Everyone i think knows who is here. S. My farright, doctor todays numbers and where we are today. Hospitalized newly is up from yesterday. But when you look at the three , day averaging of these numbers, the threeday average is down which is good news. , this is the threeday hospitalization rate. We tend not to look at any one day. Day today it is up somewhat, but if you look at the threeday average, it is moving down which is good news. We talk about the apex and is the apex a plateau . Right know we right now we are projecting we are reaching a plateau from the total number of hospitalizations. You see it is starting to flatten. This is a projection. It still depends on what we do and what we do will affect those numbers. This is not an act of god that we are looking at. It is an act of what society actually does. Change in icu admissions is way down and that is good news. The discharge rate is right about where it was. The bad news is 5,489 new yorkers have lost their lives to this virus. That is up from 4,758. That is the largest single day increase. But 731about numbers, that is 731 people who we lost. Behind every one of those numbers is an individual, is a father, a,other, brother. A lot of pain again today for many new yorkers and they are in our thoughts and prayers. Any people across this country the number ofy , deaths up and number of hospitalizations dropping, the number of deaths and losses is a lagging indicator to the number of hospitalizations. What happens is a person goes into the hospital, they are treated, most of them are released, discharged. Some stay, some get put on a ventilator. The longer you are on a ventilator, the less likely that you will ever come off of that ventilator. That is why you are seeing the number of deaths increase because these are people who came in at the peak. They were not successfully treated. They are on a ventilator. The longer you are on the ventilator, the less likely you come off the ventilator. New york is still the most heavily impacted state in the nation. New jersey which is a little bit behind new york is suffering. Again our thoughts and prayers , are with them. I spoke to the governor of new governor murphy of new jersey today and we talked on the situation and joint strategies, but our heart goes out to all our neighbors in new jersey michigan, california, louisiana. , in terms of how we are operating, how we are managing the situation. As we know, the Hospital System is a threelegged stool. It relies on number of beds, offf and equipment, number beds. We started with the system of have0 beds state and 90,000 beds, enough beds available. Problem has been a there it Health Care Staff are getting sick, they are overworked, under rate emotional stress. Think about these healthcare workers, you are working in a hospital, an emergency room that is overwhelmed, you are worried about your own health. You then go home, you are worried about bringing a virus home if you are infected. At home is under stress as every home is under stress. 7000 new staff have been hired from the pool we have identified, these are retired healthcare workers who came forward, people from across the country who came forward, the state has a pool of potential employees the hospital hires from that pool and they have hired 7000 today. Protective equipment ventilators, we are stretching , and moving, but every hospital has what they need to date. We balanced the patient load among all hospitals. No single hospital or system gets overburdened. That is a daily adjustment which takes tremendous Cooperation Among all of the healthcare institutions. I thank them very much for what they are doing. And then we have the overload relief which is the Javits Center 2500 beds and u. S. Navy ships comfort. The u. S. Navy ships comfort had 1000 bed capacity. It was originally for nonCovid Patients. What wound up happening is we dont really have nonCovid Patients. Traffic accidents, crime is down. The original plan which was the comfort would take noncovid cases from the hospitals did not really work because the hospital did not have noncovid cases. I spoke with the president yesterday morning and i asked to speak with the department of defense to see if they would change it to covid. The president , to his credit, moved expeditiously. He called me back yesterday afternoon and said they would make the comfort noncovid. When they make the transition, the capacity of the ship comes down from 1000 to 500 beds because Covid Patients require more space and the capacity came down from 1000 to 500. It is still a tremendous benefit. Between javits and the comfort, that is 3000 beds. It is a welcome overload relief to the Hospital System which is already stressed. I spoke to general shaughnessy today. The department of defense has been fantastic and the number of military personnel and how quickly they have set up here and this is a tough assignment to run facilities this long and to be handling this many Covid Patients in a new startup emergency facility. This is a really difficult undertaking and they have really been fantastic. I want to think the president from moving as quickly as he did. We are working on a tristate cooperative. I