Jeff, i was waiting on you. Are you good . [laughter] , and thank you for tuning in. Obviously anus officer Public Health to take specific questions related to the virus and the disease and testing. We will also be joined in progress by a congresswoman who will be here. I do want to thank steve for the work he is doing and for the entire delegation. The work that they are doing on behalf of the country and the state of louisiana specifically the cares act and other things they have been working on, and i do know that the congresswoman has been appointed to the Advisory Council that the president will work with as he makes decisions about the guidance he is going to issue relative to reopening the economy, and certainly i think that is helpful for our state to have someone on that council. We also have the secretary of economic development, don pearson, who is here. He will be able to answer any questions about an announcement i will be making as part of this press conference around the Resilient Louisiana Commission whittle help us as we transition to the opening our economy in louisiana, not just in the shortterm, but in the longer term because we know this is going to be a process. This will unfold over a number of weeks and months. You have heard me say, we will we are notnormal going to give back to normal until we have a vaccine in some effector, therapeutic treatments, but we will not wait until you start to we open the economy and get businesses back open and get workers back to work. So, there is a process we will follow and this commission, the beisiana commission will instrumental in helping us to make sure we do that. I am going to apologize up front because i got more prepared remarks today than i normally do. But i think all of it is really important. As for todays numbers, you dont see them on the dashboard yet because we update at noon. I can tell you that we will report 581 new cases today for a total of 22,532. In addition, and quite sadly, we will report 53 new deaths for a total of 1156. Tests, we number of have a little over 4600 tests that the results of which had been shared with us over the last 24 hours. There will be additional numbers reported at noon related to hospitalization numbers, ventilator utilization numbers handy so forth. Numbers and so forth. We also have information from the department of health. They are going to share based on original projections across the state. State, we areas a going to see new covid infections throughout the remainder of this year. Obviously, we want to see a downward trajectory of cases. After you flatten the curve, you hope to see the curve banned downward bend downward. I will talk about the new orleans region today and what the numbers show there. The numbers show that hospitalizations for Covid Patients and for puis is trending downward and ventilator utilization is trending downward, too. The charts if you look at the hospital charts, and this is region one, new orleans and Jefferson Parish and arebernard parish, where we is on the redline. If you look at todays date on the number of covid of the hospitals, it is 790. Now, had we stayed on the trajectory that we were on before we issued the shelter at home, stayathome order, we would have, just in region one today, according to the modeling, almost 3000 people in the hospital. So, that is 1200 or so people who are not in the hospital today, but would have been. Over on the chart on the right, you can see ventilator utilization at 156 in region one. We would have been over 1000 in region one alone, which is why we were doing everything we could to surge medical capacity related to beds, icu space, staffing, and ventilators because we did not know for a fact that we would get off of that curve. Remember a month ago, we were reporting new cases on a pace that was leading the world. And so, we are in a better place today, precisely because of people of louisiana at in this case, region one, took seriously the stayathome order. They took seriously the need to practice socialdistancing and better hygiene, and it is literally paying off because just as we talked about the number of deaths, not just being numbers, those are real people, these are real people who we may not know the identity of, but they are not in the hospital and they are not dying because of the stayathome order. So, this is really important, and i hope you all will help us to explain to the people of louisiana just how critically important this is. By the way, now is not the time to let up. Need to bei said, we putting the accelerator all the way to the floor and these mitigation measures, especially as we move through the month of april because it is all apart of the president s 30 day plan that was added to the initial 15 day plan, so i guess it is a 45 day plan, to stop the spread, and it coincides exactly with what our plan is in louisiana through april as well. But this is why we are doing this, to achieve this kind of result, and it is still sad we still have people in the hospital on been elated today and in icu and people dying today, but not in the numbers that we thought were going to be the case. And so, i wanted to share that with you all this morning. Also, i have another chart to show you that has the trajectories of where we would be on cases of covid in louisiana. Louisiana,sorry, not in region one. This is the same area, and you can see the redline with 2. 4. That is when you do nothing and you allow people to interact as they normally would. You would have seen cases, along 2. 0, somee, of mitigation measures. Many and not necessarily everybody participated. You can see where you are there. 1. 7 is the blue line. R0 is shelterinplace. The people who are following for the most part. That is where we are trending right now is the 1. 