2. 3 trillion relief bill that will mean help for many people and businesses in 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 to cover grants for unreimbursed Health Care Expenses and increased access to Digital Health care delivery. There will be direct checks for families. In addition there will be Small Business loans to coverdaley operations, including payroll and rent to keep the doors open. Expanded Unemployment Benefits and training dollars for dislocated workers are included as well. We know that theres additional assistance for food banks and snap benefits for those most vulnerable citizens. There also will be additional funding for child nutrition programs to make sure 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 we identify every bit of funding and assistance and flexibility we can take advantage of. But let me say were very grateful to our congressional delegation for their 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 do know louisiana is estimated to get 1. 8 billion in direct federal aid from the federal government. Weve also been led to believe that that 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. While we dont know what the duration will be, we do know that were doing everything within our power to respond to this crisis, and we need everyone. I implore everyone to do their part as well. And that means staying home, minimizing your travel, minimizing your social contact. The numbers that we report to you every day should underscore why slowing the spread of this virus is so important. And as of noon today, louisiana has reported 2,746 cases of covid19. That is 41 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 and todays was 19 . But keep in mind todays increase was from only half as many tests. So its a mixed bag and were trying to figure out what it 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, including the doctor, to make sure were analyzing these numbers so we can lean as quickly as possible what the trends are. But i can tell you, as far as what we know, we still remain on the growth curve that 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 video monitor here that new orleans has surpassed 1,000 cases. Id also point out we now have 200 cases in the four most northwestern perishes and i point that out just so that everyone understands that this is in fact spread all across the state of louisiana. We have cases in all but nine and no 4 parishes now one should think they dont have the Novel Coronavirus or they dont have covid19 in their parishes. I can assure you its in every parish in every Community Across the state of louisiana. Getting back to the deaths that we have reported up to now, 119 of them. Early analysis indicates that conditions among those covid19 deaths include diabetes, 41 , Kidney Disease 31 , and obesity 28 . Louisiana is third in the nation per capita for the number of cases. We are second, i believe, per capita in the number of deaths. Obviously this is a Public Health emergency as it has been described a and it 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, the social distancing, the stay at home order and so forth. On the medical surge part of this, we remain on the trend line that weve been on for a few days and that is under current modeling that we would run out of ventilators sometime around april 2 or 3 in region 1 down around new orleans for those patients who need ventilators. Just to put in the context of people how hard it is to acquire new ventilators, we have put in many days ago orders for 12,000 ventilators. I think 5,000 of those from the Strategic National stockpile, the remainder from private vendors and manufacturers, and to date weve 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. Were 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 cases, it threatens everybody who might need emergency or intensive care at a hospital. Whether youre a Motor Vehicle accident or heart attack victim or stroke victim or whatever. And so im asking everyone to do what they can to be a Good Neighbor to lower the number of cases that we are announcing every day, start to flatten that curve, incredibly important. One piece of relatively good news is the state of louisiana is in the top five states on a per capita basis for testing and we have surged our testing and Lab Throughput tremendously. I will not tell you were testing in the numbers we would like. I do anticipate that the testing sites, the number of tests administered, the number of test results we get every day will continue to climb, and we need to test all across louisiana, including in our rural areas. Yesterday i talked about how we need additional medical staffing. Today im happy to say Delta Airlines has offered to fly any Health Care Professional volunteers responding to the covid19 crisis here in louisiana for free. Travel will be booked for parlts pants participants once theyve registered through his website, lava. Dhh. Louisianagot goff. Before they arrive, they have to register and become credentialed through louisianas volunteers in. Louisiana. Gov. And i want to thank those who have come to louisiana to help with this emergency emergency. I want to make sure and frustrates me we have to respond to rumors but have to on occasion and want to assure people we have no plans to close any state roads or brings due to covid19. As always for traffic information or other routine road closures, please check 511la. Org for the latest travel information. 511 la. Org. For business owners, in order to answer your questions, the state of louisiana has established key covid19 resources at led and youll find an extensive links from resources from state and deral government by visiting gov. La. Gov coronavirus. If you have a nonbusiness question or general inquiry, having to do with covid19, please dial 211. Call 211. Finally, i must continue to stress how important it is that veryone stay home. The measures we take from a state standpoint can only go so far. The success well have in slowing the spread will be dependent upon individuals all across the state of louisiana. So please no unnecessary travel and stay home. Wash your hands frequently for 20 seconds using soap and water. Use Hand Sanitizer when you dont have access to soap and water. Cough your cough and practice social distancing at least six feet between you and someone else if you have to be out and about. If were going to flatten the curve and lessen the burden on our health care system, if were going to save lives, we must have full cooperation from all louisianans and have to have it now. Because