mentioned i spoke to the governor of new jersey and the governor of connecticut. We coordinated the shutting down when we did because this really operates as a tristate area. A lot of people who live in new jersey work in new york or live in new york or connecticut so we talk about the tristate area and we try to operate the best we can as that regional collaboration and that has been working well for us. We have to start planning restarting life. We are not there yet but this is not a light switch that we can just flick one day and everything goes back to normal. We will have to restart that economy, restart a lot of systems that we shut down abruptly and we need to start to plan for that and i spoke to the governors about coming up with a regional metropolitan tristate approach to do just that. When we get to that point, which we are not at but how do we restart our economy and get everything up and running as quickly as possible. My personal opinion is it will come down to how good we with testing. You are not going to end the infection and end the virus before you start restarting life. I dont think you have that luxury. How do you start the economy up how do you start getting back , to work as quickly as possible . It is going to come down to testing. You are going to have to know who had the virus, who resolved the virus, who never had it and that is going to be testing. That is an entirely new field we are developing. New york state developed an Antibody Testing regimen that the department of health has approved for use in new york state. That has to be brought to scale and the department of health is going to be working with the fda to do just that. This tests the blood to determine whether or not you have the antibodies which means you had the virus and resolved the virus. Her it is why you would have the antibodies for the virus. It would mean that you are no longer contagious and you cannot catch the virus because you have the antibodies in your system which means you can get to work, back to school, you could do whatever you want. But you have to have that testing on a scale. You have 19 Million People in new york. Just think of how many people you would need to test and west quickly. Also, Rapid Testing to determine whether or not you have the virus now exists. They now have 15 minute tests that are commercially available. Again, they have to be brought to scale. No private company has the capacity to bring those to scale. I was speaking with governor murphy and governor lamont. We are interested in working with private companies that can actually bring this Testing Capacity to scale and to scale quickly. You had the Antibody Testing, that is part. If you can then test if a person is positive for the virus and you can do it that day and you can get those results in 15 minutes, that is also another way to get back to life and do it quickly. We are very interested and so is new york and new jersey and connecticut. There are private companies that have these tests. It is all up to scale. Youre starting them in the state of new york. We only have about a 50,000 person Testing Capacity which is nice, but it is not at a scale that is going to make a large difference. Private companies that are interesting in coming up to scale quickly, we are interested in those companies and investing in those companies and they should contact us at empire state to development corporation. The state budget, every state budget has been decimated by this situation. We shut down the economy. People are not working. They are not paying income taxes. Businesses are not operating. Our budget just collapsed. Our revenues just collapsed. You want to restart the economy, you have to help restart the local governments and that is going to be a federal act. I did not have the capacity as a governor, no governor does to generate revenue in a positive way from an economy that is not operating. That is going to be a federal stimulus bill. There is no other way to do this. It has to be a stimulus bill that actually understands you have state and local governments that have to be brought up to speed and functioning if you want to facilitate this restarting of the economy. The federal government passed some legislation. It was woefully inadequate from new yorks point of view. We have had time to study the legislation. It gets worse when you read it. It is not even what was represented to us initially. I am sending out a congressional letter today saying the past good for theid nation i have no doubt, gave aid to a lot of people in places that needed it, but it was not fair to new york and that has to be remedied in any legislation that goes forward. Know it hasnt, i been a frustrating 37 days, but it has only been 37 days on the other hand. I know it feels like a lifetime. It has been so disruptive, so abrupt, so frightening, so disorienting. But it has only been 37 days. Everything in context and everything in perspective. I know it is tough to get up every day and this is like groundhog day, living through this bizarre reality that we are in. It is even more difficult i think with the weather changing and you feel the seasons changing and it is getting nicer and you start to open a new book of possibilities. The weather is getting nice and i should be getting outdoors and doing this. I get it. But it has only been 37 days. I started by saying those numbers of cases that is not , arbitrary. What we do affects the number of cases. Our behavior affects the number of cases. We are generating the cases. They are not descending on us from heaven. It is our behavior. It has been 37 days. The 1918 pandemic that we talk about peaked in new york for six months. It came through in three waves and it peaked for six months. 