Beaches. Well, good morning, everyone. As you can see, i have got a great team assembled with me here today, and i am certainly grateful for each one of them. For their service and participation in this process. First he we couldnt even be here talking about this order that expires if it had not been for the people of alabama abiding by the regulations and guidelines, for their sacrifices, their patience and their understanding during the last six weeks. What our citizens have done is work it, and i appreciate that so many people have been willing to do the right things to keep themselves healthy as well as to protect others to be well and healthy, too. This has not been an easy not in the we are Perfect World that we want to be. However, the people of alabama are to go the hard things to ensure that we can get back to our routines just as soon as possible. And today we are taking another step in that direction. Before i announce the changes that we are making, i would like to first acknowledge a few people that are with me today. Dr. Harris continues to be a great partner in this venture, and i know it has not been an easy task, but i sure do thank you, dr. Harris, for your wise council and your for your wise counsel and your realistic approach during this process. Your measured and balanced approach a have given the people of alabama confidence, the people that you and i both serve, and i know i am not alone in expressing our gratitude for your leadership during this time. Dr. Harris has worked diligently to ensure that we have more testing capabilities. As we work to begin reentry into our work places and return to daily routines, it is essential that we keep monitoring those infected with the covid19. Roping alabamas economy is certainly not as simple as flipping a switch or snapping your fingers. Like any good leader should, i have sought counsel from many avenues and received many, many recommendations. In fact, these are just some of the many reports and suggestions that we received in the last few days from the Small Business commission to each member of our congressional del desperation in washington. These suggestions are very broad and included many different scenarios, but i truly appreciate every one of them and the hard working partnership that they represent the the Seven Members of the executive committee and my Coronavirus Task portion are with me here today, and these folks have been differently diligently working to help me incorporate these ideas into the plan. This Committee Led by kelly butler has recommended to me a thoughtful, well planned time table on how we can open our economy back up. On april 30th, our current stay. T home order will expire issuing this order in the first place was not something i did lightly, and it was extremely difficult to tell businesses to close their doors. But it was done out of a need to get a handle on the spread of this virus. On march 13th i originally issued guidelines, strongly urged recommendations you might say, that if we all just did our part, then hopefully that would have been enough. At that time i spoke about my reluctance to issue a stay at home order because i have always known that if a government kills a business, washington cant print enough money to bring it back to life. I offered information we had at the time to slow the spread and to mitigate the hospital surge. Folks, i believe that all business is essential and truly regret any suggestion to the contrary. No matter the size, if you are conducting commerce and providing a paycheck, you have tremendous value to our state. On march 13th we select the a list of specific bills toss remain open based on their risk of spreading the virus due to specific functions. Our intent was never to pick winners and losers as some have wrongly suggested. We enter a safe at home direction on march 27th that we had hoped would eliminate a stay at home order. But unfortunately it did not. For that reason we enacted a stay at home order on april 4 due to the continued spread of the virus and the fear of hospital surge. As of this week we no longer believe our hospitals will see an overwhelming amount of i. C. U. Patients who need ventilators as we once believed, and that is good news for sure. While we have not seen a decrease in the amount of newly diagnosed covid19 patients, we have seen stabilization, a leveling off, if you will, in the amount of cases. Like everyone else, i look forward to easing back into our routines with caution. Just like we eased into this current stay a lot home order, we will also be thoughtful and careful as we ease back into our social interactions. Today i am announcing that we will once again enter a safer at home order that will still require social distancing and urge our people who continue taking all Health Precautions necessary as some people will return to the work place. While maintaining focus on our personal health, it is now time that we also focus on our Economic Health. This, too, will be a thoughtful, methodical process. Alabamians, i am pleased to say that we can roll back many of the row strikes thags have been placed on certain social gatherings and businesses. Own april 30th at 5 00 p. M. , our safer at home order will go into effect. All individuals, and especially vulnerable persons are encourageed to exercise personal responsibility in slowing down the spread of covid by minimizing travel outside the home. You will be urged to wear face coverings around people from other households when you leave your house. Obviously no one is going to arrest you if you dont, but it is just good sound medical advice, and it is for your safety as well as for the safety of those with whom you come in contact. You also are urged to continue propper hand watching