People and businesses across the country and here in louisiana. We anticipate that the president will sign that bill into law today. There will be major resources for hospitals including funding for grants that cover unreimbursed Health Care Expenses and increased access to Digital Health care delivery. Text ll be direct checks for families and Small Business loans to cover daily operations, including payroll and rent to keep the doors open. Expanded unemployment benefits. And training dollars for this located workers dislocated workers are included as well. We know that theres additional assistance for food banks and snap benefits for the most vulnerable citizens and also additional funding for child nutrition programs to make sure that our children still receive meals while theyre not attending school. Rest assured that all of our state agencies are combing through the bill to make sure that we identify every bit of funding and assistance, flexibility, that we can take advantage of, but let me just say were very grateful to our congressional delegation for the work they did in helping to get this important bill passed. As i just mentioned were in the process of studying what the bill contains for louisiana but we know that louisiana is estimated to get 1. 8 billion in direct federal aid from the federal government. We have also been led to believe that the funding could be available to us in as little as 30 days. Obviously that will be very helpful. We are one day deeper into this event and while we dont know what the duration will be, we do know that we are doing everything within our power to respond to this cries and we need everyone. I implore everyone to do thunder do their part as well and that means staying home, minimizing your travel and your social contact. The numbers we report to you every day should underscore why slowing the spread of the virus is so important. And as of noon today, louisiana has reported 2,746 cases of covid19. That is 441 cases more than yesterday. That is a 19 increase in the last 24 hours. Now, theres some good news and some not so good news. Its a lower number from yesterdays increase of 510, and yesterdays growth was 28 . Todays was 19. But i want you all to keep in mind todays increase was only from half as many tests. So its a mixed bag and we are trying to figure out what means and theres a lot of information you have to know, much of which i dont think we actually have right now but ive asked my team to make sure we are analyzing the numbers so we can learn as quickly as possible what the trends are. But i can tell you, as of as far as what we know, we remain on the growth curve, the trajectory that we dont like, the one that we need to flatten just as soon as possible. The other news that really theres no way to spin it or misinterpret it. We now have 119 deaths. Thats an increase of 36 deaths since our last update. This is the largest increase in deaths yet to be reported on a daily basis. Yesterday, we had 18 deaths. You will also see if you look at the monitor here that new orleans has surpassed 1,000 cases. New orleans has surpassed 1000 cases. Ill also point out that we have 200 cases in the most northwestern parishes and i point that out so everyone understands this is spread all across the state of louisiana. But nine ofs in all our 64 parishes now and nobody should ink they dont have the virus, Novel Coronavirus or that they dont have covid19 in their parishes. I can assure you, it is in every parish in every Community Across the state of louisiana. Deaths weck to the have reported up until now, 119 of them, early analysis indicates that conditions among those covid19 deaths include 41 , Kidney Disease 31 , and obesity, 28 . Nationna is third in the per capita for the number of cases. We are second, i believe, per capita in the number of deaths. Very publichis is a Health Emergency and it has been and shows no signs yet of abating, and i want to encourage everyone to take this extremely seriously. Youve heard me say it before, but medical surge is our number one priority in terms of what we as a state are doing, the number one priority in terms of what im asking the citizens of our state to do is to minimize the spread by practicing the mitigation measures we put in place, social distance social distancing, stayathome order, on the medical search medical surge side of this, we remain on the trendline we have been on for a few days, and that is the current modeling that we would run out of ventilators around april 2 or april 3, around new orleans for those patients who need ventilators. Just to put into context how hard it is to acquire new ventilators, we have put in, maybe days ago, orders for 12,000 ventilators. 5000 of those from the Strategic National stockpile, the remainder from private vendors and manufacturers and to date, we have received exactly 192. Those 192 ventilators have all been allocated and delivered. We do expect a shipment of another 100 early next week, but we need several thousand ventilators. We are going to keep working on this, obviously. And i would remind everybody that when we overwhelm our capacity, our hospitals capacity to deliver care, it doesnt just threaten covid19 patients. It threatens anyone who might need emergency or intensive care at a hospital. , whether you are a Motor Vehicle accident or heart attack victim or stroke victim or whatever. Im asking everyone to do what they can to be a Good Neighbor, to lower the number of cases we are announcing every day, start to flatten the curve. Incredibly important. One piece of relatively good news is that the state of louisiana is in the top five states on a per capita basis for testing. We have surged our Testing Capacity tremendously. We are not testing in the capacity we would like. The number of testing sites, tests administered, results we get every day will continue to climb and we need to test all across the louisiana, including in our rural areas. Yesterday, i talked about how we need additional medical staffing. Say delta happy to airlines has offered to fly any Health Care Professional volunteers responding to the covid19 crisis here in louisiana for free. Will be booked for participants once they have registered and become credentialed through this