 Please refrain from asking any personal health questions that contain any identifying information. So we have with us today Amherst Town Manager, Paul Bakerman, Amherst Regional Public School Superintendent, Dr. Mike Morris, and Amherst Director of Public Health, Julie Federman. Starting us off with some important updates is Town Manager, Paul Bakerman. Take it away, Paul. Thanks, Brianna. So welcome to our Zoom world. We're all living in a Zoom world or Microsoft Teams world or a Google Hangout world now. And I hope everyone is doing well. And I really thank everyone for joining. It's been a lot of people joined in very quickly. So we appreciate the interest and how everybody is still involved, even though it's not as we normally do it. So Brianna and Julie and Mike and I are here to answer any kind of questions and talk a little bit. There's Brianna. And you have different views that you can do if you haven't been on Zoom before. So you can see everybody. You can see just one person. You can play around with that as you do it. So, and just so you know, we're all in Amherst, but we're in all different sections of Amherst, from North Amherst to South Amherst, to all downtown everywhere. So we're all located in separate locations, properly, socially distanced. So first thing I wanted to say is how proud I have been of our staff who, oh, everyone's been stepping up in a really remarkable way to do the things that they normally do, but do it offline and sort of like Ginger Rogers, backwards and high heels, but with offline and with fewer tools. So our staff has really done a terrific job. So, and things are switching very quickly. Seems like every day we have new information, we make a different decision. So I really appreciate the patience that everyone has given to us, especially the town council who's see, I'll tell them one thing one day and they'll be like opposite the next day. It's just the way this managing in this environment is. The town council has been super supportive and playing a really pivotal role in being, in helping us get the word out to the public. This pandemic, I think it's gonna lead to a fundamental change in how we do business. We actually see it as an opportunity to be able to do things in a different way. I see this is going on for a very long time. Right now that the governor's order extends until May 4th, it wouldn't surprise me at all if this went even farther than that. I think as we learn more about the spread of the pandemic, we're going to learn more about how long social distancing has to be in place so that we really flatten the curve. It's just what everybody's been talking about. So a couple, I could pay attention to my time. Couple of things I wanted to update you about. First off, our first responders are healthy, available, and able to serve us and have the equipment that they need. We are expecting the rise of calls and cases to start to accelerate. We're at worst just at the bottom of that curve now, I think. So in the next two weeks from what everyone is saying is about in the next two to three weeks is when we will see that really peak. All of our calls for assistance for police and fire and EMS are down at historic lows, actually, which is very fortunate for us, but we anticipate that that will ramp up. And in anticipation of that, I have added four new firefighters from the call force and the student force to help supplement our existing force. And the reason for that is if one of our firefighters or medics gets exposed to COVID-19, they will have to self-quarantine for 14 days and that takes them offline. So we need to have plenty of support. So we're as prepared as we possibly can be. Police have instituted new operation protocols. So when they go to a domestic violence disturbance or if they could call to a party, they are observing proper social distancing protocols when they do that. And I also want to mention DPW who are also our first responders. They with water treatment and wastewater treatment. If those things don't operate, nothing operates in town. We know that our plumbing is a really important. So they're all healthy. We've added a wastewater treatment plant operator moving from highway over to wastewater treatment plant so that they have an excess capacity. And we've also staggered some of our shifts. So people aren't working all during the day. They might work at different times. So if one group has an outbreak, then the other group is still available. And then lastly, our town operations are really going well. There are some people who still have to come into town hall which is where I am right now because it's the only way we're able to do the payroll at this point in time and to open the mail and things like that. So we have as minimal staffing as we possibly can. I do want to give a shout out to our maintenance crews who are here right now doing a very deep clean of our building. Just really getting into every nook and cranny is an opportunity. But it's also a way to make sure that when the employees come back that we've really sterilized the entire environment. So we've taken some steps relatively recently. We've closed playgrounds at the playground equipment and cooperation with the school superintendent for all of the town's playground equipment and for the school department's playground equipment. The governor has extended the limit on gatherings no more than 10 people to May 4th. We will be enforcing that in a sense that we will use public education. So if you see a gathering of more than 10 people who feel like they're uncomfortably close, give a call and we'll send a police officer over there to sort of talk to folks about what the importance is. While many of us know, understand that social distancing, a lot of people haven't gotten the word yet or they don't think it applies to them or they feel they're immune. It's not the case. So we have to keep on educating folks along those lines. Our first order of business has been forced protection which means the people who are first