30,000 people died in new york during that pandemic. Why . They did not react the way we did. They did not know as much as we know today. They did not have the same drug therapies. But we are changing the curve in that virus world. Growth. You see that plateauing because of what we are doing. If we dont do what we are doing, that is a much different curve and that is what happened in the past. Social distancing is working. Well, shut down the business is. Businesses. I know. Well, you shut down the schools. I know, but it is working. That is why you see the numbers coming down. If we were doing the same rates of interaction, those numbers would still be going up. To the extent we see a flattening or a possible plateau, that is because of what we are doing and we have to keep doing it. I know it is hard, but we have to keep doing it. To the extent it takes an effort. Remember, it is about we and it is not about me. I know what i would like to be doing. I would like to be, it is motorcycle weather for may. For me. It is time to get out on the water. It is time to go hiking in the adirondacks. I get it. It is not about me. What i do will affect other people. It will affect my family. It will affect other people. It will affect people in those Emergency Rooms who are killing themselves every day to keep other people safe. I get infected i will affect , them. We all talk about Society Community and interconnection , and family and life is bigger than us. Now is the time to live that. Now is the time to live that. When you feel that need, i have to do this, it is not about me. It is about we and what is good for all of us. My health is in your hands. Your health is in my hands. The health of those healthcare workers and First Responders and all of those people who show up to work every day to keep society functioning, we are responsible to them also. To the extent it is hard, i get it. Maybe if we think about it through a broader lens, it will be easier lets not get complacent. We have to stay disciplined, smart, safe. We do that by staying at home and we will get through this together. Questions . They said the comfort was patients inat covid a small number. You said they would be creating a smaller number of patients. Will the ship be able to care for that number of Covid Patients safely . Gov. Cuomo i spoke to the president and Vice President and those helping manage the comfort. When you transition from nonCovid Patients to covid, the capacity of the ship goes from 1000 beds down to 500 beds but it can treat 500 Covid Patients adequately and safely and that is what we are transitioning into operation now. The Antibody Test . We have a test that we have developed and we are working to scale that up now. Over the course of the next week, we will be able to figure out how many we can run. We expect not just in our labs but to get other labs as well. We would like to work with the fda to get that approved. The fda has already approved some Antibody Tests. I think that Antibody Tests, you have to look at them. Some measure the immunoglobulin g and the other, ng. Somes some show there is a new infection occurring and there is one that has been around for a while. It is important to make sure that the tests we are measuring show that individuals have the infection. It is important to make sure it is the correct test. And showseasures g, that they had the infection and that it was resolved. Did you get that . Neither did i. [laughter] thank you. Many tests that are out there that companies are making. There are two types of immunoglobulin. One that says the infection is still there and you are starting to mount a response which is what happens with an antivirus. The other, your body also makes an immunoglobulin after the infection has resolved, that is the one you want to measure. Otherwise, you may be measuring something which actually says you still have the infection in your body. You want to measure the one that says it is resolved and that is the one that we developed a test for. That better . Yes, that was good. Mark . This is very provincial. I am provincial, that is ok. Earlier today [indiscernible] anded away from coronavirus will be buried later today. [indiscernible] away. Ay is there anything that the state police or State Government can do . Gov. Cuomo i am sure the nypd will be doing what they need to do. I made it clear yesterday that these social distancing regulations are not just please. They are regulations you can be fined for. We increased the fine to make the point that it was serious. I am sure the nypd will be enforcing it. But also, people have to understand. I understand