website. Lava. Dhh. Louisiana. Gov. , they have torive registered and become credentialed through volunteers in action. Once they are credentialed, they will be contacted and given insight assignments and instructions on where to report. I want to thank in advance each of the Health Care Professionals who volunteered to come to louisiana and help with this public Health Emergency. I also want to make sure, and by the way, sort of frustrates me to have to respond to rumors, but we have to do that on occasion. That weo assure people have absolutely no plans to close any state roads or bridges due to covid19. Always, for track it traffic information or routine road closures, check 511 11la. Org. 5 for business owners, the state of louisiana has Key Resources at led. From resources to state and federal government by visiting. Gov coronavirus. If you have a nonbusiness question or general inquiry having to do with covid19, dial 211. Is a stress how important it everyone stay home. The measures we take from the standpoint of the state can go only so far. The success we will have an slowing the spread will be dependent on to individuals across the state of louisiana. Please, no unnecessary travel. Stay home. Continue to wash your hands for 20 seconds using soap and water. Use Hand Sanitizer when you dont have access to soap and water. Cover your cough. Practice social distancing, at least six feet between you and someone else if you have to be out and about. Are going to flatten the curve, if we are going to lessen the burden on our health care system, if we are going to save lives, we must have full louisianansfrom all and we have to have it now because frankly, we dont have much longer to wait. 2, coming up sooner than we would like. So with that, i will be happy to take your questions. I will remind you, i am going to the doctor here from Public Health to take any questions specifically related to questioning. The Surgeon General said next week, new orleans could see new york like numbers. Is that something you might agree with and if so, is that just in the new orleans area or other pockets of the state . Look come we are number three per capita right now. The trajectory we are on right now is one that takes us to a place where we will not be capable of delivering the health care that will be demanded of our hospitals, so i concur with him, if we stay on this trajectory. Hard to that understand. It is a very difficult concept to come to grips with because the situation is that dyer, but i agree with him and i will tell you Surgeon General has made himself available to me specifically on a number of cases and he was actually here in louisiana, i guess it was two weeks ago yesterday. Seemed like a long, long time ago, but it was just two weeks ago yesterday he was in the state with us, and so i would have to say that i think hes probably right. But what we should start to see very soon because we know these mitigation measures work. We know social distancing works to slow the spread, so we really should start seeing that show up im lookingsoon and for the day when my team comes to me and tell me we see that bute starting to flatten, until then, we have every reason to believe we are heading toward new york. You asked, we are not going to get to their numbers because we dont have their population. The reason thats important and the reason i continue to focus on the per capita numbers, as i stated before, any States Health care Delivery System is sized to meet its population, so if you have the third most cases per capita, that means at least at that time and so long as you are on that trajectory, that you are very likely to exceed your states capacity for delivering health care. Yes, maam . Reporter can you give an update on what is happening and also the field hospitals promised from the federal government . Gov. Bel edwards the field requested fourad 250 bed units. We were approved for two. So it will be 500. These are basically hospital cots. I dont want to say beds, but they are not an army caught, either. Cot, they are somewhere in the middle and they are separate from staffing. So we will use those in the Convention Center to set up our medical monitoring facility and it will be very helpful to us. That facility will they are working there today. They are going to build this out in wings of 120 rooms each. Require theywill put up 1120 beds in the Convention Center, and we will then staff that facility primarily through a staffing contract that we are executing here and then we have Wraparound Services for cleaning, laundry, food service, things of that nature. Now, we do have a strike team coming, which are 60 medical professionals from the u. S. Public health service. That will be very, very helpful because we will use them to augment the staffing that we deliver health care in the morreale Convention Center. We are looking at other options to increase our capacity, and we are looking at other facilities and looking at other hotels. I dont have any news to deliver to you at this point, but this is step down capacity, so the idea is that we would have a to send patients once they no longer need that acute care bed or icu bed, and allow the hospitals to frida bed up sooner by having a place to transfer their patients, and that is one additional way you could surge your medical capacity, so that is what we are intending to do with the facility we are setting up. We will have more information about this soon. Coverage today of what they are doing in new york. Understand it, i is very similar to what we are trying to do in louisiana and what they are doing in new york. Yes, sir . Whatter can you tell me generally the state of the union [inaudible] the 1. 8edwards billion in funding, we should have at some point in the next 30 days. We are trying to figure out exactly what flexibility we have with that funding. 