Be ins advisory will effect until tuesday, april 7. We strongly advise people over the age of 70 and those with Underlying Health issues to stay theirnd limit interactions with others as much as possible. Get into more specifics about what this means for businesses and those at home. Always allow Grocery Stores, pharmacies, and other types of businesses that provide services to operate. I want to acknowledge the incredible impact this action has had. That theseost on me businesses are most unlikely to be able to put them play certain policies. Now, weg this action can significantly improve our position in the fight to slow the spread of this virus. Acting out to prevent more persontoperson interaction will buy us more time. So i healthcare care system can better prepare for a challenge unlike they have seen before. Our goal is to slow the spread by limiting persontoperson contact in a concerted effort now to help us get back to work and back to school. We all have a role to play in this fight. The people of massachusetts are meeting this challenge exactly the way we would expect with determination, cool heads and a selfless sense of community. I have no doubt that we will all continue to meet the challenge before us. I want to take a moment and explain how this affects everyone at home. There has been a lot of talk about a government mandating people shelter in their homes. I do not believe i can or should order u. S. Citizens to be confined to their home for days on end. It doesnt make sense from a Public Health point of view and its not realistic especially if people need to get to work and essential businesses or go to places like Grocery Stores, pharmacies or healthcare providers. Well all nonessential businesses must close their physical locations to all personnel, we urge people to stayathome and avoid any unnecessary activities because this will help avoid any unneeded person to person interactions that could spread the virus. What this means that everyone can still buy food at the Grocery Store, get what they need at the pharmacy, and of course, take a walk around the block or at the park. If you are at the park, there should not be any pickup basketball games, touch Football Games or activities or events that create the persontoperson contact we are seeking to eliminate. That spreads the virus. We are asking people to use common sense and consider how they can avoid unnecessary close contact with one another. Every step we all take to cut down on the chances this thing has to spread is a way to help erica committees get through it. For people over 70 and for people with Underlying Health issues, this virus is especially dangerous. We are strongly advising these folks to limit strictly close contact as much as possible. What this means is we are asking everyone to support our most vulnerable. Think about ways you can go to the Grocery Store for a Family Member as part of this high risk group. Call up your neighbor before you go to the pharmacy and ask if you can pick up a few things for them while you are out. We must all do whatever we can together to protect these high risk individuals. For those who feel sick or think they have symptoms, stayathome and contact your medical provider. Telehealth, meaning phone calls or video chats with a health provider, is now a covered insurance benefit that massachusetts residents can use. Using this service protect you and your clinician from unwanted and unnecessary physical contact. For businesses, we are publishing a specific list of categories of businesses that we consider essential to supporting the people of massachusetts as we battle covid19. Go towww. Mass. Gov covid19 to find it. Recently, the federal government issued guidance to all 50 states as to what parts of the economy are essential to supporting the country. We followed that guidance and adjusted and updated it to reflect massachusetts unique economy. Essential businesses include several categories. I want to mention a few of them here. All Grocery Stores and businesses that support them like shippers, producers, farms, packaging plants and wholesalers will remain open. Gas stations will remain open. Pharmacies and all medical facilities will remain open. Manufacturers of medical products, pharmaceuticals, and similar businesses that are developing and making many of the things we need to battle covid19 and other diseases will continue to operate. We are not prohibiting travel. Our transportation system, roads, bridges, tunnels, are open and our buses, trains and subways will continue to run. We will continue to ensure that these assets are properly maintained. This is essential for trucks to continue to supplier Grocery Stores and for medical personnel to get to where they need to go. Just because the t is open, we dont think is a good idea to take the train downtown to meet up with friends. By eliminating the use of Public Transportation to essential services, we can slow the spread of the virus but better protect our health care workers, Grocery Store workers, and others who are working every day to keep us safe. Everyone is advised to stay home and limit all unnecessary activities. Online or ecommerce will continue to be available and lastly, restaurants and other businesses that sell food may continue to offer food as takeout or delivery as long as they follow social distancing measures. As i said earlier, we are publishing a specific list of categories that lays out the details. Again, we are asking everyone to use their common sense, think about the impact this virus is having on the sick and the elderly and limit their interactions with other people. This cuts down on the chances that this virus has to spread. All nonessential businesses are required to operate remotely as many have already done. Massachusetts is home to Companies Large and small who lead the world and Technological Advancement and so many areas. I know we have the intelligence and the capabilities to make this work so we can come through this together and stronger. These steps are difficult to take. These aggressive social distancing measures put in place today are designed to give Public Health experts the time they need to ramp up additional steps that must be taken to effectively push back the virus. Other parts of the world have shown that this is possible. It takes expansive testing capabilities, aggressive tracking, tracing and isolation measures and developing Surge Capacity for our health system. These are obviously profoundly difficult times. I have had numerous conversations with people who have lost their jobs and their businesses and others that are struggling mightily to keep their doors open as best they can and pay their workers. I also attended and spoke via livestream at two empty houses of worship over the weekend. As we drastically