and other common sense hygiene. All nonwork related phat gatherings of 10 persons or more or nonwork gatherings of any size that cannot maintain a consistent six foot distance between persons are prohibitted. However, some toplevel changes in this new order are as follows. Employers should take reasonable steps for employees to avoid gatherings of 10 persons or more, to practice social distancing and make strong efforts to disinfect their office space. Under this less restrictive order, all Retail Businesses would be allowed to open with a 50 occupancy rate and not allow customers to Congress Gate within six feet of one another. Our state beaches will be opened, providing people abide by social stancing and the gatherings guidelines. The mayors of our coastal towns have assured me thole take the lead and be proactive in enforcing the guidelines. Elective medical procedures can resume if providers take offside lines from their state regulatory boards or c. D. C. Guidance. Y fellow alabamians, let me be abundantly clear. The threat of covid19 is not over. We are still seeing the virus spread, and all of our people are susceptible to the infection. The greatest disservice for the people who might be watching me here today is to think that by lifting the comprehensive health restrictions, that this must and sign that there is no longer a threat of covid19. Folks, we must continue to be village dantoni e rant in our social stance vigilant in our social distancing today and in the future. I encourage everyone to practice teleworking if possible and be as innovative as you can as you open your work places. Own sure you are taking every precaution while getting back to work. It has certainly been a challenging month for sure. But better days are ahead of us. I am sure of that. I just want to thank the people of alabama for being disciplined and patient as we move into what i hope will be a better season for our state. Now let me call on dr. Harris to give his update. R. Harris . Thank you, governor. Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Let me just briefly remind you of where we are right now. We are around 6,600 confirmed cases. That is over the last month and a half, with about 242 deaths so far reported here in alabama. Like we have mentioned to you before, we see that our africanamerican alabamians are disproportion naturely represented in those deaths. They represent close to half the deaths and that is pause we lieve this disease has a predelection for people with heart problems, diabetes and other health problems. These are still Vulnerable People and people we need to protect. I do agree it is very reasonable for us to begin a gradual opening like. This we appreciate governor ivy and what she has done on this. This has just been really difficult decisions, and she has done a terrific job of keeping everyone safe and trying to balance all those factors that are important. We believe there are certain times of activities that it is safe people to resume. People certainly do need to return to work, and we want to make that as safe as we possibly can do. We feel like we have seen a number of improvements recently as the governor mentioned to you. Our case numbers are relatively flat. We are somewhere around a couple of hundred cases a kay over the past few days. We have seen numbers of about 48, 209, 189, 261 and so on. We are occasionally always higher or a little lower but send to stay around that baseline of around a couple of hundred cases a day. The death that is we have seen have been fairly flat as well. We continue to see some of those, unfortunately, but they are certainly not accelerating at rates like we saw earlier on. We are very pleased at how hospitals have been able to preserve their capacity. Ey have not had ventilator shortages, or when they have had that short term, they have been able to share among themselves and manage that. We do have i. C. U. Beds and ability to care for people in the four wallace of the hospital and have not needed the alternative care sites that we had prepared for. All these, are very encouraging to us. We have mentioned more than once to you about the white house gating criteria for moving to a phase one reopening of the economy. We have met he two of those three gating criteria. We have not met all of those cry tear yafment we feel good about criteria. We feel good about the criteria related to symptoms and hospital casualty. We have yet to meet the 14day deadline that is in the guidelines. I would say for that reason we are not proceeding to the full phase one opening comes tents with the white house plan. The white house Plan Suggested opening entertainment venues, gyms, restaurants and a number of other things that we are not doing at this time. Ut we do think, like the governor mentioned to you earlier, is commactsly the right approach. It is a very gradual and reasonable way to safely get people back to work and get the economy going again. We will continue to monitor the case numbers that we have. As people get back out in public again, we certainly hope they can maintain the things that they need to do to keep us all safe and healthy. We believe that a gradual reopening makes a lot of sense. But as the governor mentioned, this really is up to the people of alabama to keep doing the right things as they have been doing so far. I have appreciated so much the ertz that i have seen from people. So many folks have really done their very best to make sure they are keeping themselves safe and keeping their family members safe. We realize that has been done at great personal cost for many of them. Even as we open things back up, we need to continue to ask alabamians to continue to work with us and do things a little differently for future. We are going