quite frankly, we dont have much longer to wait. April 2 coming up sooner than we would like. With that, i will be happy to take your questions. I will remind you i have a doctor here from the department of health to take any questions specifically related to testing. Yes, sir . Reporter governor, the Surgeon General this morning said next week this upcoming week new orleans could see new yorklike numbers. From the data youre seeing and looking over, is that something you might agree with and if so, is that just in the new orleans rea or in other pockets . Governor edward were number three in the country, the trajectory were on right now takes us to a place were not going to 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 and its not that hard to understand. It is a very difficult concept to can to grasp with because the situation is that serious and that dire but i agree with him and i will tell you the Surgeon General has made himself available to me specifically on a number of cases and youll remember he was actually here in louisiana, and im guessing it was two weeks ago yesterday, it seems like a long, long time ago but just two weeks ago yesterday he was in the state with us and so i would have to say 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 in our data soon and im looking for the day when thy team comes to me and tells me uhhuh, we see that curve start to flatten. But until then we have every reason to believe were headed towards new york. Now the way you ask the questions, were not getting to their numbers only because we dont have their population. And the reason thats important and the reason i continue to focus on the per capita numbers , as i have stated before, any States Health care Delivery System is sized to meet its population. If you have the third most cases per capita, then that means that at least at that time and so long as youre on that trajectory that youre very likely to exceed your states capacity to deliver health care. Yes, maam . Reporter can you give an update on the plans at the Convention Center and whats happening there and also the field hospitals that are promised from the federal government . Governor edwards the field hospitals, we had requested four 250bed units and were afrufede two. This will be 500. O these were basically hospital cots. I dont want to say beds but theyre not an army cot either but somewhere in the middle with i. V. Poles and other thanks. Other things. And theyre separate from staffing. We will use those in the Convention Center to set up our medical monitoring facility and will be very, very helpful to us. That facility will in fact, theyre working there today and theyre going to build this out n wings of 120 rooms each. The contract will require that in the up 1,120 beds Convention Center and we will then staff that facility primarily through a staffing contract that we are executing here. And 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 bring in in order to deliver health care in the moriale Convention Center and we are looking at other options as well to increase our capacity and were looking at other facilities and looking at other hotels. I dont have any news to deliver to you at this point. But this is stepdown capacity. So the idea is that we would have a facility to send fashtse once they no longer need that acute care bed or an i. C. U. Bed and allow the hospitals to free that bet up sooner by having a place to transfer their patients and thats one additional way that you can surge your medical capacity. Thats what were intending to do with the facility were setting up. Were going to have more information about this soon. You can see, i think there was some tv Coverage Today of what theyre doing in new york. The concept as i understand it is very, very similar between what were trying to do here in louisiana and what theyre doing in new york. Yes, sir . Reporter can you tell me generally what the state will e doing with the 1. 8 billion . Governor edwards the 1. 8 billion we should have at some point in the next 30 days and were trying to figure out exactly what flexibility we have with that funding. To one degree or another, we know it will have to be spent on those things that are related to this covid19 Public Health emergency. But just about everything the State Government is doing is related to this emergency. Were still looking at that and i can only tell you were very thankful to be getting that because right now even if we as you know, were we have the federal government paying 75 of the cost of things that were doing here and across the state related to covid19. But thats still 25 we have to come up with. So this will be very helpful in that regard. I can tell you that the degree to which Law Enforcement benefits through the additional allocation of money going through the byrne grant program, for example, that is going to be helpful. The money that goes directly to our hospitals is going to be helpful as well. We just its too early for me to tell you right now exactly how that money will be spent. I can only tell you it will be very, very helpful and the more flexibility we find as we study this bill and as it gets interpreted by the federal agencies administering the program the better off well be. Reporter the question is for the doctor, the 69 of the people who have passed by covid19 are either diabetic or obese which are Common Health conditions in louisiana, to what degree should the average diabetic or average person who is overweight be concerned by those numbers . Doctor i think in general its the cause of concern for our population and youre hearing a consistent mess thank everyone has reason to be concerned and take actions to protect themselves and families from covid19. We unfortunately announced the ath of a 17yearold yesterday. We know at high risk are the Older Age Group and you see people guying dying of diabetes and obesity and are at high risk. To the extent youre somebody with those conditions, take steps to stay at home and have somebody do the shopping for you and limit your exposure to people who are sick and wash your hands frequently. Even if youre not in those groups, do all those things for the loved ones around you that we know have those conditions. We want not only to see as many hospital admissions but want to see the rate of deaths decrease as well in the state. The only way to do that is by taking these measures seriously and thinking not only about our risk but risk to our family and neighbors as you heard the governor say. Reporter as a followup, were those 69 people, were they