limit personal contact and force organizations and people to stop coming together, i also sense a loss of purpose. As we all know, purpose is what drives us. Purpose is what fills our souls. Many feel lost and i can see why. Heres the truth we all have a role, we all have purpose as we battle this disease. Protecting one another from the spread of covid19 by limiting physical and social contact and staying at home is profoundly purposeful. Every single active distance has purpose. Our First Responders and emergency medical personnel, those who are essential to our success in battling this disease, need us all to do everything we can to reduce the spread. Reducing the spread honors these orders, honors and protects them and you and your family. There is purpose in these drastic changes in the way we live. We must all embrace this new way of life and appreciate that here we can all find purpose as we battle this virus together. Questions . Any penalty for businesses who remain open . At the end of the day, it will probably be enforced at the local level because the locals will be closest to whats going on in their own communities and can rely on the order and the terms of the order to determine if people who arent considered to be essential are operating. Its a graduated set of penalties. It starts with a fine and moves up from there. The order is with respect to essential businesses. If you are not an essential business based on this list, that we spent several days on based on the federal guidance and what other states of put together, if you are not a business on that essential list, you basically need to close your doors with respect to your physical operations and if you can operate remotely using technology, you can do that but you cannot be open. What has changed in the last 48hour that led to this . As i said at the beginning, we are in Constant Contact with other governors, other states, federal and local officials, Health Care Experts and a host of other folks. And after those conversations and reading the guidance put out by the feds at the end of last week and reviewing some of the orders that have already been put in place, we felt this was the right time to do this. [indiscernible] part of why we tried to make so clear in this order that people are not going to be forced to not go to the Grocery Store. We will not say you can only go to the Grocery Store if you live on this street on this street, monday, tuesday or friday. Thats an unimpeded right for people in massachusetts and Grocery Stores and all the entities that support them are part of our essential business criteria. We want to make clear to people that they will not lose under this or any other order access to food and medicine, period. Do dispensaries fall under this . Food and Beverage Operations which would include Package Stores fall in as essential and thats driven by federal policy is much as anything else and is in every other single order we read in every other jurisdiction that has issued one at the state level. Medical marijuana dispensaries are open. They are treated for all intents and purposes as the same way we treat health care operations. Recreational dispensaries are not. The main reason is because massachusetts is one of the few states in a big Geographic Area that has available Recreational Marijuana and a ton of traffic associated with that coming from other states, we felt that in particular would need to be closed and would not be considered essential as part of this order. What is your assessment of the number of new cases over the last few days . We have said for a while now that as we wrapped up our testing activity, we would obviously ramp up the number of people who would be found to test positive. The goal here is to get to the point where we are testing at a significantly higher level than we have historically every day. And that data is then being used as people test positive, to connect with those people who test positive and trace the folks they have been in contact with and pursue isolation strategies. That has been the most effective strategy that has been used in other states to bend the trend on the growth rate. There is no question that if you look at the location of a lot of the positive tests that have come up over the past four or five days, there has been significant spread in every county in massachusetts. Thats part of the reason for issuing this order today. One of the things the guard is in the process of doing is putting prescreening operations outside of many very 24 7 facility so they can then use those to test people in terms of what their temperature is before they enter to go to work. There are some communities in massachusetts that have reached out to the guard and asked if they can supplement their First Responders who are not sick or symptomatic but who are exposed to somebody who was in the have to go in to isolation for a certain number of days, taking them out of service and unavailable to work on behalf of their communities. I see it much more as a way to supplement Services Provided at the local level as people go out and come back based on who they are exposed to and secondly, to provide support to state operations on a variety of things. This order will be enforced by folks at the local level, from our point of view. Where does construction fall under this . That is currently viewed as essential. There is guidance that needs to be issued by the state with respect to what we would call safe practices with respect to ensuring that people have sinks and warm water and sanitizing capacity there and they are operating on the terms associated with social distancing. The greatest need seems to be equipment supplies at the hospitals. Any improvement in that situation over the last few days . There is every three or four prong approach to this. The first is to continue to chase ppe, personal protective equipment through the federal stockpile. We have had direct conversations, i have had direct conversations with federal officials about this stuff and they have made commitments and we will see if those commitments actually happen over the course of the next several days. We have confirmed orders for millions of masks. Confirmed. Confirmed, but we need to see them get delivered. We are also in the process of working with a variety of organizations who have contacts and relationships with suppliers and manufacturers in other parts of the world to see if we can get gear in from there as well. This remains one of our highest priorities. You talk to these folks all the time. Have you heard that . No. I have weekly calls with hospitals. They have not identified at this point shortages of pharmaceuticals. Thats one we are monitoring very closely. If we need to take steps, we would but we are not seeing that at this moment. We