to recommend that people wear face cofferings like this or coughings like this and like those you can mack at home. For a number of reasons, this was not an order, but this is a very strong recommendation, and we think it is the right thing to do, and we want all of you to do that. This is the mask i wore in the car on the way up here and this is what i wear to go out for takeout. I would encourage you to do those sorts of things as well. Most importantly maurice remember that we need to protect the most Vulnerable People in our society. We have seniors who represent about threequarters of all the deaths that we have seen so far, but we have a lot of people with chronic disease in our state. People with Heart Disease and lung disease. They are much more likely to do poorly if they are exposed. So please keep that in mind. Even if you dont feel that you are at risk from this disease, mcgee think about the loved ones and the people you care about and try to protect them as well. We know that we have a ways to go to get completely back where we were, but i think we are moving in exactly the right direction at exactly the right speed. We know there are some close contact professions out there that we have not address today. Those jobs where people literally put their hands on their customers are certainly a risk category that is different from other types of businesses, and we hope to hey dress that very soon. We know people have a lot of questions about that. I will be glad to mention to you later, if you like, about what we are doing around testing and Contact Tracing. We have done some very good things in those areas and believe we are moving in the right direction there as well. Again, just a thank you to everyone for what you have done so far. We appreciate all theer efforts. And thank you, governor, for what you have done as well. Thank you, dr. Harris. S i mentioned earlier, assisting dr. Harris and sifting through all of this has been the executive committee of my Coronavirus Task force. These are the folks that are starppeding behind me today. Leading this group of distinguished men and women has been alabamas fans director, kelly butler. Kelly will have a few words on behalf of the executive committee. If each member is interested and would like to introduce themselves and make a brief remark, then when we get to the questions and answers, you can ask all of the members. They will be prepared to take your questions. Director butler . Thank you, governor. It is a pleasure to be here this morning. I wanted to first thank you, governor, and dr. Harris for establishing this committee of very distinguished members of alabamas community. We have two members who are medical doctors, accomplished medical doctors, dr. Vehiclers is the dr. Vickers is the current dean of the school of member, and dr. Kahn is the row tired director of the Virginia School of medical sip. We have various leaders. Including mr. Tim vines, president of blue cross, second of commerce greg camfield. Speaker pro tempore marsh and speaker mccutchen, all very accomplished people. As i like to joke, we had one accountant, which is me. I really believe that the makeup of the committee contributed to the debate that we had, the conversation that we had. The committee was able to draw on the speaker tees of these members, draw on the medical doctors for speaker tees when it came to those issues, draw on the Business Leaders when this came to those issues, draw on the two highly elected state officials for all that leadership. I believe that led to a careful approach in the committees work based as much as it could be on data and the speaker tees of the members. As the governor mentioned, we looked at volumes of information, including the Small Business commission report, recommendations from the Congressional District members, recommendations from legislators, and individuals. Our task was to review all of that information along with the covid and ht against make recommendations to the governor and dr. Harris so that they could make the decisions they needed to make. The committee did produce a report and deliver that to them, and i believe that the process was helpful and useful, and i want to personally thank all of the members of the committee for their time and effort that they put into that. Lastly, governor, i want to thank you and dr. Harris for your leadership throughout this and for your wisdom in seeking out guidance from as many people as you could. Thank you. We certainly thank the members of this committee for working so hard. You poured through pages and pages of documents and recommendations. Folks, here in alabama, one out of two adults in alabama attend some type of church or ripplingous worship service. Faith is clearly a part of the thread of the people of alabama. And getting back to Worship Services is essential as we maintain our spiritual and Mental Health during this coronavirus he pandemic. Like so many others who call on a pastor, priest or ran eye in good times or bad, i often turn to my pastor and friend, dr. Jay wolf. However, getting back to these Services Must be done with very much concern. Last week as we were discussing this evident to reopen alabama safely. I asked jay if he would reach out to his network of friends across the state from all different denominations and across the state, and i will ask dr. Wolf to come forward now and share the consensus of what the religious leaders throughout alabama are feeling at this time. Dr. Wolf . Thank you so much, governor. We thank fwod for you and for a we thank god for you and for allows ugh to contribute to your decisionmaking process regarding reopening houses of worship in alabama. Like you, governor, we simply want to honor the lord, help and protect gods