responders have to stay healthy. If they're not healthy, we can't serve you. So forced protection is always our first order of business. I meet daily with our core team. The first thing we do is go department by department to understand what's our forced capacity? Who's healthy? Who's not? Are we still fully showing up to work? We have a lot of people who have been quarantined or have been self-quarantined. So that's gonna happen in a large organization just as it hasn't been an issue today but it's something that we monitor every day. We also have developed continuity of operations plans. Some people call it COOP, C-O-O-P. So those are all things that are being put in place by departments. Not every department has the capacity. You can't really fill a pothole from your UC chair so DPW guys have to be out here doing that kind of work. One thing that we do ask is to really pay attention that flushable wipes are not flushable. They do clog the sewer drains and that means we have been sending crews out there more frequently to flush the drains because they clog up, they can clog into your basement. If it doesn't dissolve in water it should not be put into down the toilet basically. So we ask you to please observe that put it into a plastic bag and throw it out. I wanna mention our new website that Brianna has been working on and developed. It's called AmherstCOVID19.org and it will pop up eventually. So that's where we're gonna be consolidating all of our information. And there we go. And this, so it'll be consolidating all of our information as a separate site away from our website. And this will be built out over time. People working on this to add more and more information, more relevant information. It's a site you should go to on a daily basis. So the only four other things I want to mention are vulnerable communities. If you've been downtown you've seen our, it's kind of deserted. Our local businesses are suffering but the deserted streets really looks disorienting but I think that's a good thing. That's a sign of love. It means that we're all respecting the social distancing thing. So when you see empty streets, that's a good thing. I came to work this morning and there were a lot more cars on the road. I thought, ooh, I'd make me worried because it felt like people aren't staying home. When the weather warms up I worry about people not staying home and abiding by the social distancing thing that we've asked people to abide by. Our elder community and our seniors are very important. Our director of senior services has been working really hard to make sure that folks are staying, that people are in touch with them that they're getting the food that they need, things like that. Food security is a really big issue for our community. Mike will probably touch on that a little bit. Also, Lev Ben Ezra from the Amherst Survival Center will be presenting at the town council meeting come Monday. And then our homeless community, it's a very vulnerable community. We've been working really hard to help make sure that there's a place for someone who is told to isolate at home who doesn't have a home that we find a place for them to stay. It's been an enormous challenge. We've worked that every day and Julie's been on the lead on that. So those are sort of the sort of brief updates that I went to get probably a couple longer than I had anticipated. I know Mike has a few things and then we will open up for questions. Sure, thank you, Paul. And I want to say from the school's perspective, it's been a great partnership with the town. Lord knows how many times I've been on the phone with Paul and Julie over the last couple of weeks for a whole range of topics. So I just want to thank the town for inviting me onto this webinar, but also for the partnership because it really, we sort of often, we're a part of the town but we're three different districts and how that all works and really it's all about making sure we're taking care of people now and it's not about the kind of artificial boundaries that sometimes get created. It's really about how do we work together in a situation with a global pandemic to make sure we're taking care of our people. So I really want to thank the town for that partnership. For people who don't know, just going backwards a little bit. So I made the decision to close our schools on March 13th, Friday, March 13th and that was announced with a video message to students and staff and an email to parents, guardians and the community and at that point I decided to close the schools for two weeks. On that Sunday, March 15th, the governor decided to close all schools in Massachusetts and that order has been extended. So it can't reopen earlier than I think it's Monday, May 4th as the town manager indicated the stay home order also ends on May 4th. And while the, I think the members of the public have asked me very good questions of, do you really think that we're gonna put kids on buses the day after a stay home order ends right now? That's the governor's decision. I think as we move along, as the town manager said we'll see about timing and whether that gets extended as well. So I think there's a lot of questions about what that would look like and what would school look like would there be extracurriculars if the kids come back in the spring and so at this point we don't know and we're doing our best to continue to communicate to our stakeholder groups throughout and really so, you know, since March 13th, when schools close our focus has really been threefold. Communication, safety and distance learning. And so for communication there's a website that we set up that you can link to through the site that, you know, Paul and Brianna talked about a little bit earlier. We've sent 15 communications about COVID since, you know, this all started. And so we also have had social media we've used in other sites to expand beyond just our typical email base. And so we've been working on that. Principles of sent home videos and other communications