extremely diabetic, extremely overweight . Do we know the degree of that . Doctor billioux i dont know. But i will say i dont think necessarily were seeing just extremes. I think theres reasons for everybody with those conditions to obviously always take control and have the ultimate health they can but most importantly now we try to limit access to people who are sick with 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 testing or is it something specific to the isolation of the parish . Governor bel edwards its largely a function of testing. As weve seen more high volume testing sites whether theyre done by municipality in lafayette or Hospital Systems in other parts of the state, we start to see not only the places where the parishes where those test sites go up but also the parishes around them go up. Though were concerned were not seeing people tested adequately there and is the case throughout the state. Governor e, l edwards any other questions . Yes, maam. Reporter the Florida Governor announced hes 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 sort of test points for drivers, have you heard anything about that and what do you think globally about governors in texas and florida creating restrictions from dealing with people from our state . Governor bel edwards first of all to the degree theyre doing and saying underscores what im saying and that is people need to take this seriously, that we have a significant issue here in louisiana with the case count and the trajectory that were on in terms of case growth. I think that 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 in to florida. So you know, 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. Reporter is there any warning or advisories from the c. D. C. Before mardi gras to indicate it shouldnt go ahead or any kind of red flags . Governor bel edwards kid tell works id not and dr. B at the health at l. D. H. 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 look, 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 that thats probably correct. But trying to figure out how it got here right now isnt as important as making sure that were doing everything we can 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. Yes, maam. Reporter in terms of the prisons now that we know 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 . Obviously theyre very tightly congested, what are you doing to make sure to limit the spread there . Governor bel edwards as of this morning with the u. C. G. Meeting we had via conference call, theres no positive cases in our state prisons in terms of inmates. So i need to make sure people thaunds. Secondly, we were among the very first states in the nation if not the first to discontinue visitation, not just at our prisons but also at our jails and then with hospitals and nursing homes, for example. We know that p. P. E. Is going to the prisons so they can care for inmates. We know that people are being screened for health to see if they have symptoms such as the fever and so forth as they come in to go to work and if they have a fever, theyre not allowed to go to work. They are paying particular care to those inmates who are in those most vulnerable categories either because of age or Chronic Health condition or both, so i can assure you that were doing everything that we can in order to protect the people that we have in our custody of our state prisons. It is a challenge, just like its a challenge for everybody across the state of louisiana, ut im confident that the work the secretary and his team is doing is really commensurate 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 and have ordered other mitigation efforts and yesterday talked a little about noncompliance. Were heading into the first weekend of your stay at home order being in effect. Just how critical is it this weekend people hunker down, and i know you reiterated, now that people are off work more so that its a weekend. Governor 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 focus 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 well do that in this case and being a Good Neighbor means you dont have unnecessary contact with one another. Whether that is your family members or your neighbors or friends or whatever, just dont do it. 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 on awful lot of louisianams out there doing their part. Just wanted to backtrack to the prisons. The attilas the amount of testing that has been done . At cant tell you the amount of test. I can only tell you that with other testing protocols, when individuals me to the protocols for testing whether they are inmates or staff workers commit which means you have to have symptoms commit the tests are simply not designed to give you an accurate result before there are symptoms. But 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 driveup federally supported 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 set up test sites a two week ago today, and its site set up a week ago tomorrow, jefferson. It was a lag time between having your sample collected and having the test results being made available to you. We are starting to see those results being made known to those individuals. But obviously, just like we want to have the ability to to increase our capacity for the collection of specimens to be tested, and the throughput at our labs, and a time to shorten between 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. We always want to be better. We are working on that every single day. By the fact that we have the fifthmost tests in the country right now on a per capita basis. Just how hard we are working to improve our Testing Capacity and the Lab Throughput and so forth. We dont like not knowing. 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. I will mention again what i have said a couple of times before, one of the reasons why we have been struggling to flatten the curve and the country of south korea was able to do it as they to do it, is 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 have 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. I think everyone admits that this was not 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 . Tomorrow. Ok. 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, i am 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 afflicted 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. We are actually going to go a reporterur desk to who is working in louisiana right now to see if we can find out a little bit about what is going on on the ground. On on the ground. Adelsongo to jeff