He said they are following the white houses reopening criteria and will continue to monitor across the state. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for being here. I appreciate the public for tuning in on their television or their radio or their computer. However they happen to be watching. Or on their computer ar they happened to be watching. I have dr. Alex bu. Marshal butchfire browning who will be here to answer any questions you might have as pertains to what he has been doing with open safely and has become more apparent in a moment. The next proclamation will likely be issued on thursday and will be effective friday. We intend to leave it in place for 21 days. Which is june 5. The next time that we we intend to leave it in e today will place there and have the most recent data to look at. Like all decisions, this one involves a lot of time and work. I want to thank the department of health and dr. Billoux and his team. We wanted to make sure we were following the cdcvetted plan that was issued by the Coronavirus Task force and president trumps phased approach to reopening the country. I believe that we are striking the right balance with this plant. That balances between Public Health on the one hand and this Public Health emergency and reengaging more of the economy and getting more business is open, employers back to work, customers in the stores, restaurants, and so forth. Youre going to get more data in just a moment that is broken down in different ways from dr. Statewide, we do meet the statewide criteria from the white house based on the planning declining covid19like illnesses being and you will see in a moment that is particularly true with respect to cases in tests administered, which is one of the white houses criteria. And with respect to hospitalization. In addition, as we outlined on friday, and this too is part of the president s plan, we now have more Testing Capacity in state. And in fact, in the first week of may, the federal government wanted to resource the state with collection kits that will allow us to get to 200,000 tests per week. m sorry, per month. That would be a tall order. And so we feel much better about that as well. And that capacity we have for testing, for Contact Tracing will be in place by this friday, it greatly exceeds that which was available to us several weeks ago. The bottom line is the people of louis as a of louisiana have worked really hard since the Public Health emergency was first announced, in order to slow the spread of covid19. And i am proud and i want to thank the people of louisiana for doing that. Complying with the stayathome order and had they not, we would not have seen the progress that e have been able to see. I also want to remind everybody that until friday, the stayathome order is still in place. I mentioned that the doctor will come up in a moment. I did want to explain a little bit more about what phase i will look like. Again, we are doing this on monday. So that we have an opportunity to answer any questions throughout the week. The proclamation will be issued on thursday, effective on friday, and im encouraging people to read the product the proclamation itself because it will be a complete document that will give you links to different places that if you need to go see certain things, such as, we will still have three categories of businesses in louisiana. Those b deemed essential, the Cyber Security and Information Security agency that works in the department of Homeland Security at the national level, they are on their third edition of what constitutes essential infrastructure. We have embraced the full scope of those businesses that constitute essential infrastructure. They will continue to operate as they have without restrictions as to the number of persons that can be present and so forth. But they do have obligations, obviously, to employees and customers with respect to safety and social distancing and the use of ppe and so forth. Then you have a second category of nonessential businesses. I will get back to those in a moment. And you have a third category, and those that are closed businesses. There will be fewer of those but there will still be business types that will be closed in louisiana. For example, during phase one, tattoo parlors and such establishments, spas, unused meant parks amusement parks, children museums, bars without permits, they will remain closed. The second category, that is everything in between. If you are not essential infrastructure and you are not going to close, you are in the middle. Ust like we had a middle before, but the middle will be larger because there will be more businesses that are allowed it to open and they will include things like hair and nail salons, gyms and Fitness Centers. But there will be restrictions in place. Restrictions in place. Most notably, these businesses will operate at a maximum occupancy of 25 and must practice social distancing. Know they canwe practice social distancing when they reopen. Employees will have to wear a face mask growth phase covering. Proclamation that will us into phase one last 21 days, through june 5. The next anticipated announcement will be june 1. I also want to note that as we make decisions about things like salons and jams we received impact from the louisiana taskforces but also the associationsde about measures they put in place for the safety of their customers and employees. Cautious,they will be as