directly to students. One of the things that we know that was incredibly important to us was that in this period where we're doing physical distancing as best we could to stay socially connected. And for many students regardless of age level being connected means seeing a video of their principal. So at our elementary school they're sending two or three a week there's some special effects in one of ours. So if you're ever curious, go to the Wildwood site you'll get to see Principal Yaffe and his dog and all sorts of special effects but the feedback's been incredibly positive because it is a disorienting time for many people who are home more often and we wanna make sure that we're doing our part to stay connected, to help people stay connected. Our teachers, our staff members have reached out a variety of ways, videos, conference calls with students, conference calls with families, emails staying connected in all sorts of ways. Tomorrow Fort River staff are doing a parade through the catchment area, the enrollment zone of Fort River to be able to as a physically distanced way stay socially connected to students. And that'll be a lot of fun and we appreciate the town for supporting us in that effort as well. So really we feel like communication is always important. It's incredibly, the importance of it is only more right now given the current situation of the physical distancing. The second piece briefly I'll touch on on safety. So after March 13th, we spent a tremendous amount of time to sanitize all of the schools and school buildings. I wanna publicly thank our custodians and maintenance crew for their incredible work on doing that and being so fistidious even in the weeks leading to when it was closed. They changed cleaning protocols, we changed our products, we've bought different technology, different machines around sanitizing and they have been just tireless in their efforts. At this point schools are locked and closed. So those efforts are shifting a little bit to other projects as few people are going in them. The vast majority of our staff, much like the town is working remotely and those who aren't are working with physical distancing guidelines in place. In terms of safety, we also feel food scarcity as a safety issue. And so within two business days of our closure we began food delivery to 13 sites in Amherst, typically high density sites. And we're now partnering on UMass for about half those sites. We thank UMass for their partnership. They get a little more sustainable for us. But in the last two and a half weeks we have delivered over 5,000 meals to families which we're really proud of. The efforts of our food service department, our family center, our drivers. We know that getting to the schools was gonna be a barrier for some families. And so that's why we're going out into the community to do that. New tomorrow, we're gonna put more meals in our Friday meal boxes to cover part of the weekend. So there'll be four meals in the Friday meal box instead of the two so we can provide more food for families over the weekend because we don't have deliveries happening at that point. We're also working on expansion to the town of Pelham as well because they're our partner and then the district that I work for. So the last thing I'll talk to briefly and then we'll look forward to open up to questions is distance education. So the state's guidance at the beginning of the closure was to provide enrichment activities and our teachers have certainly gone above and beyond that and supporting students. At the end of last week with the extension of the closure, the state provided guidance that goes a bit beyond enrichment and what we're talking about going to distance learning 2.0. So our 1.0 version was enrichment activities, opportunities for learning. And the 2.0 is really going a little beyond that. At the high school level, there's a credit no credit kind of aspect for students but beyond that it's being a little more as this looks like it's gonna last for quite a while being more organized in our approach. So we had 155 teachers and administrators working over the last two days to talk about that transition plan out what that'll look like. We're getting feedback from every single staff member in the next couple of days and by the end of next week we'll have rolled out distance learning 2.0 which I think for many families they'll find more organized and more structured in their approach. It's still not going to be six hours or four hours or three hours doing what we're doing now on Zoom or Google Hangouts. We don't want kids on screens that much but we wanna provide much more opportunities for students to go deeper into previously taught concepts. And we also wanna support students who have special needs and who are English language learners in ways now that we've had a little time to organ ourselves into more robust ways than what we were able to do with the quick closure and that turnaround. I think from a technology point of view all of our middle school, high school students have Chromebooks and by the end of next week by the time this distance learning 2.0 starts we'll have given out over 300 Chromebooks to students in grades K to six based on families and student needs. So we're trying to provide technology to support the application and we do have non-technological solutions. They're just, they're a little limiting particularly on the social communication part that's harder to do when you're not doing something like this at video conference. We also this week have purchased mobile hotspots and we're in the process of identifying which families need them to have Wi-Fi access because we know that a Chromebook or even a laptop without Wi-Fi access is really limiting. And it's not just limiting from a student perspective certainly that's true but also from a family perspective at least they an age where that's where lots of people are getting their information is from being online. So we made the purchase and we have to get the hotspots in