3. Quite frankly, a couple of weeks ago, we were doubtful that we would ever get to that line. And you have various data points you can use to determine where you are. Cases is not the best of them voted hospitalizations can tell you, and within hospitalizations, we can model on icu utilization and bad utilization as well, but when you put all of those things together, we know that in region one, our line is now down to 1. 3, and so, what that means is we are not transmitting covid the way we would if these measures were not in place, and so, it is really paying off for us. And we are in a much better place than we literally thought was possible. So, just wanted to share that information with you, and if you have questions about that, we will get back to your questions later. Is all good news. It means were headed in the right direction. , come on in, steve. Congress minsk police is here, and appreciate congress minsk police is here and we appreciate you for joining us. We are doing relatively well. We do know however that everyone across the state, and and not every region is complying with the shelter at home order to the degree would like them to to the degree we would like them too. I employ everybody to do that. For the remainder of april. Obviously, we do have essential infrastructure and essential workers working. We have make sure that people have access to nutrition. But we think restaurants we have restaurants and Grocery Stores open, but as you venture out to take advantage of those things, do not do that as often as necessary. You dont have to take everyone to the store every time you go. And of course, we have the delivery and the drive through and take out options that are restaurants. And i know there is a significant concern that if we remove too many restrictions all at once, we will see the cases spike. That is a concern i have as well. So, we have to try to strike the right balance between promoting Public Health and minimizing the spread of covid19. The demand on our hospitals and ultimately the number of people who die, but we do know that we have to transition to opening up more of our economy across the state of louisiana, and we are going to do that. I dont have a lot of precise information for you today. I do have a video telephone conference with the president and the Coronavirus Task was at 2 00 p. M. Today. The congressmen will sit in on that conference with me and as i mentioned earlier, he has been appointed by the president to a counsel of advisors. I dont know what they are calling it, to help the president decide exactly how we are going to open up the economy and moving forward as well, and i think that is very helpful. But we are going to have more information for you all in the coming days as to what that will look like. We do expect the cdc to revise their guidance today. We will continue to rely on that with our and consult department of health and the office of Public Health care. We will continue to look to things like the department of homeland securitys Cyber Infrastructure security agency, what their guidance is and whether it changes on what is essential infrastructure and, which workers are considered essential and so forth. We will have more information for you all about that in the coming days and weeks. I do want to take a moment to thank the farm bureau of louisiana. They gave 500,000 to feeding louisiana. And that is through the association of food banks. That will be shared across five food banks that touch all 64 parishes. They include the greater baton rouge food bank, the Second Harvest food bank, which also covers the acadiana region. And the food bank of central louisiana. On that note, while we are talking about farm bureau, ask for special prayers for Rodney Anderson west and the president for farm bureau for 31 years, and he has been a longterm member of the lsu board of supervisors. He is currently in the hospital in an icu and on a ventilator, fighting against covid19. He is aware and responding to stimulus, but today marks his 29th day in the hospital. In june. Set to retire we ask you to keep him and his entire family in your prayers. He is one of those people who are represented by the numbers that we always talk about because numbers all refer to individuals. Also, i want to thank airbnb for committing 500,000 to provide places to stay for the 350 Frontline Health care workers in the new orleans region. Today, sams club and walmart have donated produced Health Care Workers to University Hospital in new orleans. About 20,000 pounds of Fresh Produce via sams club, so we thank them very much for that. We expect that it will provide over 1000 hospital employees with Fresh Produce, and they will be on site, sams club will be there to distribute that today. Obviously, our Health Care Workers, doctors, respiratory therapists, a lot of professional Health Care Workers , they are on the front lines. They are absolute heroes working long hours to care for those who are dealing with covid19, and people in the hospital, for whatever reason we happen to be in the hospital, so were very thankful to them, and we are thankful for walmart and sams club for recognizing how important they are, and to recognize them and this gesture is relatively simple but i think it does speak volumes as to how important they are. The other thing i wanted to recognize his walmart, they have been helping the state. They are parting with the state to facilitate testing. They are doing that principally right now in st. John, the baptist parish. That is really helping an awful lot. Importantmake an announcement regarding our economic recovery. Life as we know it has been altered for the time being. Or economyour state has been untouched by this Public Health emergency. And we remain in the midst of a fight to defeat the invisible enemy. We are not there yet i, the