 Good morning everyone. Last week I issued a stay home, stay safe order directing Vermonters to stay home as much as possible and businesses to operate remotely or to close with some exceptions. In order to provide for basic needs, we know there are some things many things that need to be done away from home and we're working to provide the clearest guidance we can to help people understand what this order means to them or their businesses. So here's the bottom line. We've got to slow the spread of this virus by staying home and away from others as much as possible. This will help protect those at risk of serious illness and in too many cases even death. It's also important to prevent our healthcare system from being overwhelmed which keeps all Vermonters safe. Yesterday the Center for Disease Control issued new guidance asking those in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut to refrain from non-essential travel for the next 14 days. In light of this, in my continued concern for the public health and safety of all those in Vermont, I've signed a new order today directing anyone who enters Vermont to self-quarantine for 14 days once they're here. And that means heading directly to where you're going with no stops in between. Well, it would be best for our friends and family from other states to follow the CDC guidance and stay where they are. I also understand some who have a home or family in Vermont may need to return. And it's not just our border states. This means those who have wintered across the country. We need everyone entering Vermont to be a good neighbor and abide by the self-isolation directive. And then to follow afterwards, my stay home, stay safe order. To be clear, this 14 day quarantine does not apply for those just going to the grocery store or an essential job across the border. To further support my stay home order and this travel guidance, we've also included clarifying language for the lodging industry. My order last week suspended lodging operations, except for specific needs to support our COVID-19 response. To provide more certainty on what this means, today's order makes clear it applies to hotels, motels, bed and breakfast, short-term rentals, meaning those booked through Airbnb and others, and all campgrounds in RV parks. We're seeing some online booking and advertising that's still occurring. This is a violation of the stay home order. And to make that crystal clear, today's new restrictions suspend online reservations. I've also asked law enforcement and the Attorney General to help with these measures with a goal of full compliance through monitoring and education, but with the possibility of additional steps if necessary. Mr. Shirling and Attorney General Donovan will provide more details shortly, and I want to thank them for their partnership. Here's what I want everyone to understand. If you don't need to come to Vermont, please don't. This is about public health and safety, which is our top priority. But having said that, we can't let this become an us versus them view of the world. That's not who we are as Americans, and certainly not as Vermonters, and we shouldn't let anything change that. Our message is this. If you're entering the state, you're directed to isolate in order to protect those already here, as well as the capacity of our healthcare system. This will help protect those currently in the state while allowing people who own a home or have a family to be here as well. We've got to remember, as Americans, we're all in this together, and we all have a role to play in keeping each other safe. So I'm asking everyone to join us in this effort to be united and to stay Vermont strong. I'll now turn it over to Mr. Shirling for a brief update on the work of the Vermont State Police to assess lodging compliance over the weekend, as you're showing. Good morning. Over the weekend, we directed law enforcement in Vermont to monitor compliance, in particular with lodging properties here in Vermont. 318 properties are known to exist in Vermont, exclusive of the Airbnb type properties. Of that, this is a running spreadsheet of those checks. The Vermont State Police and local law enforcement were able to successfully check on all of those properties. Of them, 88 were open. Half of those 88 were in compliance. In other words, they were housing folks that were involved in the response, visiting nurses, healthcare professionals, military folks, flight crews that are flying in and out of Burlington International Airport, and the like. 44 appear to be non-compliant. For those non-compliant properties, yesterday they received a letter from the Department of Health and the Department of Public Safety indicating that they need to bring their operations into compliance, and the Attorney General's office will be following up with that cross-section of apparent non-compliant properties today. After that, there will be regular monitoring by law enforcement. Folks can expect to see troopers in law enforcement in the parking lots, checking in with staff there to ensure compliance. Again, this relates exclusively to the health of Vermonters and the capacity of our healthcare system. To emphasize, we really expect voluntary compliance with this stepped-up effort to do these cross-checks, the letter, and subsequent phone calls by the Attorney General's office. We have every belief that these properties will become compliant and that we'll be able to maintain health and safety as a result. Thank you. Good morning. I've always believed that the best way to enforce the law is to give people the opportunity to comply with it, and I want to thank the Governor for his leadership during this crisis and his philosophy of that enforcement principle, that we work with Vermonters who need our help and we ask Vermonters to comply with the Governor's executive order because we all have a role to play in this crisis. As Commissioner Shirling said, the Attorney General's office is reaching out to those 40 or so hotels and lodging establishments this morning. We're asking them to comply with the Governor's order. We will work with you if you have questions. I do want to say that the Governor's executive order does carry penalties. There are civil penalties that range from $1,000 to up to $10,000 per violation. There is also a criminal penalty that carries a $500 fine