21 degree or another, we know it is going to have to be spent on those things that are related to this covid19 public Health Emergency, but just another thing the State Government is doing related to this emergency. We are still looking at that. I can only tell you that we are very thankful to be getting that, because right now, even as you know, we have the federal thernment paying 75 of cost of things we are doing here tooss the state related covid19, but that is still 25 we have to come up with so this will be very hot hole in that regard and i will tell you the degree to which Law Enforcement benefits through the additional allocation of money through the burn grant program, thats going to be helpful. The money goes directly to the hospitals is going to be helpful as well. We just its too early to tell you right now exactly how that money will be spent. I can only tell you that it is going to be very, very helpful and the more flexibility we find as we studied this bill, and as it gets interpreted by the federal agencies administering the program, the better off well be. Yes, sir. Reporter me question for the doctor. Actually, 69 of the folks who have passed from covid19 were commondiabetic or obese, Health Conditions in louisiana. To what degree so the average diabetic or average person who is overweight be by the numbers. In general, it is a cause of concern for our population. Everyone has reason to be concerned and take action to protect themselves and their families from covid19. We unfortunately announced a death in the 17yearold yesterday. We know that the people who are at the highest risk are the people in the older gauge group, but we also know that people with conditions like as youre seeing, diabetes, kitny disease Kidney Disease, and obesity are at high risk for bad outcomes to the extent you have those conditions want thank you stayathome and make sure you wash your hands frequently, but even if you are not in those groups, we want you to do those things for the loved ones around you who have those conditions. Not only do we want to see not as many hospital admissions, we want to see the rate of deaths decrease as well the state. The only way to do thats take these measures seriously and think about our risk and the risk to our families and neighbors. Reporter as a followup, were those 69 people, like, extremely diabetic, extremely overeight. Overweight . Dr. Billioux i dont know the specifics of each case, but ill say, i dont think were necessarily seeing just extremes. I think theres reason for everybody with those conditions to obviously always take control and have the optimal outcome they can, but right now, it is trying to limit access to people who are sick and limit exposure. Reporter can you talk about why there are few or no confirmed cases in some of the rural parishes, is that because of a lack of prevalence in testing or something specific to isolation of the parish . Dr. Billioux it is largely a function of testing, as we have seen. More high volume testing sites whether done by municipality or hospital systems, we start to see not only the places where the parishes where the test sites go up and the feeding parish around them go up and war where we see theres zero cases, we are concerned were not seeing people getting tested adequately there and i think thats the case throughout the state. Gov. Bel edwards thank you, doctor. Any other questions . Yes, maam. The Florida Governor has announced he is going to start screening people who come in from louisiana, not just new orleans but the whole state and talking about the possibility of perhaps setting up some test checkpoint to get into the state for drivers. Had you heard anything about that and what do you think about governors like in texas and florida creating these restrictions and dealing with people from our state. Gov. Bel edwards first of all, to the degree that what they are doing and saying underscores what i am saying, and that is that people need to take this seriously, that we have a significant issue here in louisiana with the case count and the trajectory were on in terms of case growth. I think that is helpful. I am encouraging people from louisiana to stay home, so i think that it should be a small number of people who are on the road going into texas or going into florida. So, ive got my hands full here with responding to this crisis and im not going to secondguess or criticize what other governors are doing or not doing. Yes, sir . Do advisories from the cdc on mardi gras indicates gov. Bel edwards i did not and the doctor works at the office of Public Health at leh. He did not. If i am not mistaken, at the time of fat tuesday there were around 15 cases in the country. All of whom were either tied to direct travel or indirect travel, meaning they had come into the country from one of the hot spots, principally china or they were in direct contact with someone who had. So there was never any suggestion by anyone, and i think its interesting to consider, and i know that there are working theories that the 1. 5 Million People who participated in mardi gras and traveled and so forth, likely seeded the virus. I happen to think thats probably correct. But trying to figure out how it got here right now isnt as important as making sure were doing everything that we took dashcam to minimize the spread and appropriately respond by surging our medical capacity. So i dont want to take time and attention away from the task at hand in order to discuss what is at present a theory, and im sure that some student is going to get a doctoral degree one day by doing a dissertation on this. In terms of the prisons, the workers in at least two state prisons have contracted the virus, what are you doing in particular in the prison population to make sure theyre obviously very tightly congested. What are you doing to prevent the spread there . J. Millett as of this morning, with the ecg meeting we had via conference call, there are no positive cases in our state prisons in terms inmates. Reporter for inmates. Gov. Bel edwards thats correct. I need to make sure people understand that. Secondly, we were among the very first state inside nation, if not the first to discontinue visitation. Not just at the prisons but at our jails and nursing homes, for example. Is together so prisons can care for inmates. We know that people are being screened for health to see if they have symptoms such they fever and so forth as they come in to good to work, and if they have a fever, theyre not allowed to go to work. Theyre paying particular care to those inmates who are in the most vulnerable categories because of age or Chronic Health condition or both, and so i can assure