they have to get configured but we expect to get those out in the next couple the next two weeks to families so that we're expanding Wi-Fi access both for academic reasons but also for health safety and security reasons as well. I think I've exceeded my time limit as well Mr. Bachman I apologize but I'll stop there and then perhaps open up for questions and I'm happy to expand on anything that I mentioned in the last couple of minutes. Great, thank you. We have some questions coming in and I just wanna take the opportunity to remind our attendees the way that you can submit your questions if you've joined us via Zoom is the Q&A button type your question there it will come in and be visible only to the hosts we will try to get to as many questions as possible. So I will start with the first question that came in what do you suggest for college students who are living together in an apartment to stay safe and healthy? Julie. Okay, thank you for the question. I think it's a tough time for everyone to have to be staying in and I think that one thing you wanna be doing is supporting each other in this whole effort because it's very lonely for a lot of people. So getting outside and getting into nature is a really good break. You do have to be careful when you go outside that you're still using your social distancing that you're staying six feet apart. If you're sharing an apartment I think coming up with some ways that people can have privacy. So if that means that one person goes out for a walk at a different time than someone else if there's two people then you're sort of breaking up the space a little bit. I think balancing your time between screen time and outdoor time I think we're really lucky that this is happening when the weather is fairly warm and it will only get warmer. I think it's very important even though you may have heard that you're in an age group that you're less susceptible to the disease or that you may not get as sick that we're finding that people are getting sick and that they're transmitting the disease so that it's just as important for you to be doing the social distancing, washing your hands, keeping surfaces clean. And we really appreciate how hard it is for you to do that. Okay, so we have a, the next question is regarding if the governor, it's possible to ask the governor to get a testing site for COVID-19 for our first responders such as police, fire, EMTs so they don't have to drive all the way to Shrewsbury to be tested. So I can start with that and Julie can add more. So there is a centralized testing site in Shrewsbury for first responders. They did that because they're trying to manage the limited resources that they have. If there are resources available in Western Massachusetts then we would be encouraging them to set up a site here. Cooley Dickinson is working hard to get that type of facility going. And so I think that it's more the limiting factor is not do we want to, is do we have, can we run one responsibly with the right testing kits that are available? So anything you want to add to that Julie? Just that we hear this request loud and clear and it has been communicated up whether it's to Cooley Dickinson or to the state that we really would like to have a testing site like that out here in Western Mass. So we really understand that there's a need for that. And as soon as it's possible we hope that that will be happening. Okay, we've got another question here. Can Amherst Media give time to teachers for lessons, read aloud and other content? Yeah, so I'll take that one. Amherst Media has been a great partner with us. What they have been doing is we ran a video series some years ago, I want to say 2011, 2012 that was really focused on reading stories out loud for young students and also organizing it where parents are able to watch with their young students. They can acquire some tips and skills on how to do read alouds in an interactive way with young children. So they've been partnering by reshowing those videos which while they're eight years old there's other than perhaps the quality of the video from Amherst Media's perspective that the content, the educational content's the same. They're also running some of their other shows that are more focused on educational content as well. And we continue to explore with Amherst Media if particularly if this goes on for quite a bit longer what's possible, but the other partnership the state has made is with WGBH and WGBY which are the two public access channels in the Commonwealth and they will be showing live, not live but tape lessons of master teachers during the academic, what would be think of as the academic day. So on channel two and channel 13 or something like that depending on I guess what network you have for cable PBS is doing that in a very organized way from the state level and that's really helpful for us because they're putting a lot of energy and resources into incredibly high quality content and mixing it up every day where, you know what grade level it is and what content area it is. And I think as we're not been instructed at K to eight anyway at the kindergarten through eighth grade level to not teach new content, these are lessons that really go at the deeper level and they're engaging and fun and get often to the point that Miss better Julie made is get people outside into nature to explore the outside world but having academic content along with it. So MR speed has been a great partner as is PBS and it's nice to have a statewide organizing organization whose our department of education is working with PBS on that. Next question is what is being done to help local businesses supply for federal aid or other supports and is there any information about rent delays? So we, the business improvement district and the chamber of commerce have worked hard to stay engaged with the local businesses. They've gone to be going door to door when they were still open, they're staying in touch. Some land, it's an issue with paying rent to landlords and some