people and do hat is right and responsible our task force was asked to provide for the governor some helpful and common sense considerings for reopening houses of worship across alabama in accordance with the whitehouse and c. D. C. Recommendations. These guidelines were compiled by a team of ministers and lay leaders and in particular, dr. On williamson, who is the head of the Alabama Public Health department for many ehlers. The process for reopening churches for large inperson gatherings must proceed gradually and in a measured fashion. Because covid19 has proven to and very y contagious dangerous enemy. We must reopen in a way that will not in verrett endly facilitate an outbreak of this virus. Many sad stories from other states have emerged where covid19 has spread through a congregation and even taken the lives of pastors and created community outbreaks. The c. D. C. Is recommending a threefazed approach to reopening houses of worship. It is our opinion that the c. D. C. Guidelines should be followed. Ease visit www point whitehouse. Gov, opening america, and they will give you current information. Now at this time alabama does not meet the tie year ya proposed by the c. D. C. For reopening houses of worship for large inperson gatherings. Roping houses of worship will be a process, not an event. According to the c. D. C. , as the null of infections go down, then the number of people who can safely gather will go up. Consequently at this time we are recommending that alabama follow the guidelines of the ite house and the c. D. C. And a. That inperson corporate gatherings or small groups are not currently advisable. However, churches are encouraged to continue doing gods vital work of connecting with people by using Creative Online Services for worship meetings and ministries. Lets keep connect the to people through technology fools. Lets use them for innovative practices. Lets also use the high lillard reflective driveup Worship Services. But it is not yet safe and wise to gather in person. When the number of new covid19 patients and infections decline, then in accordance with the c. D. C. Guidelines and time lines, larger inperson groups can safely meet. But to reopen at this juncture could facilitate outbreakles of infections that could tragically hartline our neighbors and set alabamas progress back. As we prepare to reopen places of worship in the future, which will be based on the standard specified by alabamas Public Health officials, you are encouraged to consider and follow the guidelines that are a helpful game plan designed to assist your congregation prepare for a safe reopening in the coming days. Thank you so much, jay. Now before we open up for questions, let me go ahead and answer one question that i know is on yalls minds today. And that is what about restaurants, and barber shops and others like that that have been closed . When will they be able to open . Well, first of all, when we started talking about what to reopen and what to close, i want to go on the record that i said to dr. Harris that in my opinion, hair stylists, or at least mine are essential to the function in the state government. I look forward to getting back to my hair salon. On a serious note, we will be working proactively with the state cosmotology board, the Alabama Restaurant Association and other boards and associations to address every business that is currently on our list of higher risk businesses still closed. Some of these are regulated by the Health Department such as tattoo parlors and restaurants, but we know there are still more questions than we have answers for today like summer camps, gyms and bowling alleys. Yall, today is the beginning of our new state safer at home order. It will be the first phase of what we hope and expect would be a multiphase reopening off our state. As i have said repeatedly, we know that what we are announcing today will please some and will make others frustrated that we are not going further at this time. Always to must be find the right balance. Keeping our people safe and healthy, as well as focused on the Economic Health of the state. Now i am happy to take your questions. Yes, sir . What role do surrounding states play . I havent talked to any of my fellow governors from other states about this particular order. This has been toffolied with input from our Small Business commission, or congressional delegation and constituents from their districts as well as our executive committee behind me pouring through and ferreting out. This is an alabama developed and alabama prepared step we are taking today. Dr. Harris, can you address, as you said before, the testing situation . In particular, some of the disparities we have seen particularly in rural areas . What is the states testing right now . The question is what is the state of the tests, especially in the black belt areas and the wire grass . Yes. We believe we have continued to increase capacity quite a bit. Our county Health Department teams are doing clinics in all of these counties. Not every county every day, but they are traveling to do those in every county certain days of the week at least. We have been in discussions recently with our federally qualified help centers. You may be aware that nationally they were awarded bout 400 million last week by congress for covid activities, and much of that we feel can be used to work with testing and possibly with other activities as well, possibly Contact Tracing as well. They are located in most counties in the state where a lot of people go to get their health care, and they will be excellent partners. There have been other initiatives. The Governors Office has been working with walmart to do some mobile testing sites, and they have been doing that in jefferson and