we are doing better. Health care education, business and government institutions have all been adversely impacted, and i understand we need the best possible game plan for the future in order to foster economic recovery to become an even more resilient state, and and to safeguard Public Health. I am announcing today the creation of the Resilient Louisiana Commission that will assemble that game plan. The purpose is to bring together the very best public and private sector individuals who have expertise in these areas and give them to prepare and guide the state through the next weeks and months, as we deal with the covid19 pandemic. Look at our economy and make recommendations to make businesses more resilient, so that we can open them up, get businesses up, get workers back to work, but do so in a way that adequately protects Public Health. And so, you will see a lot of activity, a lot of recommendations come from this thep, and obviously, intended outcome is a comprehensive game plan that makes our state more resilient, both in the shortterm term and in the long term. And i am excited about the work that they are going to do. We will make sure they do it in a transparent way that includes multiple viewpoints, and is going to have multiple individuals from business and industry all across the state of louisiana, and geographically and by sector of the economy. It is a tall task, but i have confidence that with experience and talent and dedicated divers members of this task force, they will do a great job. Theant government lieutenant government will be joined by other state officials, our commissioner, the secretary of the department of revenue they will serve as members. On the panel will be state senator ronnie johns, the Senate Commerce chair and state representative paul davis, the house commerce chair. The two chairs will be charged with leading the Resilient Louisiana Commission are don pearson and terry sterling. You know don. He has decades of economic experience at the local and regional levels. I cannot think of anyone better than terry sterling to be the cochair. Recovery will be a big part of this in terms of health care as well, and that is where she has spent her career. We need to know what worked and what didnt work in terms of our medical response to covid19. And terry has served for more than two decades with the franciscan missionaries of our lady of Health System in executive roles, and she was instrumental in leading the creation of the new Childrens Hospital here in baton rouge, and she now leads the Health Care Management consulting business. So we got a lot of work to do, and i am asking them to get started just as soon as possible. They will have multiple task forces. They will be formed underneath them by a sector of our economy and im looking forward to receiving their and i am looking forward to receiving their work. Be one and going to done. This is going to continue for some time, and i have no doubt we are all going to get through this by working together. You can track the work of the Commission Online at opportunitylouisiana. Com resilie. Tlouisiana as i mentioned, we are going to have a call with the president today at 2 00. Constances police is going to sit in on that call with me solis will be on that call with me. We will get guidance from him ,nd the Coronavirus Task force and the cdc. Looking forward to all of that. And first, i will see if you want to add some comments before i take questions from the public. Good to be with you, governor. I am sorry we cannot shake hands formally. The governor and i have been working through this crisis together. Our whole delegation has been united in that front. We have all come together. Especially here in the louisiana, we have always had that tradition as a congressional delegation of working together through crises read crises. The focus has been addressing and containing this virus. New orleans became one of the epicenters for the outbreak as well as some of the surrounding parishes, jefferson, st. John the baptist. You saw a lot of effort made from the governors standpoint all the way down. We talked to the president on a number of issues. When we were worried about ventilator shortages, we were able to work with fema to get more ventilators and more ppe for the frontline workers. I cannot say enough about the great men and women working in our hospitals, the doctors, nurses, people cleaning up the rooms and being extra cautious. Also not sure what exposure they have for their own families, but they still want to work to keep our communities safe. It is one more reason why it is so important for us to do our part, everyone of us, to keep ourselves and our families safe, so that we dont overwhelm the hospital systems. You have seen a drop in ventilator use. The number of people on ventilators is coming down. Thats no reason to let up on social distancing. When you go to the grocery store, keep distance. Maybe you are not fighting as much for the toilet paper these days. I think people are a lot better aware of what they need to do to keep themselves and their safe. Es this gets us one step closer to where we can stop start opening up the economy. Hasof the programs that been incredibly successful for Small Businesses has been the paycheck protection program. It is one of the components of the cares act, the 2 trillion package that Congress Passed just two weeks ago. Case where government moves at light speed to set up a program, republicans and democrats coming together, to say we need to save our Small Businesses and mediumsized businesses. There are different components of that for everybody, but the paycheck protection has been the most successful and most effective. We have seen one point 6 million businesses across the country have already qualified for loans. In the louisiana, we have seen more than 17,000 businesses that have qualified for the paycheck protection program. Unfortunately today, just a few , the program ran out of money. This is something we have been working on in congress to renew. In just a few weeks, that program has been completely exhausted. Today, they stopped accepting applications. But there are thousands more businesses that need that relief. We want those businesses to come back. Does, 70 has to be used to pay workers, pay employees, so we dont see millions of people joined the unemployment rolls. We just saw another 5. 