it was the wrong population being tested for that specific assay is it something systematic in the way the assay was done is it something to do with the timing of their PCR test which we don't think so because we think they are very close in time to the antigen test so it shouldn't represent a resolved infection or anything of that sort so those are all the bits of detective work that we are doing in tandem with trying to get these results reported on okay so we are being here for answers and you just not there again exactly it's an ongoing investigation like any of the outbreaks we have reported on to date it does take some time to get data analyze data reflect on the data and provide an accurate assessment of what's going on okay you had mentioned earlier that the FDA is likely looking into the antigen testing and the results and recently helping Human Services they are going to be putting in the antigen test using the same testing device into nursing homes across the country what are your thoughts on that concerning the fact that a lot of these nursing homes hopefully are going to be asymptomatic people that are going to be testing right actually I referred to that very a little bit tangentially earlier today the fact is we are probably not getting those devices here in Vermont even though initially it was billed as these are going to nursing homes everywhere I think they are being prioritized to the surge areas so the reason probably being that those surge areas because they are a surge area have a higher prevalence of the virus already they may God forbid but they may have nursing homes that have staff members or residents who are becoming symptomatic and for the purposes of protecting those who are not infected in those settings they want to have a very rapid turnaround test so they can make very quick decisions on public health and clinical point of view as to where a patient should be in what room what patient should be isolated from other patients what floor should be isolated from other floors etc because the last thing we want is to have nursing homes that have a very rapid transmission of virus throughout the nursing home and leave a lot of people very ill or God forbid dying so I think that's their logic I do agree with your initial thinking though that the logic of putting those machines in a state that has low prevalence of virus and that they have nursing homes where everyone is free of symptoms may not be the best use for them. Thank you. One last question for Governor Scott. Governor the legendary sweatshirt just very recently passed a mask as part of the mask order and the sweatshirt chair was quoted as saying we've been waiting for the governor to take the lead on this and so he hasn't could I get your thoughts on that? Well again I answered this a little bit earlier I think we both have the same mission that we all think that at least from my perspective I believe that masks make a difference and they're advantageous to help fight this virus. The question has always been from my standpoint is how do we get compliance? What's the best way to get compliance? I feel education and guidance is the right approach and we're doing that with our mask campaign as we speak and that will be beneficial regardless of whether we make a mandatory or not in the early stages I've given the flexibility to communities and take their own decisions based on where they are and what they're feeling I believe in local control and many communities took us up on that and implemented that many communities across Vermont who don't have a high prevalence of COVID-19 for instance in the Northeast Kingdom may not want to go to a mandatory mask type of approach so it was just trying to be sensitive to the needs of varying needs of those in Vermont from a leadership perspective giving them the flexibility to do so I think provides leadership having a mask campaign and providing guidance standing up here three times a week in previous weeks and saying that masks make a difference and you should be wearing a mask I think that provides leadership so again I'm not taking it out of the toolbox if we see our numbers change right now we're doing really really well in Vermont something to be proud of we have a high amount of compliance in a lot of areas so again the question is if we make a mandatory is it going to increase compliance Avery, WCAX Hi my question is about the school hybrid online in-person reopening model obviously there's going to be some internet connectivity to get over so what is it going to do to make sure students access to broadband in the next six weeks when school starts back up yes that's an important consideration we just to back up a little bit on that we published guidance on this concept of hybrid learning on Wednesday I believe you know as I mentioned earlier I think it's going to be an important tool for districts to have their toolkit on how districts will employ that we're seeing a lot of interesting creative planning going on at the district level now but as we mentioned previously today I think the focus clearly needs to be on in-person learning because that's what's best for kids in a lot of ways in particular I think there should be a priority on in-person instruction for the primary age students but in terms of the connectivity that's an important consideration I think we have two issues around deploying hybrid learning one is the connectivity and the other is to have the online tools to actually organize that we were able to get the legislature in partnership with the governor to make an investment in our CRF funds the Coronavirus Relief Fund to allocate some funds for a broadband so my expectation and hope would be that this summer we focus on those critical areas sort of those critical last mile issues and make that initial investment but I think clearly that's going to be a longer term investment that's needed and I'm hopeful that we're talking about congressional delegation that will be future investments in this area I think it affects education as well as telemedicine and broader systems as we try to reach out in particular some of our more remote areas I think in terms of online tools we've made some progress in that regard since the spring at the state level we've made investments in our expanding access to the Vermont Virtual Learning Co-operative which will expand our districts provide them free access to a learning management system and a robust set of tools for professional development to help teachers learn how to teach online we've also announced a partnership with EdMoto to build out an ecosystem so a lot of the ideas that Vermont teachers are creating now in districts as they're trying to deploy our guidance we want to ensure that there's a way they can share the best ideas across the state so that's essentially the function of EdMoto so I think we're on the right track to address some of those issues but I would agree it does as a concern and there's going to be issues of equity I think that's precisely why we want to give districts the flexibility to have the ability to deploy in-person instruction as a priority but also have the ability to fall back on hybrid learning or even remote learning as it conditions the virus change in our communities and a quick follow-up what are the realistic expectations for students during this? I mean the school day is typically seven to eight hours how are students going to get a full education what are they going to be expected to be doing? Yeah it's a great question I think you know it's also for me as an educator it points to you know when we start thinking about reopening as the governor said what does opening mean? I think as educators in particular as we think about opening for the fall our priority needs to get students back in the classroom and get them back together so we can begin to assess the impact of the virus and what has occurred in the spring in terms of remote learning you know just the fact of opening school itself is a significant intervention and important so important to students and also the vibrancy of the communities so we need to focus on that for very strong compelling educational