of the landlords have been very generous about extending or forgiving rent for several months which is really tremendous. And there are resources on the chamber of commerce and bids website. And that's something that we may be we can add to our COVID-19 Amherst website as well. So businesses can be better prepared. We're devoting some town resources to this where we actually meeting tomorrow with the business improvement district and chamber to go through what's the best way for us to get this information gathered in one place. Great, so next question I think would be for Julie. Can you explain to us how the town is working with mass department of public health to conduct contact tracing to identify sources of infection of confirmed cases? And is there any way the public can do, anything the public can do to help with that effort? Oh, thank you for the question. So in Massachusetts we've had a very well-developed system for contact tracing that we've used for around 20 years now that is based electronically. It has been built out a little bit for COVID-19 because we will anticipate more and more contact tracing than we've ever had to do before. So we, in Amherst and in any other town where a resident lives in Massachusetts, if they test positive for COVID-19, that information is directed to us electronically at the health department. We immediately check in with that person and start an investigation into whom their contacts have been. This is a process we're very familiar with and those contacts are then telephoned and informed of the fact that they've been a contact and instructed into how to quarantine. We don't need any help with that in that it is something that we are training some extra nurses how to do. It's usually done by public health nurses and we're bringing some other nurses on to help us with that. I think one of the important things to know about that is that if you hear that there's a case, you can rest assured that if that case was tested, that we are following up and that all those contacts are being reached out to. There are times when a physician is telling someone they want them to stay home in isolation, they're not testing them because they may not meet the criteria. Those are not always cases that we know about. In that instance, the healthcare provider themselves is instructing that person how to reach out to their own contacts and just let them know to be looking for signs of illness. Thank you, Julie. So we have a school's related question now that I'll pose to Mike. If we do go back May 4th or after, when is the last day possible day of school? It seems schools could be closed for the remainder of the year. What does this mean for students come September? So I'll answer that as a two-part question. So the first part is actually regardless of whether schools come back May 4th or not the last day of school right now is slated to be June 23rd, I believe. Whatever that Tuesday is, I'll look on my phone in a second or maybe Briana will make sure I have that right because the commissioner has said that schools are not to go past their 185th day. So basically 180 days of school are scheduled plus you've built in five days for if there are snow days. And so at this point, we were pretty close to that. Anyway, I think we had four snow days at the elementary and five at the region, something like that. So that Tuesday is slated to be the last day of school regardless of when we return. I think the other question is a huge one that we're starting to grapple with is what does school look like in the fall? It was interesting not to go too much into a narrative but I was at a conference called University, asked me to speak to students about a week ago and I held the appointment for them and it was a call like this and they were asking about that. And I said, even for the colleges, even though many of them are continuing distance learning their students won't have been in a social setting for months on end that's typical for them. So both on an academic point of view but especially we talked about younger students much more in a social-emotional point of view. The fall will look different than any other fall we've had and it should look different. And I said at the college level, it should look different too. Well, perhaps it's a different setting. All of us adults and children are gonna have to readjust to the life that we've lived for most of our lives that's been interrupted during this time where we're actively practicing physical distancing. So the framing that we have is that academically we're gonna have to do much, change things up quite a bit to understand where students were, what they got, what they missed so that we're not starting on day one with the next year's curriculum in the same way that we typically would. But I think even more importantly, how are we promoting the social skills and acquisition back into being in group settings? That's a huge, huge thing. And I think if we lose a second, we'll lose the first. So we're gonna focus much more on the social-emotional learning part and how do we get students and groups back together functioning collectively again, being in the same physical space and dealing with a lot of concerns that are gonna come up. Even if this COVID piece goes wonderfully and Julie's not getting calls at the hour, she's getting in calls a couple months from now, that's not going to mean that there aren't students and adults in our community, both staff and parents. We're gonna have real concerns about is the virus gonna come back and what are we doing around keeping everyone safe? And those are gonna be really legitimate and need to be managed and supported and responded to. So I think we really are thinking about the whole child, but also the whole human, both for students and staff, and looking at a very different fall than we typically would look at, even if it is the case that Ray would have come back this spring. Thank you, Mike. We have a question for Julie regarding testing. Can you tell