and a maximum penalty of six months imprisonment. I want to be very clear. The last thing any of us want to do is enforce these orders and seek those penalties. We're asking for your compliance. We're asking for your cooperation. That being said, we also know that we all have a role to play during this crisis. We're prepared to do our job. The Attorney General's office is prepared to do its job. We'll be reaching out to you today if you have questions. Talk with us. We will work with you and we are prepared to partner with the Vermont State Police, the Department of Public Safety, and Governor Scott to do its best for our state of Vermont. Thank you. Would that turn it over to Commissioner Levine? Thank you. This morning I'd like to briefly put the executive orders in a public health context, repeat some of what I've said previously about testing, provide a bit of a situational report, and wrap up with the website. If we're to succeed in flattening the curve and preserving the capacity of our healthcare system, it is essential for the health and safety of all Vermonters that everyone strictly comply with Governor Scott's executive orders. We can do it if everyone pulls together in the same direction. Social distancing, as I've said before, is not our natural state and it's difficult and challenging for everyone. I've done a lot of observation over the past weekend and was overall pretty pleased with what I saw, with some conscious distancing for people that I encountered. I've also been getting lots of emails and cards and letters though about Vermonters who are concerned about a hopefully minority of the state that doesn't take this as seriously and doesn't understand the importance of this as a true intervention strategy to really improve our performance against this virus. I just want you to listen to the comments I make later on regarding what's going on in Vermont now to put my concern into context and to really have everyone take this as seriously as possible. Now regarding the most recent executive order, because there are now so many hotspots around the country asking Vermonters who are returning from other states to self-isolate upon their return home and preventing travelers from other states from residing in lodging sites for prolonged periods is no different than policies that you may recall are just a few weeks old around the country that did the same for travelers coming back from China and Italy and other such places. This is just plain sound public health practice and it will protect us all. Regarding testing, this weekend in collaboration with the National Guard Civil Support Team, an additional COVID-19 patient test site at Landmark College in Putney was successfully stood up. This site will provide additional capacity for testing for people who have a referral from their health care provider. As I've said before, early and broad testing is a proven strategy to limit the spread of this virus. Vermont is still early enough on the curve of positive cases that we hope that increased testing can have a large impact on our ability to flatten the curve. I want to stress again though that you can't just show up and be tested. Mainly because if you do not have symptoms, the virus might not be detected and you might actually be falsely reassured that you don't harbor the virus. And secondly, because we continue to rely on your own physician's judgment about your illness and then we try to identify, counsel, and isolate those who test positive, conduct contact tracing, and quarantine as clinically appropriate. We're all counting on each other to do everything we can to meet this public health crisis head on. Now as our testing capacity increases, you can expect to see an increase in the number of positive tests. This will reflect more tests and not necessarily more transmission of disease. We'll need to look closely at the proportion of tests that are positive and trends in our data, not just the absolute number of tests. In terms of what our status was as of last night with COVID-19 in the state, there were 21 new cases yesterday, 256 total cases at this point in time, still 12 deaths, seven of them from the outbreak at Burlington Health and Rehab, five from patients that were hospitalized at various locations in the state. We continue to follow the outbreak at Burlington Health and Rehab quite closely. We are now also following another outbreak that you may have seen on the news just today at a facility in Essex Junction. This is a senior living facility. This facility is not a long-term care facility, not a nursing home. It is not a healthcare facility. It is essentially a building with over 50 apartments in it where people are independently living with the only criteria for being housed there is your age is 55 or greater. So needless to say, there are some people that are in the greater category and some are more frail and may have chronic illnesses as you would expect. There are now two deaths associated with that facility. One, not a person that was living there, but that was a significant other of an employee there and the second occurring over the weekend, someone who was actually living there. The health department has been very involved over the last five to six days with its basic work that it does in all of these outbreak situations which is making sure they're aware of all people who are in contact with that initial case that brought the disease in and making sure that we've done all the appropriate follow-up on them make sure that they all are connected with their healthcare providers if they become symptomatic and make sure they are all isolating as is appropriate. This is ongoing and obviously it's more breaking news so I won't have a lot more details to provide you with there but we've been in constant contact and help the facility with its own communications to the residents there. In closing, I want everyone to please stay safe, stay home, and keep informed based on the number of hits, I guess is the word, to the healthcare website. Many of you are using that for information, healthformat.gov. It continues to have the latest information and answers to your questions. Last week we added an automated web bot to the page. With this tool you can type in a question and the bot will search a knowledge base that is updated daily from our extensive FAQs, frequently asked questions. We can use the questions people input to keep expanding our FAQs in a collapsible section called ask a question about COVID-19. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. I just want to remind everyone we have Secretary Smith, Agency of Human Services on the phone who will be answering questions, any questions that might arise in his area of expertise and we have a lot of questions, a lot of reporters, media on the phone as well so we're going to do our best to get through those questions and if you can be prepared with a star six unmute yourself that would be very helpful. To Joe Gresser at the Barton Chronicle. Hi, Joe. How much additional testing would be necessary to get a very clear sense of what the progress reflecting from staying in place might be? I mean, how long can we, will we have to wait to see a change in the curve? I'll let Dr. Levine answer that. If we use Wuhan China as our guide and that was the most rigid of social distancing and mitigation strategies as you know, there was about a 14 day period that elapsed for that. So most people think it's in the several week range. I might add though that as we, so and it's not really in the testing itself, the testing helps provide greater precision to all of our modeling and our projections. The fact that we are now in the 200s range of cases is helping refine that modeling significantly but obviously we'll be watching very, very closely over time and testing isn't the only outcome obviously to see if we've reached a plateau and cases will obviously be looking at other medical factors in the population in terms of, you know, illness and hospitalizations and things of that sort. There's a difference in the graph and I wondered if those totals represent the number of residents of other states who have the positive. Dr. Levine. I'm going to have to check that out because they don't have it in front of me but it is true that we've had a number of positive tests of people who live in other states, predominantly New Hampshire but other states as well that might explain that and we've had some Vermonters whose positive test occurred in another state. So I'll get back with a more precise answer but I suspect it's one of those two. Thank you. You may need to unmute your phone or we're going to move to the next call. Moving to Andrew at the Caledonia. Can you hear me? It's my understanding that the state is acquiring refrigerated trucks. Other states have done this for bodies related to the COVID-19 virus. Is that what this is for and where would those trucks be located? Yeah, thank you Greg. We are currently searching for trucks to just be prepared. We hope it doesn't come to that but considering the number of people who are the morticians in the in the Vermont, we have to be prepared for most anything and we'll be strategically placing those around the state if it becomes necessary but we want to make sure again that we're prepared for the worst. The press conference last week talked about more precise modeling as the numbers increased. How has the modeling changed over the last several days and how has the state's efforts to increase possible capacity, PPE, ventilators, things like that matching up with these new models? Yeah, we're refining our modeling as we speak. We're hoping to make it more public as the week progresses because I think it it does highlight some of the challenges we face and why we're doing taking some of the steps that we're taking today. So at this point in time, I might ask Mr. Shirling to talk a little bit about our preparedness in terms of PPE and ventilators and so forth but we're trying to stay on top of that but we're watching the modeling as well and that's why again if we take the steps we're advocating for today and last week we hope to stay underneath the line of the capacity of the health care system and that's our goal. Mr. Shirling. Thank you Governor. I think the governor covered the modeling component relative to PPE and ventilator and surge capacity. There are teams continuing to work on those things. We have literally millions of items on order in the PPE supply chains. We're working closely with the hospitals and the federal government to try to ensure that we get as many of those units as possible. The update on ventilators is we have over 400 that have been ordered and we're working daily to get delivery dates for those. There are parallel efforts also including efforts to explore whether Vermont manufacturers can produce certain types of PPE and there's a parallel effort actually to develop a ventilator that could be constructed here as quickly as possible and additional efforts to ensure that if possible we can use a ventilator for more than one patient and important to note that we're working in support of the health care professionals the Department of Health and the hospitals on those efforts in particular. I might add and Commissioner Shirling unless I mistake this we did we did receive some support from the federal government over the last couple of days. A number of trucks have been brought in with some of the PPE equipment that we need so that's good news but it doesn't mean that we relax in some respects. We're pulling every lever we can using some of in-house and searching throughout the country to be sure that we have all the available equipment that we need to fight this. It's a great point Governor. Six trucks arrived to the state's warehouse over the weekend. We anticipate additional trucks will be inbound. The state's storage warehouse for PPE actually can't handle the amount that it's storing at the moment which is partially a good sign so there's an additional warehouse space that the Guard is assisting to set up and Guard teams are now taking over some of the logistics and support of the Department of Health and the Department of Public Safety because of the volume that we anticipate needing to move. Chris Roy at the Newport Daily Express to unmute. Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah how well of isolation for the folks who are returning to Vermont maybe from their winter homes or traveling how are you going to ensure that those folks that those folks all might be late? Yeah admittedly Chris that's very difficult as you can well imagine someone coming in driving back home after wintering in let's say Florida coming back home and then we can only educate and advocate for them to do the right thing to protect their neighbors to protect their friends to protect their family members this is the right thing to do it's literally in your hands to do your part and we're asking that's why we're we're having all the message boards along the the interstates in the in the airports and so forth to to make sure the message gets across if you're coming into the state make sure you you self isolate for 14 days and again we we're not going to be able to enforce our way through this but we can ask for monitors to do the right thing. Anything else Chris? B.T. Digger, star six to unmute. Yes. Thank you very much. Governor, when will hospitalization rate per day be released? The number of people in the hospitals at this point in time with the with the COVID-19? Yeah. It's a good question. I did I did talk about that over the over the weekend. I'm going to turn this over to Secretary Smith who probably has the answer for you as I said over the weekend right now in all our hospitals we have 19 COVID-19 in patients that's 19 there's one in central Vermont there's one in Mountain County there is two in northwestern there is zero in on regional right now there's southwestern Vermont regional is to UBM at 13 and quarter medical at zero and here's how we're going to start doing this each night at eight o'clock the hospital will report the COVID-19 inpatient numbers I will have those numbers each day for us to report going forward here so we'll have those numbers each day now anything else and no thank you all right Tim McQuiston Vermont business magazine morning governor the state of Vermont is the largest employer in the state and of course the budget is getting hit pretty hard here have uh we've done the employees you know the DMV workers on the front end is there any bit layoffs or furloughs or what do you plan maybe they've been redeployed in some way what is what is your plan for around the state workforce yeah we're redeploying as many as we can for instance using some of the DMV employees to help with the the Labor Department surge that we've seen in other areas of government as well obviously this is going to we're trying to focus on the crisis itself today but our budget is going to be problematic obviously so we are going to work alongside the the legislature alongside our congressional delegation to provide for whatever relief we can knowing we have to provide essential services to Vermont but but we have to be realistic as well so we'll we'll work through again get through the next three to four weeks but ongoing we're we're trying to dissect the the federal bill to see what this means to Vermont and Vermonters and as well as our state budget and then and monitor what else is needed the congressional delegation has been been ongoing having ongoing support for us I speak to congressman Welch and probably Senator Leahy almost daily and they are they want to be a willing partner so as we move forward again we'll see where the challenges are and see what we can do to to mitigate that one i'm aware of one that is tested positive we're currently aware of and have been in communication with 10 who we believe had the intense exposure and we're going to continue to abide by what i mentioned in my opening comments that testing is not treatment and testing will occur for those who become symptomatic in consultation with their health care providers everyone who has been identified as a significant contact is by definition doing what they would do if they were a positive test which is self isolating assuming they were not so ill they had to be in a hospital and that is the basic rule of how public health works in this kind of situation so testing you know in a broader sense is really not indicated other places where you have health care workers in contact with people not just an independent living situation that becomes a bit of a different equation but in this situation that's really what's happened so there's no plan for wide scale testing of every individual living in the building and then i guess just to follow up so because it's an independent living as opposed to like an assisted living so i guess is there any different guidance or support that's being offered to the residents there or probably it's the same guidance no matter which setting to be honest because even if you're not a close contact you live in another apartment you're supposed to be abiding by all of the rules that came down in the executive order in terms of social distancing in terms of staying at home staying safe so that would be the advice that everyone would have anyways the major issue in buildings like this as opposed to living in your own home are that there are now congregate settings in those buildings so there's a room where everybody goes for laundry there's a room where everybody goes to get their mail there are card playing rooms and things of that sort for social activities so we have to be very direct about advising people to not be congregating in those particular parts of the building does that answer your question i think what was also interesting in terms of what dr. Levine had described to me earlier was that if you're not symptomatic and you're asymptomatic the tests aren't as accurate and so you might get a false sense of security if you have the test early and think you don't have it when you might so you have to just assume that you may have it to self isolate and monitor your own symptoms take your temperature make sure you're taking care of yourself by staying away from others i mean it's very clear it's not any different than it's just a home and so so stay away from others and make sure that you're taking care of yourself just like if you're traveling from a hot spot i mean it's the same principle as if you're traveling from a hot spot outside the borders of remand into remand again we want you to make the assumption you may be harboring the virus and not symptomatic yet you've got you like in dealing with uh access to COVID-19 cases and full transparency as we've seen uh in grandisle and epic county so they continue to have no reported cases of course they have no hospitals either what i'm wondering grandisle county we continue to hear reports of a few individuals with positive cases including at least one whose name was