need as many masks, ppes and swabs as possible. It would be 3 million across the supply chain and as the governor said, we are exploring International American manufacturers as well as today, we announced our collaboration with biotech. Mema is out picking up a lot of equipment thats been donated through the Biotech Community and we will publish that so people can see what we are bringing into the stockpile. [indiscernible] the Biggest Issue with test results is geography. The state lab is located here in massachusetts and that makes it relatively easy for them to get a test in massachusetts, execute on the test in massachusetts and send it where it needs to go in massachusetts. The commercial labs, until very recently, qwest is building out more capacity in massachusetts. Thats why the Lieutenant Governor and the secretary and i were visiting them in marlborough. They literally took a part of their existing operation and said we will cordon this part off and turn it into covid19 testing for massachusetts and for the new england and northeast region. They are now ramping up their testing capability there. Before that, their tests were traveling to many parts of the country where they had existing covid capability in the same is true for labcorp. Most of the testing they do is not done locally, its done somewhere else. That all by itself adds a few days to the turnaround. I think the biggest thing we need to do to administer more tests is whether you call it a test kit or a swab is to make available to the Provider Community as many of the swabs as they need to actually conduct tests. We have been sort of sourcing those from a variety of places. One of the big confirmed orders we have with a u. S. Based manufacturers for a significant number of swabs. But the big issue with testing generally for the last few weeks has been the availability of the test kit, the swabs, to execute on the front end of the test. Would you be bummed if i said facts on the grounds . I would say this we are constantly reconsidering virtually everything we do. Honestly, there are daily conversations going on with other states, with local officials, with health experts, folks in the Provider Community, with academics to gather and collect best thoughts and best ideas about how to process this unprecedented circumstance we find ourselves in. I fully believe that part of the reason why we put and dates on these is to give people an answer with respect to how long it is absolutely positively guaranteed to last but at the end of them, they all Say Something like unless further extended because we want to have the ability if we need to to go beyond the timeframe thats listed. [indiscernible] how difficult is to do the tracing with more people testing positive . Do you want to speak to that one . There is a few things on testing and tracing. You can see it in the daily numbers that we need to ensure that our commercial labs also report not just the positives but also the total number of people they are testing so we have a good sense in massachusetts of how many people are tested as well as how many are positive. You can see the changes in the daily reporting and we are now putting out the age ranges. We are putting together a cadre of individuals to help augment us to do the tracing and support with local boards of health. On friday or maybe saturday, and then again on sunday, there was a call with the deans of schools of Public Health in massachusetts to see if we could use their students and others engaged with the Public Health committee to help us do tracing. We are also talking to the deans of medical schools when they have the residents coming in but they dont actually start the rotations on till june, to help augment that. There is also a corps of Public Health nurses to bring them back and help us also and we will be doing more of that. I dont want to call it americorps but folks who can help us do tracing. Its testing, tracing, isolation and recovery which is the core of this. You might want to tell them how you do the tracing. Its not like you have to physically go there. We can actually do it right by telephone. It doesnt have to be boots on the ground but its boots on the phone. [indiscernible] yes, they are essential under the federal rules, yeah. [indiscernible] they should be looking at foreclosures today and passed the senate bill today. We have spent a lot of time with the legislature on the municipal bill. Unless it has changed a lot since last friday, i think we are good with it, right . What is the second part . Tax date . We are having a conversation about tax day as well. The first message which most people reported on is we made clear that you cannot just evict or foreclose on somebody in massachusetts. You cant. For evictions, you have to go to court and the court is not open until april 21 and you still need 60 days process and opportunity before you do that. Foreclosures and mortgages, same thing, 30 days and we will enforce those rules big time and we are asked to talk to the legislature about what else we can do but thats a very high priority for us. What is it look like in terms of unemployment claims . This is kind of a nerdy thing. We made a decision about a year ago to move the ui platform off a state operated box and put it into the cloud. We have been doing that with a bunch of different areas and government where there is high Processing Capacity and a big up with respect to how much capacity you need. Honestly, thats probably the most important thing we did with respect to being able to process ui in this environment because the cloud has the ability to expand to meet demand. The answer is yes, for the time being, but we are obviously doing analyses on that on a regular basis. The question was do you have enough money and we do for the time being. How about the last one . For those who may be out of work, any consideration to connect them to essential services . The answer to that is yes. Do you want to speak to that . There are companies that are hiring like amazon and others for example. We are connecting and creating on the platform a connection with opportunities for people if they want to connect through our workforce Labor Development because it is an opportunity at a challenging time, thank you. Thanks, guys. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] the senate gaveled in at noon eastern for more work on the Economic Relief bill. They failed to move the legislation. We will update you with more from the senate when information becomes available. You can watch the senate live over on cspan2. Later, it is the Daily White House task force meeting. President trump has been leading these recently. That is at 5 30. We will have it live. Starting tonight, join us for a special live evening edition of washington journal