us how testing works? Can we just call and get a test? If so, who does a person call? Thank you, Brianna. So testing is done on people who have symptoms of the disease, people who meet criteria. So you can't, for example, show up anywhere and expect to get tested. You need to call your primary care provider if you have one and describe your symptoms and they will decide if you need testing. If you do need testing, they're gonna ask you to arrive at the doctor's office in a certain manner and they're gonna likely greet you outside with the appropriate personal protective gear for themselves and likely testing will be done outside. If you don't have a primary care provider, I wanna urge you, Cooley Dickinson Hospital has a phone number that you can contact to get linked up with a healthcare provider now. I think it's a really good idea for people to do that before they may get sick. They can also help people with looking up to health insurance. So I'm gonna tell you that number now. It's 888-554-4234. So again, that's at Cooley Dickinson Hospital. It's also on their website. They can help you find a primary care provider and also help you get hooked in with insurance. If you don't have health insurance, you can also call that number and they will advise you. I mean, if you don't have a PCP and you haven't gotten one yet, but you're feeling ill, you can also call that number and they'll advise you what to do. Again, no one should show up at an urgent care or the emergency room or their doctor's office expecting to get tested. Oh, I'm sorry, that's the website popping up. I thought I wasn't working anymore. You should always call first. And don't be surprised if you don't have all of the symptoms of COVID-19, they're not just testing people because we're still looking at not having quite enough test kits yet. So it's for people that are meeting criteria that a healthcare provider feels is indicative of COVID-19. If you are tested, the results for those tests take from 24 to 48 hours to turn around to get the results back. You'll be asked to stay at home until you get those results. Thank you, Julie. So we have a question that came in. They saw on our website that we've closed off playgrounds, both the town and at the school. Can we still go to the park with my kids or hike in the woods? Can you give us some guidance on this? Sure, I can take that one. Yeah, we decided to close off the playground equipment because we just can't guarantee that we're gonna be able to clean it off all the time. So we're all avoiding touching surfaces. So we didn't wanna do it, but we felt it was really for the public's good. Absolutely, you can go outside and play in the parks. We don't want you to be congregating in groups. Again, it's supposed to be groups of under 10. And even at that, everyone should be social distancing six feet. If you're a family and you're all living together, obviously you're coming in closer contact with each other. But if you're going out in the parks and you're running into people you know, unfortunately, you have to keep six feet away from them. And we know that that's hard for the kids especially. But we do want you to get out there and enjoy the parks and all of our conservation trails. This is a great time to find a new place to go and explore outside. And we really encourage that, but not using the playground equipment. That also means not using basketball hoops because when you're playing basketball, you're getting really close to each other. So those ball games are for now, not something we want you to do. Also because you are throwing the ball to each other and therefore it becomes a surface that many people are touching. Great, thank you. We have another question that came in. As of yesterday, there are 81 confirmed cases in Hampshire County. Do we know how many of them are in Amherst? That's a good question. Again, as I said, a confirmed tested case is sent to each municipality in Massachusetts. We have 351 towns, we have 21 in Hampshire County. So each town health department is aware of this confidential information. At this time, because we are not seeing that many cases in Hampshire County, we are not choosing to say how many cases are in our particular town. We don't think that that information is useful and has the potential to jeopardize people's privacy. The State Department of Public Health is very much recommended that communities not release that information. You may have seen that some larger areas, small cities are doing that. Partly that's because they're so large that that's not compromising people's right to privacy. Great, thank you. We have a question coming in regarding senior meals during this time. The attendee has noted that UMass dining services is making selected deliveries to children and teenagers and why not to seniors. Deliveries could be made by ringing the doorbell, leaving meals at the door. Any resources for seniors during this time, particularly regarding meals? Yeah, so I can take that. So that's a good question because our director of senior services, Mary Beth Ogilovitz, has all over this and she has developed a lot of opportunities to deliver meals to people who are in need of them. While UMass may have stepped back from this program, they are still offering services with the school department for children and students. But the question is really about seniors. We are looking for volunteers to help with that and the number, if you can call Mary Beth at 413-259-3060, that's the senior center's number. They can use people who do precisely as you just suggested. Drop a meal off. There's no real interaction, but we'd like the people know that they have their meal available to them. Great, thank you, Paul. We have another question that came in from an attendee. I heard through word of mouth that the Amherst Regional High School is being converted into a hospital slash medical care facility. Is this true? If so, who made this decision? Thank you for helping the public ask questions. Would you like me to