5 million people. Hopefully, those people will get back to work as these grants and applications get back get approved and workers start putting People Company start putting people back on the payroll and Offering Health insurance. For is why we are pushing 250 billion dollars more. We have been working with treasury secretary mnuchin and his team. I know negotiations are ongoing as we speak. Republicans and democrats are working with the white house to get an agreement. Hopefully, we will get that in the next few days. Louisiana, we the still need that relief. As we start looking toward the where thethat is focus has started to shift. Everybody from local restaurant tours to the heads of some of the Biggest Companies in the world are starting to look at the next step to safely come back. Lets keep in mind, when we talk ,bout reopening the economy were not talking about a choice between safety and economic recovery. We can do both and we have to do both. I have talked to a lot of health experts. It was really good to see warner to thomas at the white house working with the president on a chan to share ventilators. Working on a plan to share ventilators. Warner was at the forefront of that. We also talked about how to open way. Conomy in a safe this has been an encouraging sign. The fda used to be notoriously new drugs orving testing techniques. Sometimes, the delay to get a 99 rate when you can get a 95 rate in a quicker time, you can hopefully help a lot more people. Clearly, there is extra demand on the kids. But now there is a new saliva test. When you talk to the heads of sports leagues about opening up, we want to go to a saints game. I want to see the pelicans. Joe wants to get to Tiger Stadium and he doesnt want it to be an empty Tiger Stadium. Want a full stadium. People know when we come back, a pace where be at people are taking extra precautions and we have more of a Comfort Level that this disease is not going to spread like it spread before. That work is being done at a rapid pace, even looking at finding cures. In many cases, its an opportunity. There are direct examples of people cured of coronavirus from some of those preapproved drugs and that is what the medical community is working to address. The irs started yesterday processing and sending checks to families, a component of the cares act that puts money directly into the pockets of families so they have money to buy food and do the things they need to do when you might have lost their when they mightve lost their job. In the next few weeks, more and more people will see that. Its something you do not have to preapply for. If you have an account with the irs, if you have paid taxes before, they have your information. Over 60 of americans already have direct deposit on file with the irs, so those checks will be automatically deposited. Today, the irs opened a new portal. You can go online to irs. Gov and they have a coronavirus button you can click on to get a lot of information. If youare eligible, qualify, or you just want to get your Checking Account information put into the system so the irs can automatically deposit it, you can do all of that today with the portal. I was honored today to be asked by the president to join the task force to reopen the economy. This is a task force that includes some of the biggest Business Leaders in the world. Its a Bipartisan Group with about 20 members of congress, republican and democrat. I was on the call this morning with the president , the Vice President , and some of my colleagues talking about the economic recovery. I heard from people in the about how tonity start opening the economy in a safe way. All of this is going to be put together. We are working in conjunction with the governors, and clearly, they are going to play an Important Role to get things back to the way they were. We are going to come back. Disasters. N through unfortunately, in louisiana, we have more experience than others in dealing with disasters. But we are a resilient people. Our country is full of resilient people as well. Our wayto get back to of life. When we start, we know it will not be exactly the same. We have to take extra precautions. We cannot be complacent, but we can start getting back to work and planning that in a smart, amazed in a smart way. Thatll address problems come up along the way. On behalf of the whole delegation, which has been working incredibly well together. Ok, a couple of questions we are going to answer and then we will take your question. The first comes from covington, june. She says as the stayathome to june 1, closer the beginning of Hurricane Season, what is being discussed about evacuation procedures as some neighboring states have restrictions on us entering their states . First of all, its a great question. I dont know that the stayathome order will be in effect in fact, it wont be in effect on june 1, i believe, the way it currently looks, but we will still be dealing with covid19 as we get into Hurricane Season. So what i want to tell everybody things we do every year apply this year, maybe more so. Have a game plan. Make sure you go to gameplan. Org and follow those instructions so that you can put you in your family and the best possible position to withstand