reasons I think you know the larger issues of you know the structure of the day and so forth we address some of that in our hybrid guidance hybrid learning guidance that we put out on Wednesday which is essentially some regulatory advice on how to navigate the attendance requirements and so forth so I think there are ways to deploy hybrid learning in particular that can satisfy our attendance requirements we're going to be interested in capturing data on that but there's going to be I suspect a conversation around asynchronous and synchronous learning meaning particularly the remote or hybrid options synchronous with the sort of in-person instruction but all those tools need to be out there for districts right now maximum flexibility I think is the word for them as they seek to implement the guidance that we created at the state level. Thank you. Sorry Derek seven days. Yeah two hopefully quick questions for Dr. Levine I'm curious why the urgent care clinic in Manchester didn't have the capacity to swab for these confirmatory PCR tests prior to the quote-quote outbreak being discovered the clinic told me that they had requested the test kits from the state repeatedly and had been implicated in that and the second is that you mentioned there's one other site doing antigen tests I'm just wondering where that site is sure answer the first question is I'll have to look into it I'm not aware that there was a problem in getting them supplies but obviously there was I know that they have gotten some sense the second one there was a WCAX story last night in today that interviewed I'm not sure what his position was the gentleman associated with the spot on the Wellington waterfront who was using the test so that's the other site that I'm aware of I was actually aware of it before the news story but that's the one I'm aware of so this is the only this is the only doctor's office or two clinic medical facility that's been using antigen tests from on to your knowledge to my knowledge yes I don't know that that means there aren't others using it and if they're testing negative they'd have no reason to report a result to us okay thank you Greg the county courier it's 113 so please keep it brief yep I certainly will I guess to keep the best for last year governor I guess some questions about going back to school here I talked to a parent yesterday who in preparation for sending his son to the castle then had been waiting to find out if there would be in school or online learning and upon hearing that there would be in-person classes put down $1,800 for an apartment for first month's rent and security deposit whatever finds out yesterday that the school's going completely online so that money is essentially wasted for that student and that student's family and at the same time we're hearing that the state's making decisions to go to bring primary students back to school in the fall and making that decision almost entirely based on Dr. Raskin's theories of spread among youngsters and it just seems like the state has some inconsistencies in the way we're responding to going back to school like we're making decisions from a two-headed dragon's point of view or a seven-headed dragon's point of view what can you say making consistent policy? Thanks for your commentary in terms of Castleton versus K-12 two different animals from that perspective that wasn't our decision to not provide in-person instruction at Castleton I've spoken to a number of other colleges and universities in Vermont that are planning to have those in-person instruction hybrid type of approach with those living on campus I still believe that this isn't just one expert although I believe that Dr. Raskin has done a lot of research on this there are others across the country who feel the same way I think about the kids who fall through the cracks because of not having that connection with their teachers and not getting the education that they so need and deserve so we're moving forward I think this is the best approach I'll ask Secretary French if he has anything else to offer but we believe as do many across the country that this is essential to our kids and if we can do it safely and find a path towards doing that I fail to see why we wouldn't I think the Governor's observation they are two different animals we don't necessarily control the decision I think what I was going to use the opportunity for your question is just a comment on we will be coming in with guidance at the end of the month priority of the month on sports at the K-12 level which I think was part of the conversation I think also the college level as they were making determinations just to use as an example athletics are highly dependent on out of state travel and so forth that's not necessarily the case in K-12 so I think there's a lot of considerations that aren't necessarily applicable but we've tried to be very consistent I think in grounding our decisions in K-12 on the science and certainly having that be informed by practitioners but I don't necessarily see them as being the same environments and the students certainly are different in many ways in how they behave so I know some parents have kind of looked at the situation and thought well you know you have elementary high school students that are going to school coming home possibly spreading the virus to the home maybe grandparents that are staying at home that are at higher risk and you compare that to college students who are basically contained to a campus even if they do pick it up they're contained to a pretty small campus you know it just seems like a divide there I'm going to have Dr. Levine weigh in on this as well I just wanted to return to the college issue because we did have Rich Snyder here a week ago or so and extensively discussed the reopening plans for colleges and universities in Vermont and though Castleton did come out with its decision and it is their purview to do that they are abundant and I will use the word abundant other colleges and the University of Vermont within the state that have plans to reopen and have the same concerns you just voiced about you know students on campus and what's going to happen what might happen but they are implementing all of the guidance appropriately and making sure that when students arrive they have a substantial testing commitment and a quarantine protocol so that they will try to keep their campuses as safe as possible from the beginning and then of course they've implemented tremendous other guidance to utilize as the semester goes on so don't get misled into thinking that the colleges are not reopening and they are an exception to what's happening in K-12 education because the majority of the colleges are actually looking forward to reopening and working very assiduously at making sure that this goes well and that they make it as safe an environment for everyone as possible just a quick follow up I know Rebecca probably won't let me call in if I keep going there are some people that have taken a general topic and the idea that we're sending our kids back to school based on Dr. Ratzka's advice that we're essentially sending our kids in to be lab rats for the next year and see what happens Governor, what's your assessment on that? I just fundamentally disagree I believe that we are finding opportunities to bring them back safely we enjoy here in Vermont a low positivity rate I believe we've gotten through a lot over the last four to five months we've learned a lot we can do things differently and it's just so important for them to have in-person instruction trying to bring them back and if they can't have a hybrid approach if we can't do that we have to come up with other ways but the goal should be the same what's best for our kids and if parents don't feel comfortable with that there will be an opportunity not to again we're just trying to do the best we can try and pull in the same direction get all the best ideas on the table and provide for the next generation future generations today because what we do today could have an effect on them for the rest of their lives so what's best for them? is that it? okay thank you very much for tuning in