montgomery counties, but are also going to dallas county, to clarke county, to maringo county. County. They will be providing some availability there. The real issue with testing is not the total amount of tests we have out there available in the state. If you add up the capacity of all the labs, we probably have enough people to run tests. But it is really about access, about having the testing in the right place. In the past week those of us in Public Health have reached out to every person who has submitted lab results to us. Every lab that schmitz test results. We asked them about their capacity and how many labs they can run and hoomanawanui variables to they have for increasing their testing . The problem is just an uneven industry pution of tests. It is definitely a pairier for people in rural areas to see a provider and get a test ordonezed but then maybe have to travel some else in another part of the town or county to get tested. We are working on ways to make is so that testing can be done in accordance with where people get their care. That is really going to be the solution to the problem. [inaudible question] i didnt hear all of your uestion. [inaudible question] well, theologies are orders the, and if there are vie litigations, they are subject to a 500 fine, et cetera. I would encourage them to rethink that strategy. Yes, sir . What about Funeral Services . Funeral services are Still Limited to no more than 10 people six feet apart. For dr. Harris. They have had issues with some of those supply chain items. [inaudible question] the question had to do with acquiring testing materials. I think that has been an issue for all states for as long as we have been involved in this response. We continue to have some supply chain issues, and we try to source those materials everywhere that that we can. We wish we had better access to testing materials. What doing the best with we have. The Governors Office has been terrific in helping us find products in places we dont even know where to look in Public Health. Right now we are stable with that. We do feel like a lot of time we have just in time inventory. We are not sure we can test tomorrow, but then at the last minute we manage a way to do that. So we have not had any complete interruptions, but it is still a bit of an issue every day to make sure we have what we need. Mike . Governor, when will you rea assess the issue of barber shops and restaurants . Will that depend on the 14day decline . And how does that impact whomizations . The measurements are several criteria, not just one category of measures. You look at vacancies of hospital beds, how many folks are on ventilators or not. I. C. U. Beds, et cetera. We look at a cluster of factors to measure things. We have already started making inroads to the restaurant association. They are going to be getting with us this week or the first of next to provide some recommendations. We will be addressing beauty shops and restaurants very soon. Governor, how will the state nsure its employeries employees in preventing from getting sick returning back to work. We have trusted the people in the state to be good citizens. I believe most of them are trying to do what is right. I have not heard of anybody personally complaining about not doing it. I think our Business Owners are responsible, and they want to be, too, and they want their employees to be healthy. Governor, is the amount of the personal protective equipment available a factor in whether or not you are going to allow close contact businesses and restaurants to reopen . The available of p. E. D. s . Is that a factor in whether or not you are going to allow those businesses to open he up again . Well, i havent had my meetings with the restaurant folks yet. We will certainly consider all factors. We just havent addressed that particular aspect of it yet. There are those who wanted to go further than some, Something Like georgia. Is the reason we are not going four they are because we are not met all of the white house criteria . Re there other factors to go further . Well, we need to meet more of the factors. This is the beginning of an effort. Once we have reopened wit all retailers to have 50 open and have 50 occupancy and limited ccess to our beaches and press on with elective medical procedures, we will see how this trend lasts, but we are moving forward. The gentleman back there in the white shirt. Govenor, will there be a High School Football season in 2020 . D if so [inaudible] will the they have offseason running, laces of passing and throwing all through the summer. Will there be a High School Ball season, and if so well, this is the end of april, and so we have some time to track our progress as we begin this limited reodoming. We are hopeful bull i cant speak to specifics on that issue yet. A question for dr. Harris. A lot of experts are talking aspect. The tracing can you talk about that . Sure. The question has to do with Contact Tracing. I think most of you are aware of how that works, but Contact Tracing some something we have always done in Public Health for a lot of diseases, particularly ones that spread person to person. We get in touch with all the people around that case and let them know they may have been exposed and give them advice about what they can do or should do and look out for. That is an important part of what we do with covid19 because it is spread person to person. People diagnosed so far, we have contacted them and attempt to learn who lives at home with them and in their work place. In many instances, we have to contact the work place. This is an enormous task because every person may have dozens or scores evans ntactses that need to be identified. You need to make sure you are to go that on the scale you need