the hurricane. , when we look at hurricane preparations in our planning, we are going to have to have multiple shelters so that we can practice social shelters. Inside the we are going to have to have additional medical personnel in any shelter we open. There are all sorts of things we have to consider. We are going to do an exercise here that will be integrated with the National Weather service. We have fema on site and they have been on site now for over a month every day here as we work on these things together. But it is a great question. You never know exactly what is but typically, it is the augustseptember portion of Hurricane Season when you see the strongest and the most hurricanes. Obviously, this could be the see one june the first, so we are going to be prepared. Parish, but he asks are we seeing a backlog of test results or has the backlog cleared was to mark with over cleared . With over 90 of the test results coming in today from nonstate labs, its hard for us to say we have a complete picture of whats going on. Two days ago, we had over 10,000 test come in in one day. That is the most we have ever had, probably something to do with easter weekend. Cases sorry, the number of tests we see informing forming our data going forward, should be more uniform. 7000 e had over sorry, 4600 tests, and that is more in line with what we saw yesterday. We should see that number taper out. Of course, we are trying to increase Testing Capacity every day and we are having some success with that. It remains the case that we believe we still have the most testing per capita in the country. If not, new york has eclipsed us, but just by a slight amount. And that was essential, because as you know, early on, we had the fastest growth in covid anywhere in the world. By the way, every day the results get reported, whether it is a labs or private labs, to us here at the state. The department of health. And every single test result gets reported to the cdc as well so they have visibility on what we are doing. With that, we will open it up obviously, we and have the doctor here to answer questions, congressmans police congressman scalise. On the chart you showed, the purple line if we are going to start opening the economy before july, it looks like double the number of people could get infected if we just go back to the blue line. Do you have projections for how many more people will be infected when we get the economy back up . Are going toll, we try to do things to make sure we dont do that. Thats why we are still working through this. We are trying to get cdc guidance. Virus,n more about this its transmission, the disease, every single day. When we open up more of our economy, we are going to do so as congressman scalise indicated, to protect Public Health as we do so. Have occupancy limits and various establishments reduced. We are going to have people wearing ppe. We are going to do social distancing. We are going to require people stay home if they are sick. Continue to do all the things we are talking about. Rampup capacity and testing. We want to find out sooner when somebody has covid19 and then do the Contact Tracing necessary to isolate individuals coming to. Ontact with are thats how you can reopen the economy without going back to these curves we were trying to flatten. Point. Se a good doesnt go away on may 1. Topeople want to get back life as normal and they ignore everything we are putting out, you go back to one of these trajectories where we dont want to be. We are going to know a lot more soon about how we are going to is the topic at lot of people want to talk about today. Answers have a lot of right now. Cdc guidance is going to be coming out. The task force is going to be important to the decisions we make. At all times, we will make sure we are hearing from the medical community as well. I mentioned this earlier and talked to congressman scullys lease s the scalise about this. It is my expectation that the first part of our economy we stand back up will be clinics respect tols with nonemergency medical procedures and surgeries. There is only so long you can put those things off before they become emergency conditions and before you impact the health of those individuals and make them more susceptible to covid19 going forward. Ofknow it is also a big part the economy. Health care is a huge part of the economy in louisiana and nationally. We will be doing that first. Frankly, i would like to be able to do a lot of that before may 1. Its going to look different when you go to the clinic. You will see social distancing. You will likely be required to wear a mask. You may have to sit in the car until youre called and told to come in so that we dont have people congregating in waiting rooms. There are going to be a whole lot of other things i cant even begin to envision right now, but thats what we are working through, and i am going to get a report or a set of recommendations from the department of health soon about what thats going to look like. I know its my obligation to let all of our hospitals, all of our clinics know in advance what these restrictions are going to look like so that they have time to prepare. They need to be able to call staff in. They need to be able to schedule procedures. They need to be able to clean facilities and make sure ppe has on hand in all sorts of things. And thats just with respect to health care. And then you are going to see all sorts of things with respect to the other sectors of our economy. How long until widespread testing . I keep hearing that is the key to reopening the economy but it seems like as a practical matter we need to scale up. I will ask the doctor to come address how long we are not going to wait until we have the testing we want in order to make changes to the orders in place right now. Fair