you that were doing everything that we can in order to protect the people that we have in our custody in our states prisons. It is a challenge, just like its a challenge for everybody across the state of louisiana. But im confident that the work that the secretary and his team is doing is really commence rat commiserate with the challenge that they face, and theyre doing a good job. Yes, sir . Reporter a few days ago, you said you were encouraged by how the public is reacting, we are heading into the first week of the stayathome order being in effect. How critical is it this week if people hunker down and now that people are off work, more so that its the weekend. Gov. Bel edwards look, every day is really, really important, and we cant do anything about what we did or didnt do yesterday so im asking people to be focused on today and if it helps, i can ask them to be focused on tomorrow, saturday, and the following day, sunday. But this is just something we have to do. And we dont really have a choice unless we just dont care. Whether people die who otherwise wouldnt need to die. And thats just not how louisianans behave. Thats not what we believe. We have a long history of dealing with emergencies and disasters and being Good Neighbors and i fully expect were going to do that in this case, and being a Good Neighbor means you dont have unnecessary contact with one another, and whether that it your family members or your neighbors or friends or whatever, just dont do it, and now this is difficult i know this is difficult for people. I know this is a different way of living than were accustomed to. But its just critically important. And we are going to get through this. Exactly when, i cant tell you, and exactly what shape i cannot tell you. But i can tell you it will be faster and better if more people comply, and there are an awful lot of louisianans doing their part, but we know that we can do better and im urging everyone to do that. Last two questions. Gov. Bel edwards okay, right reporter just want to backtrack to to prison. Can you speak to the amount of testing that has been done for prisoner inside staterun facilities and parish jails. Gov. Bel edwards i cannot tell you the number of tests, but like other testing protocols meet protocol,s they are tested, whether theyre inmates, whether they are staff workers, which means you have to have symptoms. The tests are just simply not designed to give you an accurate result before there are symptoms, and so i dont have the numbers to give you and i apologize for that. Yes, sir . Reporter are we getting test results fast enough . Gov. Bel edwards well, you know, we would like to get them faster, and we keep reading about trials on tests that might be available in as little as 30 minutes and that would be great. I think, for example, we were told three to five days for individuals testing at the three supportedederally testing sites, two in new orleans and one in jefferson. We would really like that to happen faster, but we believe those test results are coming in. You may recall, i think it was new orleans had to test sites a its site sety, and up a week ago tomorrow. It was a lag time between having your sample collected and having the test results being made available to you and we are starting to see those results being made known to those individuals, but obviously, just like we want to have the availability to increase our capacity for the collection of and thes to be tested throughput at our lab and the time to shorten the twin when the test is taken and the results are known and communicated, all of these things are improving tremendously over time, and im never going to say that we are where we want to be when you look at this map and it has that information on it so we always want to be better and we are working on that every single day. I am heartened by the fact that we have the fifth most tests in the country right now on a per capita basis. That indicates just how hard we are working to improve our Testing Capacity in the Lab Throughput and so forth because we dont like not knowing and the more tests you administer, the more you know and the easier it is to convince people who need to stay home to actually do that. Ill mention again what ive said a couple times before. One of the reasons why weve been struggling to flatten the curve and the country of south korea was able to do it as they were able to ramp up their testing much quicker and they did it in much larger numbers so they were able to identify more of their population who had the virus and get them to stay home. Well, our testing is slower so were trying to get people to stay home who havent been told they have the virus. That makes it hard but its essential so the mitigation measure, the stayathome order becomes a proxy for the testing that we were slow to ramp up and when i say we, not just in louisiana, but across the United States and i think everyone admits this wasnt done as well as we would have liked it to have been done early on. But we can all agree that testing is improving over time and thats going to be very, very helpful. Look, im going to cut it off there. We will let you all know when the next press conference is going to be, but we are thinking that is going to be when . Okay. I know im working tomorrow so if youre working tomorrow, we will likely have another press conference tomorrow, but thank you for the job you are doing in order to allow us to better communicate to the people of louisiana and while i have the cameras rolling, im going to ask you, im going to urge you, im going to implore you one more time, do your part. Stay home, slow the spread, save lives, and offer a prayer for those whose lives have been taken and their families, and those who are inflicted by this disease now, that they will be granted recovery and for everybody in the state, that we will find the ability to do our part. God bless and thank you. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] if you miss any of our live coverage of the governments response to the coronavirus outbreak, watch it any time at cspan. Org coronavirus, from daily briefings by the president and the White House Task force to updates from governors of the hardest hit states. It is all there. Use the charts and maps