religious gatherings. I understand the orthodox community, the jewish orthodox community. I am very close to them and i have been for many years and my family is very close to them. But now is not the time for large religious gatherings. We paid this price already. We have learned this lesson. That was new rochelle and westchester. So please, now is not the time. You do know one a service you do no one a service by making this worse and infecting more people. There have been a lot of reports that communities of color have been particularly hit hard by the virus. Do you have a sense if that has been the case in new york . You are putting out a lot of data. Gender, age, updating it daily. Has it been difficult to get those racial breakdowns . What are you doing to get those . The hospitals actually dont report race information directly to the state. What we end up doing is calling the coroners offices around the state after the death has been reported. There has been a lag. We understand people want that information. We want that information and we will have it this week. There has been that trend where it has affected communities of color . Gov. Cuomo one of the challenges is that some of the communities have challenges with their health in general. They are more apt to have challenges with asthma or diabetes. Anytime anyone who has underlying medical conditions ends up with this virus or any virus, it puts them more at risk. Do you have any update on the unemployment website . There is progress and we will have that interface off and running by thursday. We have worked with verizon. A lot of the problem was the lines were crashing because the volume was extreme. We have moved 80 of the calls off of the verizon system and into call centers and you should start to see easing up on that today. Again, we ask people to remain patient as we get that resolved. Executive order regarding ventilator distribution. That was going to cover other things. Is there a reason for the delay . Gov. Cuomo i am going to issue an executive order on the ventilators, fines, and everything we have discussed today. Taking the ventilators, the Health Association put out something to say there would be a voluntary taking of those. Gov. Cuomo the hospitals tell quoteunquoteave available, meaning unused and they are not going to use it in the foreseeable future. It was always of the equipment that you, the hospital, believe lentailable, if the state 20 of the available units, as you define available, that would be 500. And 500 ventilators was a big deal, especially two weeks ago. Frankly, since then, other things have happened. We have 1000 ventilators from china. California freed up 500 ventilators. Oregon sent 140 ventilators area the state of washington freed up i think 400 ventilators or Something Like that. We have also acquired an additional 500 ventilators. We are not in the position we were in. But that is what it always was. The hospital says we have available, by their own weinition, unused inventory are not using for the foreseeable future. 20 of that number, leaving them with 80 of the unused, was 500 ventilators. That is not what you were saying on friday. Gov. Cuomo no, that is what i was saying. [inaudible] similar to after 9 11 . Gov. Cuomo that is something that is going to come up and i think is important to look at. To find a way to say thank you to these healthcare workers who are out there every day. We talk to them on the telephone. What they have done is incredible, just incredible. Not just the healthcare workers. Healthcare workers, just think of the mindset to walk into that er every morning putting on those grounds those grounds wns, protective clothing, having to change that several times a day, seeing people pass away, then go home and deal with stress at home. Also the First Responders and transit workers. You look at the rates of sickness, they know what they are exposing themselves to and they still do it. God bless them. The stateinmates in prison system to curb this corona outbreak . Gov. Cuomo we are looking at that anyway we can and looking at it continually. I dont think there is anything new, but it is something we are exploring all the time. [inaudible] gov. Cuomo we have done a number. We have done about 700 role violators state, people deemed to be a low risk to Public Safety and highrisk to covid. We are continuing to evaluate it. The promise was 400 people to come out about come out of rikers. So far 130 have been released. I think 230 out of rikers, but we can get you the exact numbers. On a more psychological philosophical issue, 730 people died. These numbers keep rolling out. People seem to get numb to these sorts of stats. How do you counter that . How do you impress on people that these are human lives, that this is an enormous human catastrophe . Gov. Cuomo you know, jesse if they i hear the point. I guess one could get numb to the numbers. Remember everyid number is a human being behind that and a family. , the last thing i do is get numb. I can tell you for the hospital staff that goes through this, they are not getting numb. For the families that are suffering, they are not getting numb. The pain is increasing, the