out on social media being going to take all this possible so is it that the trend of cases if there are any are actually being counted in other counties like fitna and franklin county and presumably the same in Essex county that they're going to hospitals either in st johnsbury or lansher the second part about access information is i've been told by employees at two different hospitals that they are not told where the COVID-19 patients are on certain floors and this causes concerns by employees not to ask for disclosure that they're working on floors is there anything the state for the health department to do to infer full transparency to the staff that are working at these hospitals i'm going to ask secretary smith if he has the answers to either one of those questions or both and then uh dr levine to follow up i don't like but let me mic donnie you this is mic smith i don't but let me uh check on those to get see if i can get some answers for you on the first part of your question the second part of your question the medical question and i'll lead it to dr levine thank you on the first question i would definitely hope that if there was a case in grand aisle it would be listed as grand aisle county because it would have to do with the place of residence not the place where the test was done um because we definitely want that data as as everyone else so i would hope that is not the case with regard to the second um you're actually speaking to basic infection control practices at various hospitals and i'm quite comfortable that our hospitals understand infection control practices have specific personnel in place that are that have expertise in that area and that they would be abiding by that um so i would hate to think that there would be an employee that feels they're at risk because that fact that knowledge is not known um if you could provide us uh yeah so i you know i i guess i'd need to hear more specific cases because clearly anybody who is either known covet 19 or a person under investigation awaiting a test result is under a very strict isolation procedure so that those going in and out of the room specifically would be aware of what they need to be donning in terms of the appropriate protective equipment every time that happened and they wouldn't just casually be going in the room to say clean the floor or get a a tray off the patient's tray table uh there would be knowledge of that so again i would need specifics but i i i can't believe that the basic infection control practices and practices that are frankly protective for the employees uh wouldn't be uh happening there okay thank you and might that yield or the commissioner will check on the i think there's 126 cases presumably between like frank and then jim to see if any of those yeah my one of us will will check but the doctor levin is right what we see every day is the county of residence for those people but let us check to make sure why thank you governor um your state of state order expires in two weeks uh do you know last night uh the president extended the national directive to all of april is there any doubt in your mind that you will have to extend the state-safe order through at least april uh and secondly what is your projection when you might peak yeah um two parts to that question but first of all i think everyone should expect that this will be extended uh april 15th and beyond just trying to determine how long that's going to be and what provisions will be in place as we do that and as we amend as we move forward um in terms of how long um that's a good question um and i think it's up to all of us to make sure that we implement all the measures that we put into place in the executive order and all the amendments since uh the sooner we do that uh the sooner we'll get through this and we'll uh we'll continue to monitor and we'll again be sharing uh some of the modeling with you with uh with with vermonas uh over the next uh over the next few days because i think it really is important uh for you to understand the magnitude if we don't get this right what it could mean and how quickly it could overwhelm our healthcare system and that's what we want to prevent you know we uh we need to make sure that we're increasing the capacity lift that line of the capacity of our healthcare system making sure that we have a surge capacity there making sure we have all the equipment we need to to fight this but at the same time it's literally in our hands if we we take this seriously we stay away from each other we self isolate and and this will go a lot better than the alternative so it's really important that you pay attention hi how are you um governor good uh good morning um you had mentioned earlier that um the mandate that your order requires residents and non-residents coming from outside the state to self quarantine for 14 days is targeted for people coming in from hot spots um and that it doesn't necessarily impact people who are coming over who are working between northern new york and northern vermont can you clarify the types of businesses that that impact and secondarily have you consulted with the neighboring governors like governor slo-mo about this addendum and its potential uh impact two two things i can give an example let's say someone who's living over in in platzberg is working at uvm medical center uh they're part of the covet 19 response so we understand they'll be going back and forth uh so that would be allowed if for instance someone is in the dealing with national security uh working for border patrol or something of that nature that would be exempted as well um i have spoken to a number of governors have not spoken to governor qomo but our other neighbors um governor sununu governor baker in particular i speak to on a regular basis um so we're all trying to deal with this uh understanding that we're we're individual states and have individual needs um but uh but there clearly should be some more coordination throughout the nation in some respects because we do this patchwork and and and i believe in states rights and i believe that we should be doing everything we can again individually to protect our our citizens protect our our vermonters in this case but uh but when we have a difference in what we're we're implementing it does have an effect on other states for instance if someone was in