to say that with more testing, diagnostic testing related to the virus and Antibody Testing related to moreity, if you have testing, you can do more things to open the economy and do so without the cases spiking because you will have a better feel for whats going on out there. You will be able to isolate those individuals who have the disease, quarantine those with whom they come into contact, and really open things back up. We pray that immunity is conferred on people who have antibodies from the disease and that they cannot get it a second time. We dont know that yet, but its a pretty educated guess and its going to be critically important. But remember what the doctor said yesterday. Antibody test can measure whether you have antibodies to the coronavirus, but the common cold is caused by a coronavirus. So we have to make sure we are that haver antibodies been developed as an immune response to this novel coronavirus, to covid19, not just any Antibody Test is going to do. And then when we come up with it the right test, thats reliable, has to be massproduced. All of that will take some time, but we are not going to wait for all of that to be in place before we start reengaging certain sectors of our economy. But until we have therapeutic treatments and a vaccine, you are going to see a transition over time, over months, potentially up to a year, year and a half, whatever that looks like until we get all the way there. We are going to be living in a new normal. We have widespread testing in certain communities across the state already. Systems here in baton rouge stood up what was inviously a research lab record time and were able to process clinical samples. What we want to see is more of the high volume Testing Capacity in other parts of the state. Were on in mitigation, we focused on understanding how much covid is in the community. That is why we had directed testing sites across the state. What we know now is that the volume at those sites is decreasing. We stood up new sites with robust volume. Even here in east baton rouge. We know the demand for testing site is down. Thats good. That means we are seeing less covid, fewer people developing symptoms. Now we want to move to suppression. As we identifyns a new case, we can quickly do Contact Tracing, test everybody else around the person who may have symptoms, and process samples quickly so we can continue to make the range larger. All of those people being told specifically to stay home is what will allow us to keep public spaces for of covid. We have 3d printing of swabs. Swabs are in short supply across the country. Theseer to take some of specimens and have them tested. Over time, all of these things are being addressed and our capacity is ramping up. I appreciate the herculean the stateing made in of louisiana by our private sector, our hospitals, our clinics, our department of health because we have the most test being administered in the United States on a per capita basis. While it is not as robust as we would like, the fact that we went from where we were to where we are is really amendable. So i want to thank all the folks who have been working on that. You and then for congressman. And epidemiologist said we will have to watch this through 2024 and they are recommending social distancing through 2022. At the white house, have they discussed that scenario, this study, and all the obligations . Wax to go back at to go back to what the governor just mentioned, were learning more about this disease every day. Medical experts are coming up with better ways to confront the disease, to treat it, and ultimately working toward a vaccine. We have seen we can reduce the. Pread of the disease but we cannot keep the economy closed until 2024. Do we want to see 25 unemployment . We have to be smarter about confronting it. Its not a question of whether the disease will go away. The flu comes back every flu season. We expect this will boomerang back again in the fall. Take those precautions. To figure out how to live with covid19 and our society, while also confronting it. In the meantime, for anyone to suggest they know what will happen in november of this year let alone 2024, i hope and pray our medical experts will find a cure for this, a vaccine. They have already found a number of their fees preapproved by the fda that work for some patients, not all, obviously, but i have heard direct stories from friends of mine who had covid19 and were struggling. Somewhere on ventilators and they took some of those drugs for things like malaria or lupus and the next day they were off the ventilator and got to go out. F the hospital todont know whats going happen in 2024, let alone by july of this year. We will have better ways to protect ourselves and our families because of the breakthroughs happening as we speak, not just the testing, but the cures being found. Anythingly dont have to add to that. We have not had conversations with the president and Vice President about that particular study, but as these studies come out, i am sure they will inform what cdc does in terms of the guidance they give us and so forth. Yes, maam. The resiliency commission, obviously, you are going to be making decisions about reopening theeconomy much sooner than task force recommendations. Are you looking at a deadline or just assuming you will be making those decisions early on and they will be making more of the long term . Its going to be both. I will have the limited ability to make decisions on may 1, but thats not to say they wont be able to weigh in before than at all. This is going to be a transition. There will be multiple steps over a longer time than you might imagine to fully stand our economy back up by sector. Is awe are looking for sector to tell us how they believe they can successfully and safely reengage, open back up