to do. You may have seen where massachusetts just hired 1,000 people to do this sort of work for a state of that size. We are going to use a you in of different strategies to do that. We have already moved a lot of our staff specially i believe i spoke to all of you about it maybe last week. But we normally have less than 10 people who are doing a lot of this outbreak work for us. We have moved a lot of staff specially and now have 50 or 60 people who are doing that work. But we also have volunteers who are helping us, medical students, and school of Public Health students as well, who can do that at least for a while. We clearly will need to find additional resources. We have had discussions about Community Health centers, their ability to help that as well. There are phone banks we use for a lot of survey work that have hippa trained operators who are used to calling people and asking them about medical things that we can use when we need to. And there are also some kind of really interesting electronic means that have been designed by some of our Big Tech Companies in the u. S. And in the world. There is a product from microsoft that dr. Vickers knows a lot about. Google and apple have a product they have been working on. We have others we are looking at specifically. That involves tracking people based on their cell phone, so they can be reached in an efficient way. Ultimately i think we will probably use some of all of those strams because until we have a vaccine or at least an effective treatment, we will have to scale that up quite a bit for a while. There were 120 people doing the Contact Tracing. There were 6,000 cases, and obviously the math shows not enough. How confident are you that you will be able to identify dr. Harris i think we have a lot of concerns about that. It is very important that we are able to do that. One of the distinctions we make when we get a new case is do we have a new case that is linked epidemiologicly to another case . If you have an infected person, is it because we know they live in a house with someone who is infected . That is a case we can explain. Or is it a case with no exposure . Those are the ones that concern us because that tells us that there is Community Transmission going on. Forgot Effect People got infected without having any known exposure. In addition to seeing those numbers improve, we want to make those nonepilink cases are the ones that are going down. And they actually have been. They are not at the. Level we would like to see not at the level we would like to see. Reporter [indiscernible] dr. Harris there are a lot of ways to calculate that. We need a certain amount of ftes, and it certainly doesnt mean Public Health employees. But we need hundreds of ftes to do it. There are certainly some Turnkey Solutions out there. There are companies that are professional Contact Tracing companies that you can contract as you need to. I think what we anticipate in the future is we will be able to manage our workload with certain amount of capacity. But we may see an occasional outbreak if you have a nursing home infection or you have a workplace infection like we have seen recently. You may need to add additional capacity like on a contract. Reporter [indiscernible] workplace infection like we have seen recently. Recovery does nott definition anywhere in the world. With the disease thats only been around three or four months, we are not quite sure what recovery is. No one knows what the longterm recovery of a covid19 patient looks like. We would think the recovery would be following a patient after they are free of symptoms and ideally testing negative as well. There are a lot of places able to do that yet because of the capacity requires. If we had enough staff to do that work, we would continue to follow those people. Now we are doing the initial contact and investigation, Contact Tracing, and we are not able to follow up with this patient several times, which would be required to define recovery. From what we have seen in the world, 80 of people never have serious disease. Of the ones that are hospitalized, there is a mortality rate we are not sure. 1 give or take. Most of the others, even those hospitalized seem to recover. Reporter [indiscernible] gov. Ivy the order is effective at 5 00 p. M. It will be enforced by the local officials, the coastal towns and the Baldwin County commission for fort morgan, etc. They have assured us, we talked to them yesterday, and they have assured us they will enforce the procedures. They want the folks to come back to the beaches. It is in their best interest to keep them safe. I think we have a good deal there. Thank you so much. [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] [crowd noise] cspans washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. Coming up wednesday morning, a discussion on what federal spending has done to the federal budget and debt. Will talk about potential vaccines and treatments for robert, with dr. Cofounder and director of the institute of human virology. Watch cspans washington journal, live at 7 00 eastern wednesday morning and be sure to watch washington journal on sunday at 9 00 a. M. To the antiwar student protest at kent state that erupted into deadly confrontation between student and the Ohio National guard. Federal reserve chair talks about the state of the economy. Live coverage beginning at 230 eastern on cspan. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards gave an update on the Coronavirus Response in his state, speaking from baton rouge. He spoke about the number of infections, corporate donations of medical supplies, unemployment and federal commitment to increasing testing. It brings us to a total of 200,200 86. That is good news. The other good number