vermont a company in vermont that was closed down we closed them down to uh to prevent the spread here in vermont but they can work over in new york uh and then they start commuting back and forth uh that's problematic uh and so my uh my guidance is for any one or any company uh going to another state to work for something that's non-essential uh that they stay there and uh if they're going to work there stay there and uh and if you come back uh isolate for 14 days once you return and is this order going to pretty much mirror your stay at home order the length of time if you you know extend the stay at home order this will also be extended along with it it's tough to say at this point pat uh you know we're some of the considerations that's why I haven't extended it at this point although you can expect that the order will be extended but we'll determine at that point uh what what we need to include what we don't um if there's any you know we can only hope that we we peak before then but our modeling doesn't show that to be honest and um so I expect it'll be extended but for how long I'm not sure at this point thank you sir from the start I have a newspaper I've just got a question about the u.s. mail and um the carriers don't have gloves masks need to do the tellers um what what I can you know I'm going to let Dr. Levine answer part of this but I see a number of people uh wearing uh gloves for instance um that doesn't necessarily provide relief and and uh it doesn't insulate you from either transmitting this to others or transmitting it to yourself uh because the glove itself could be contaminated with the virus and then you could touch your face with the glove so that's the point is not to touch your face uh to remind or remain uh at a safe distance from others um you know masks and shields I've seen where convenience stores and other entities in Vermont that remain open have put shields in themselves make shift shift lexan type shields that will do the job and I think that that's what they should do and I believe the post offices should do that as well and for those who are delivering mail um they should uh they should take that precaution on their uh to make sure they're protecting uh themselves and others uh during this crisis okay oh wait somebody's on there now is that you wilson yes it is sorry I had two questions here one about the hotels that you found and other lodging facilities that were not in compliance with 40 something how responsive were they presumably you pointed out that they were not in compliance and how responsive were they to that and just to to that being pointed out to them and then secondly um is there any estimate yet on when Vermont expects to see a fee uh I'll let uh commissure shirling answer the first part in terms of responsivity the initial contact on saturday was just reconnaissance to see what levels of compliance yesterday they were delivered letters as I indicated and then there'll be follow-up calls uh that begin today so I don't think we have a full gauge of of the responsibility at this point but we expect that folks will largely be compliant with the 44 properties that again to be clear appeared to be out of compliance this was not an in-depth uh detailed investigation thank you um in terms of the second part of your question wilson um I don't want to get ahead of the what we're doing with the modeling trying to refine that but um but suffice it to say it's sometime we feel sometime in april but we'll be sharing that as the the days go on here this week thank you reminder for everybody for for clarity we will be having a separate briefing on the modeling uh and projections this week so there will be more uh details and a briefing scheduled specifically for that later this week we're going to go in the room to thoughts 44 um question for Dr. Levine um just wondering if you have any information or know anything about a staff member at pine press senior living in essay instruction who passed COVID-19 and went to work still you're making it sound like currently as opposed to so we believe previously there was a staff member who was unaware of their status who may have been infectious for a couple of days uh we're not aware of anyone currently but you might probably but uh I received several calls over the weekend uh from people in the valley in that uh danger zone as far as uh medical and they were concerned about the b and b still operating and they've seen them constantly running back and forth and they they were worried that they either a were part of it and governor you uh already gave us the answer to that but but is there any anything in the works to hit the air b and bs yeah again uh we're doing the same thing uh this approach uh pertains to them we saw the same thing we heard from the same people and we're trying to make sure that they comply uh mr. shirling anything to add on that sure uh with the additional clarity that was issued uh today we fully expect air b and b uh operators if you know them if you're listening you need to shut down your operations we will begin monitoring for online postings uh this week and we'll be making referrals for contact to the attorney general's office thereafter and just to add to that uh we we are part of the order is to to close the online reservation portion so I know that I think uh commissioner shirling you told me earlier that on the on the page the air b and b page that there is a already a notice that's going up at this point in time there is we expect that there'll be additional clarity after today some you know you know let's let's be honest some didn't know or didn't know that they it pertain to them that's why part of the education a part of what we did to try and get the word out and that's why it's important that we do and we hope all of you will carry that as well governor um this actually this question might actually be for commission commissioner shirling I'm wondering if someone could detail what kind of supplies Vermont has requested from the federal government and how much of that uh equipment we have received versus how much we're still waiting on thank you um just to be clear we're not waiting on anything from the federal government in some respects we're going and we're pulling every lever we possibly can and finding a lot on our own we should be able to share some of that