in ways that are safe for workers and safe for the public. We will then look at cdc guidance and talk to our own experts at the department of health to try to validate all that. You, we aretell human beings, and we are going to make some mistakes, but testing will allow us to quickly determine if we have made a mistake and then do a course correction. And if the testing shows that the cases are not spiking and we continue to move down the path and get a little further a little faster than would otherwise be the case. I have to on here for questions. Why not you answer the role you in the task force playing the shortterm and over the long term as well. Do you see this commission making recommendations on how to use some of the money for how to help businesses . Thats the beauty of getting this commission established. Are finding a way to gather, analyze, and communicate this information. The real work is going to be forces in various economic sectors. Which ones get engaged early on . Health care, health care delivery, restaurants, retail, Small Businesses. All of these will get a look and have the opportunity with the participation of the private sector, using a lot of programs out there identified as best practices. Whether its a recommendation to the governor, perhaps to a congressional delegation, the important features to build both shortterm and longterm resilience in the economy is what we seek to achieve. Done byuch can be executive order versus legislation . Quite certainly, it will take a quilt of all of these elements. Are not necessarily looking at trying to deploy resources that belong to the state. We are trying to gather information from stakeholder groups, whether it is the all are association, going to be participating in a meaningful way. Reopeno restaurants can so, restaurants can reopen with half of their Seating Capacity . If we have a Public Health emergency in place that i declare, we have the authority to do these things. That is really the only way that this can work. On mym not just relying authority exercised without consideration and input from the ,eople who are being regulated which is why we are having this task force stand up. Toare going to be talking restaurants, bars, Grocery Stores, manufacturing facilities and the like. But the answer is yes. Do you know how many healthcare workers across the state have coronavirus . I do not. I had a conversation last night with the ceo of a franciscan missionary about a lady here in baton rouge. He gave me an extraordinary low number of individuals that work for him or in his facilities who contracted covid19, and i think he told me all of them had contracted it somewhere other than a hospital setting. I dont know if that is representative of the experience areas, upce in other in shreveport with the lsu system. Do you have any information . I can tell you i have no reason to believe and quite frankly, i dont know how accurate some of the stories are that come out of places like new york. I have no doubt healthcare workers have been exposed and contracted the virus, but i dont know how accurate those stories have been. The reports i have gotten here in louisiana say there hasnt what you are near seeing on national media. I will tell you, our workers are heroes. We are doing everything we can to help them get ppe so they can safely go to work and do their jobs. Are doinghospitals everything they can as well. You have said part of reopening society is Contact Tracing. Is there any investigation into virus clusters at churches . I am not aware of any investigation. Modeling fore any other parts of the state . We do have modeling. Not aod news is there is region in the state that we expect in the next 14 days we use 14 days as a planning tool for allocation of resources and so forth but in no region of the state to we believe we are going to exceed capacity for health care in terms of beds, icu beds, ventilators. We do believe there are certain regions of the state where the transition rate is more than one point through bait one point 1. 3 based on factors we are looking at, but all are trending down close to the 1. 3 level, which is much better than where we thought we were going to be a month ago. You make your decisions based on modeling because its the only information you have when you pull the trigger. If you think you are going to exceed capacity with respect to beds and ventilators, you have to do something about that, which is why we went ahead with the convention center, for example, which does have 105 patients in it today, by the way. You make your decisions based on what you know, when you know it, and the time you have to actually stand up to address the need you think is going to be generated by the disease. The whole time we were doing , we were stressing the shelterinplace imperative to flatten the curve. When you see the graph, you can see that the people of louisiana flattened the curve and that pushed out the peak to give us to increase medical capacity and potentially, as we learn more about the disease and the virus, to come up with more mitigation measures. Have modeling in different regions and that is shared by the department of health. They will have information about the various regions. What would you say to Small Businesses that are still trying to get their money . You are out of the 350, trying to get another 250. Whats beyond that . We heard from trade groups. As well as the u. S. Chamber, we did a Business Roundtable with manufacturing and the heads of all the biggest and Smallest Companies in the world. They will tell you that if this probablyuch longer, half of the businesses in this country wont come back. You are talking about another month of the economy being completely closed. A lot of those businesses wont be able to come back, even if there is more