take that? Sure, you should take it then. Okay, thank you for the question. People are hearing all kinds of things? No, we are not looking at opening the high school to be a medical facility. Yeah. Yeah. Great. So another question probably for Julie. If someone is infected in doing self-quarantine at home, how are they going to get groceries, supplies, food, et cetera? That's a great question. And I'm gonna start with just explaining again the difference between isolation and quarantine. So you're not infected if you're in quarantine. If you've been tested and you come back as positive for COVID-19, you are infected with the virus. All those people in your household who've come in contact with you or other people outside your household that we have determined our contacts need to be quarantined in order to watch that incubation period of two weeks to see if someone develops the disease. So those are the distinctions between isolation and quarantine. In many ways, in effect, they are the same behaviors in that whether you're isolated or quarantined, you need to stay in your own room, not share towels or dishes or bed linens, not share a bathroom unless that's not possible. If you do have to share a bathroom, then the idea is that you clean it down with Lysol or Clorox wipes after you've used it so that the next person using it isn't possibly exposed to something you've left on a surface. But you bring up a very good point about how will people get food or possibly medications if they need them. We have a town emergency team of eight people who are looking at all of these needs and how they will be met. So people who are in need of these things are gonna be contacting the town manager's office, I believe at this time or I'll let Brianna and Paul speak to the contact info as we develop ways to bring food to those homes and possibly other supplies. Great, thank you. We just had another question come in. The primary care physician said they won't even see people and you can't come in if you have symptoms at all. What does one do when they get this response from their physicians? Yes, so that is happening. What the intent in all medical facilities is to keep as many people who are starting to have symptoms from leaving their homes or going to healthcare facilities to stop the spread of the disease. So very often what's happening is the healthcare provider is using the telephone. In some cases they're actually using some type of video conferencing like this to talk with you, to talk through your symptoms, to see if they feel that you are developing COVID-19. So it's important to stay in touch with them once you've had that initial contact. They will be advising you also, but just as a reinforcement that if you start to feel worse, you call your PCP back. And if people are meeting a high criteria for testing, those people will be brought in for testing. Many people won't be brought in for testing at this point. They will be told to convalesce at home. And again, you reach out to your PCP if you're not feeling well. If you find yourself having real problems with shortness of breath, then you would call 911 to triage that over the phone with our ambulance staff who would come to the home if someone was truly feeling severe case of shortness of breath and needed to be transferred to the hospital. Great, thank you. So that is all we have for now. I wanna thank Paul, Mike, and Julie for their time and to all of you for joining us. There will be another session today at 5 p.m. using the same link if you'd like to join us or spread the word with friends, family, neighbors. We are also recording these sessions and there may be future sessions. So please stay tuned. If you have, if you wanna follow up with us, you feel like your question wasn't answered, did you like additional information? Please email us at info at amherstma.gov. And you can always reach the town manager's office via phone at 413-259-3002. Any last words from our panelists? Well, I'd like to thank Mike and Julie. You know, it's great to have Julie who is a registered nurse and our public health nurse who are been at the front of the lines of this. It's just great to have that medical experience advising us because we're really basing all of our decisions based on a scientific evidence that we have in front of us at the time. And I know there's some questions that we didn't get to. We will answer those at the five o'clock session. So that's a lead in to come back at five o'clock if you want to. All right, Mike, Julie. Thank you. Thank you for all you're doing too. As I like, I wanna switch over to physical distancing, not social distancing. We're all staying social in all the ways that we can, even if for some of us it's sending a card or writing a letter, because technology's not our thing. It's the physical distancing. And we know how hard it is, but you are literally saving lives by doing that. So thank you. Yeah, and I'll just, my last thing is again, thanking the town and I guess my one pitch on the piggyback and what Julie said, it's just making sure you're reaching out to people, people in your life, people in your community. And it's not only the people that you think might be struggling, sometimes it's the people who are checking in on other people that need that check-in, because as a town, as a community, we can do a lot even in this kind of unusually physically distanced environment to make sure everybody is hanging in there and getting the support they need. So whatever that circle is of people in your family, your friends, your neighbors, I think we can all do a lot to help each other through this if we're all reaching out to one another. So that's my little plea slash pitch to end, but most of all, I just really wanna thank the town for organizing the event and helping get the word out. And great questions that we're able to take an answer. So thank you. Thank you, everyone. We'll see you again at five if you choose to come back. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.