information with you again this week we we hope but I like commissioner shirling answer the rest of that we have standing requests for millions of personal protective items from the federal government over I think our request is for 600 ventilators um and we've received a cross-section of n95 mass surgical mass gowns and face shields hundreds of thousands of those items have come into the warehouse I don't have the exact counts in front of me uh the again as the governor indicated that is one avenue of exploration to bolster these supplies it is not by any means the exclusive avenue thank you very much Ethan Burlington free press star sticks um so I was just wondering uh is there any indication so far at least that the new expanded testing policy is working and uh in addition is our congressional delegation helping Vermont secure more test kits um I'm going to let commissioner Levine answer the the testing portion but I just would add uh that it's not instantaneous it takes a bit of time in terms of extraction then turning it over to the lab and depending on whether it's done in in-house in the state lab versus us sending it to an outside lab let's say mail clinic it takes a little bit more time for us to get it to them and to return but but I would also add in the terms of in terms of mail we are not waiting we're not shipping it by by UPS or FedEx or US mail we're flying it there and we're doing this twice a day starting today I believe tomorrow morning so we're we're being aggressive with this we want to get the results back just as quick as we possibly can and our testing in-house we can we can have results within 24 hours but again we're not going to see this for a day or two but the Putney testing I've I've heard back that it was a successful start yesterday and continues to be today Dr Levine not a lot to add to that but any strategy that you begin in terms of combating COVID-19 you have to maintain at least 10, 14 or longer day period of time to see the impact so certainly would not be instantaneous especially if you understand that the incubation period of the virus can be as few as two days or as long as 14 days hello can you hear me now great I was just wondering what steps are being taken to protect the prison population and the staff who work in the prison I'm going to refer to Secretary Smith on that if you're still on the line I sure am governor Michelle like I said the other day there's been extensive sort of precautions that I've never seen before in the prison population in terms of what we're doing first of all we have suspended all in-person visitation rights for the prison population we have done that now and substituted video conferencing for the inmate for for visitation rights secondly we have we have established sort of spacing and as you know right now our prison population and that's some of the lowest that has been in quite a while we're just under 1500 I think a year ago we were at 1600 so that allows us to get some spacing we are monitoring employees coming in in terms of temperature checks as we move forward and we have on-site supplies for testing for inmates and right now we have no positive tests that have occurred in the inmate population we've also ranked up our supplies to make sure that we don't run out of supplies in the in the prison population so we've we've been very very aggressive in the in our correction facilities and we'll continue to be aggressive as we move forward okay thank you don Dylan bpr keep your on John I had a question that you can hear me we can okay great this is about infrastructure after Irene I'm sure you'll call it we rebuilt culverts and bridges and everything to withstand the future event um right now our infrastructure for the internet is is inadequately for many people working at home or trying to learn at home I wonder if there's any effort underway to maybe use the holy pulpit to talk to consolidated and other internet providers to be absurd in some cases I understand is just a matter of installing a new switch in neighborhoods so this is a need I've heard from people pretty much all over the state and I'm wondering if there's any effort in that regard thank you John as you can as you may recall after Irene there were less a lot of lessons learned and we and we did things better after that we built bridges differently we we dealt with obstructions differently we did we did many things in a different manner we'll do the same thing in the aftermath of of this crisis as well and I think the the accessibility to broadband is one area that is certainly something we knew about before but it's going to take resources in order to do that but if there's anything we can do easily obviously we'll do them but this is another area I've talked with the congressional delegation already about you know in the recovery we're still dealing with a crisis today but in the recovery this might be an area that we could all use some help across the United States in terms of making sure that we have accessible broadband so that when we go to online learning and in other areas where we're isolating ourselves that we have the capacity to do this but I will say I mean we're we're learning as we go and and I I take my hat off to all Vermonters for finding their way through this I mean I mean even in our own office even myself where we're doing a lot of video conferencing a lot of calls like we're doing today I think the silver lining again I was remarking after a press conference on Friday the silver lining to this is so many people are calling in and we're hearing from all parts of the state where typically in a press conference we have at the state house there's just a handful of local reporters there but now we're getting from all different regions and their ability to ask questions and and be able to communicate is something that I think is really important so in the aftermath of this we'll learn from best practices and be able to do better any immediate efforts to talk to you the providers I think I would say our public service department commissioner tyranny is is constantly asking them to expand over and we're providing whatever help we can guidance to do so so yes I would say it's an ongoing effort to make sure that we're we're dealing with a crisis at hand right now and part of that is making sure that there's capacity so anything we can