federal help. Morew have more and businesses recognizing how important it is to hold on, and that we have to start opening the economy up in a smarter way. There doesnt need to be an exact timeline today, but as the , electiveaid surgeries not only help keep things running, they save lives. Members of congress will tell you that right now if you are not going to get your mammogram or going to get your colonoscopy , that could detect early something that could be treatable and save your life, whereas if you put that offer two months because the hospital cant do the procedure, that might be the difference between life and death. So getting up and running in a safe way is the remedy. There is no Endless Supply of keep you can expect to businesses afloat if they have no cash flow. Again, a lot of medical experts are coming up with good techniques and businesses are looking at this. The heads of sports leagues, you can imagine, are having conversations about having large gatherings. Thats their business model. They have smart people working on good ways to come back while safely allowing people to go into a sports arena to watch the saints play or watch lsu play. Everybody has good ideas about but we need to open the economy back up as soon as we can in a safe way. Not only are multiple members of congress medical doctors, i have had an opportunity to speak to senator cassidy and representative abraham, both of whom have told me we need to prioritize adding our hospitals and our clinics back open with a full array of services as best we can. I will tell you another reason to do it. We have been talking about the population3 of our is africanamerican, whereas more than 60 of the deaths are among africanamericans. We know that is because of chronic Underlying Health conditions like hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and so forth. In order to put that part of the population in the best position to withstand this disease, they need to be as healthy as they can be, even if they have this condition. Do this. E have to we are going to do it first. We are going to do it smart. We are going to make adjustments as we move forward. One more question unless nobodys got one. Right here. What is the best Case Scenario as far as economic recovery . How many businesses will reopen on what will business look like 3, 4, five months from now . I dont know that im prepared to give you an answer. Obviously, we want more Economic Activity than less. We want more people going back to work than fewer. Fastesthe worlds growing economy in the country when this Public Health emergency hit us. Unemployment has skyrocketed here and across the country. We know Small Businesses are struggling and i encourage them to take advantage of the paycheck text and program and the next installment of it. Those loans are forgivable under certain circumstances. Its to make sure you keep people on the payroll so they dont become unemployed. I dont have a timeline for you on exactly what that looks like, but i think the congressman was exactly right and this speaks for itself. The sooner you can reengage the various economic sectors and get people back to work and businesses back open, the sooner you are going to get back to full capacity. And the less the damage inflicted between now and then. Unemployment numbers, those are real people, too. Those are families that are struggling. Those are businessmen and women who had their lifes work in their business. Those are their dreams and so forth. It is incredibly important. I have to believe the people of louisiana and the United States are resourceful, resilient. As we find safe ways to allow them to open up, you are going. O see them be very innovative we will see people working from home and still being productive. You will see innovation in our country and in our state like you have never seen before because necessity is the mother of invention or Something Like that. Is that it . You will see that in this case, too. Going something that is to Service Going forward. We are going to find better ways to become more efficient and. Ore resilient we are doing a press Conference Today at 3 00 p. M. From lsu. They are manufacturing some ppe, so we are going to be there. We will tour the facility and then do a press conference. Thank you very much. The clockhas round coverage of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it is all available on demand at cspan. Org coronavirus. Watch white house briefings, updates from governors and state officials, track the spread from the u. S. And around the world with interactive maps. Watch any time, unfiltered, and cspan. Org coronavirus. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] this afternoon, President Trump will hold a press conference with Vice President pence and members of his Coronavirus Task force. You can watch that live starting at 6 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. Washington journal prime time, a special evening addition of washington journal on the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. Our guests are an expert on chinese politics and Animal Rights laws. Also, congresswoman robin kelly on the impact of the virus on her district. The coronavirus pandemic is having an impact on the congressional schedule. Steny hoyer announced there will not be congressional business until may 4. Mitch mcconnell has announced the same. That is two weeks after the chamber was originally scheduled to return. Watch live coverage of the house on cspan. See the senate on cspan two. South dakota governor kristi noem held a town hall taking questions on the states response to the coronavirus pandemic. The state is one of few without a stay at home order. 518 meatpacking plant workers tested positive for covid19. South dakota public broadcasting posted the town hall