grief is increasing. You see those pictures on tv, getting through a situation where you have to put bodies in trucks in parking lots. How you could get numb to any of imagine, cant especially new yorkers, that we lose the humanity of this. It is something i struggle with every day. I tried to think of the opposite, that we are doing good. Because you cant stop, you cant stop you cant save everyone. This virus is very good at what it does and it kills vulnerable people. Thats what it does and it does that very well and we cant stop that. The question is, are you saving everyone you can save . Yes,hey are the answer is and i take some solace in that fact. Armor Health Care System is operating. I dont believe we lost a Single Person because we couldnt provide care. People we lost, we couldnt save , despite our best efforts. No, i dont see the numbness and i dont believe new yorkers see the numbness. I think the frustration of the individual situation can cause you to do irresponsible things, should,t more than you to disregard social distancing. I think thats an issue and thats what i have been trying to address. When people do start getting back to work, will it be a reverse . Time orto work 25 at a 12 or something . Gov. Cuomo it is a good question. I think they go back it is my opinion and we are working on a plan with connecticut and new jersey, because when we go back, we go back together. I think we go back with people who have tested that they are negative or people who have tested that they have the antibodies, which means they had the virus and are immune. Or we go back with younger people going first, still protecting, isolating the vulnerable. But if it is waves, i think those are the waves. Can you get reinfected . Is there any proof you cant get reinfected if you have the antibodies . Usually when you have a virus, you develop antibodies, you dont get it again. There was one report out of china where they suggested maybe there were some cases, but that hasnt been confirmed. Are you concerned that the temporary hospitals are you concerned that the temporary hospitals wont be accepting significant numbers of patients . Gov. Cuomo a significant number of nations . Of patients . No, they are ramping up now. The Javits Center and comfort, you are talking about . There is two separate situations. When i say we have about 90,000 bed capacity, we brought online additional beds. Two ways. Number one, every hospital had to increase capacity by 50 with a goal of 100 . Every hospital has increased by 50 , that is why you see hospital beds in Conference Rooms and lobbies. Second, we built temporary emergency facilities primarily around downstate new york. They may or may not be used depending on whether we need the beds. The javits and the comfort we are using and they are ramping up now. Im going to go speak to the hospitals. Thank you. [inaudible] are there any plans on how to address Grocery Store workers . Gov. Cuomo Grocery Store workers, transit workers, First Responders, police officers, these are all, in my opinion, heroes of today because they get up every morning, they go to work so society stays safe and functioning. We are doing everything we can to protect them. We owe them a big thank you. Thank you. Despite a stayathome order in wisconsin, there was voting in the democratic president ial primary. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers tried to issue an executive order to delay in person voting until june, but his actions were overruled by the state supreme court. The primary results will not be released until monday, april 13. When it comes to trying to keep people from gathering, how close are we to remote voting in that building behind me . Is one chamber closer to that happening than the other . No, it doesnt seem like it. Is there some guideline of why this virus affects people differently . Of course this virus, it is much more transmissible than many other viruses, and number two, it appears to be thanmore severe and deadly other viruses, like influenza. Do you have any way of pushing the idea of Disaster Recovery preparedness up into the organization so it is more of a top priority . Thatam smiling as you say because you say it is the second highest priority. I would argue it is often dead last. Share your experiences dealing with the coronavirus and ask experts your questions. During the conversation every morning on washington journal and more live conversation weeknights at 8 00 p. M. Eastern for washington journal primetime. Maryland governor larry hogan confirmed that former fda commissioner Scott Gottlieb is now part of his States Coronavirus task force. He made the announcement while speaking to reporters about local efforts to combat the outbreak, including the formation of strike teams to help Nursing Homes dealing with an influx of cases. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today at the Baltimore CityField Hospital at the convention center, which represents a critical part of our ongoing efforts to support Baltimore City and our hospitals across the state in the fight against the covid19 pandemic. This facility will be a place where coronavirus patients who no longer require