do we're doing if you if there's anything that you think we should be doing please offer that up and let us know so that we can we can make sure that we go to them if we haven't seen it our highlighted already sorry star six was giving me some trouble I just noticed actually just earlier today testing seems to be a large part of mitigating the spread of the virus and preventing deaths I know they mentioned specifically Germany and I believe South Korea having studied since the testing and it has been reported the U.S. lies behind other countries at testing I thought a new test was just granted emergency use authorization by the FDA and is expected to roll out this week it provides results in approximately 15 minutes and it said that that particular test can the company that makes that particular test can do about 50,000 per day and I'm wondering if Ramon is aware of this possible new test and if some of you guys are seeking to use it in any capacity yeah I've seen that on the national news as well and suffice it to say if it's available to us and we would we'd be utilizing it but at this point in time I don't believe that we have seen that and the availability is not has not been known to me um wish you're leaving and it all depends on which kind of test you're talking about there's the test that's actually looking for the active virus in a secretion and then there's the test that's looking at your blood to see if you have an antibody response to the virus so I'm not sure if you're aware of which one you're you're talking about but I know the maker is um the maker is called Abbott the maker of the test and sure it would be results in 15 minutes so it's a very very very rapid test and I believe that says all that I but it's like a it's like a swap test my understanding is the patients potentially swap themselves right so you know things are happening on a very rapid timeline with emergency use authorizations and the FDA so obviously if this becomes a prime time thing that's accessible to us and can help in our efforts we'll certainly pursue that avenue right now we literally have a bunch of irons in the fire for a variety of test regimens some of which will give us even greater improved over the 24-hour turnaround even if it's not in 15 minutes and those are going to be standing up in the very near future so we're using everything that we know that's existing and what you're describing is evolving and emerging and so we'll have to evaluate it and see if it's accessible and it's worth pursuing thanks I think he's a digger go ahead can you hear me weekend okay yes hi this is Nora um so yes I was wondering um is there a statewide effort I guess to to provide housing or temporary housing for healthcare workers who may you know want to live separately from their families during this time I believe there are accommodations uh being uh contemplating at this very moment but I don't have the specifics on that uh secretary Smith governor thank you very much and as we talk about sort of how we will handle a surge capacity within the state of Vermont there we're looking at hospitals for them to determine the maximum capacity for things such things as back beds ICU vent PPE uh within sort of their hospital uh health service area and this might include that they have to do additional beds within the hospital facility as well to establish a local service at the same time the state is looking at um using their modeling that we've been talking about uh that's the maximum medical surge for beds ICU's and vents and that surge will be if if if the response goes above the hospital sort of maximum capacity and we you know things we'll be working with our hospital state establishes you know uh targeted alternative care sites uh you see some of those for example and then you're talking about this special population surge such things as um well there's there's this category the special population surge and those are areas a wide array of areas like mental health and social service and long-term care homeless and uh prisoner population that may need special needs consideration for COVID-19 and then there's isolation sites for people like um those recovering from COVID-19 plus um COVID-19 exposed healthcare workers who do not want to return home as well as the spread there is these various that are ongoing right now in order to address any potential increase or surge that may happen as the governor said in the month of April uh with this particular fire all right oh okay yes go ahead just a quick follow up yes sorry um and so how does that work is that led by the hospitals or by the state you know is it a local sort of depression or is it uh statewide in terms of special population surge we're doing that right now at the state level in terms of finding maximum levels over the hospital the hospitals are responsible for the initial surge and and their hospital service area if it goes beyond that hospital surge area then the state would would um bring its resources in what i would call a state medical maximum helping the surge there with the special population where i'm talking mental health social services the state is handling that right now looking at various sites i think i saw a news story on that this weekend and then the isolation site would be a partnership with the state and the municipalities and community partners that are out there thank you all right allen keys bt digger and star six last question oh allen go ahead allen hello go ahead you're breaking up allen yeah didn't get all that can you try it again allen yes i have no knowledge of that at this point in time allen uh we'll we'll look into that but i i'm not aware yeah yeah we'll we'll look into it and get back to you again i want to go ahead i'm curious if there's been any change in your assessment that 80 percent of the cases that are diagnosed would not become hugely serious could be handled by state home isolation any any adjustment in those percentages based on the experience not to this time well again i want to thank everyone for tuning in this is extremely important and if we can just self isolate follow this some of the procedures and some of the order that we put have put into place but we'll get through this quicker and i want to thank the attorney general for participating today in his partnership in this effort as well thank you