they have been all along. That is why, at this time, i feel it is safe to take this , and not statewide doing it on a regional basis. I know there are a lot of different business uses and building types, and we are aware that for some, the new guidance is not as simple to apply as it may be for others, and every Business Owner needs a proclamation to understand how it will apply to them. I will remind the Business Community about opensafely. L. A. Go. Guidance toovide help establish how many people you can have inside at a certain time. Once you let just are once you register, you will be notified as guidance evolves. As we move from one phase to the next, the guidance changes. If youre trying to understand what the 25 means, note occupancy capacity is based on gross Square Footage at the particular use of your building. And 10 feet between tables. We will still encourage you to closely interact only with members of your household. If youre going out to eat on a you andnt, dining in, your household could sit at one table, but you need to be at least 10 feet from the next table so you have three feet between people so you have six feet between people. What you cannot do is say i am limited to 25 of my occupancy, i will put them all and 25 of my Square Footage. That does not work. Were trying to do this as safely as we possibly can. The capacity does include customers and employees. Obviously the Square Footage does not include outdoor patio seating. Social distancing for outdoor or patio seating will continue to be required. This is different for our businesses and different from than the way we operated before the Public Health emergency, but it is required if we will cautiously to allow our businesses to serve more people, bring in of their employees, and allow us to remain safe. The occupancy is based on science and is in with the white houses guidance that require strict social distancing protocols. Speaking of the white house, i do not believe theres any distinction between what is in the proclamation on thursday and what is in the white house guidelines. We have embraced those guidelines, so if there is a distinction to be made, it is that we moved early in some areas like the resumption of nonemergency medical procedures and surgical procedures and a couple of other areas as well. Examples ie, to the just made can be found i going la. Gov to get the information to prepare your business. With the exception of gaming establishments, no Business Owner or church owner is required to register or get approval on their plans in advance of may 15 in order to open. You do not have to go there and register with the fire marshal la. Gov in order to open. We are asking you do so if you are a business so you can get more information sent to you automatically without you having to ask for it. As we look at the latest numbers, i would ask you to keep in mind that they are typically lower on mondays because we are reporting testing that came over the weekend. Also want to point out that we had an issue with the server on friday, which is why i think we were late updating on friday as well. So the way that played out on saturday, we had a larger number of tests and positive report of positive reports than we had over the previous several days, and we are fairly certain that about half of fridays results were reported on saturday. So if you average those days out, you will see that things are pretty level overall. And that issue has been resolved. So getting to today, we have a report of 215 new cases. That was on the daily total of 4958 tests. Those 215 cases bring us to a total of 31,815. You can see that we updated the number of people who are presumed recovered. 22,608. So you have got about 9200 or so active cases among those around the state who have tested positive. These numbers do not include people who have never been tested. There is a certain percentage of people out there with covid19 who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic have not been tested. The amount of covid is certainly in addition to the cases you see on the board in front of you. Sadly, we have 29 new deaths to report, for a total of 2242. We have now conducted and reported almost 221,000 tests in the state of louisiana to date. With that, im going to yield the podium to dr. Billioux. He is going to come up and discuss the latest data. He will take questions about any of the data he presents. And then ive got the fire marshal here with additional information, should you all have any questions for him. And i will be back in a moment. Dr. Billioux . Dr. Billioux thank you, governor. Im going to walk you through some of the data that we looked at and talk a little bit more about, as we prepare for transitioning into phase one. As we did two weeks ago, the team at that apartment of health, the office of Public Health, including our epidemiologist and internal biostatistics, met with academic partners from two lane, lsu, and went over the data we have. Some of which we will show you to understand the trends we are seeing in the criteria for cases that, we are looking at for the epidemic that we are looking at. Go to the next slide. I first wanted to show where we were on the 27th. This was the slide we showed on april 27 after we had the initial discussion. And what we conveyed at that time looking at the data was that covid like illnesses, people presenting to Emergency Departments of covid as a percentage of all visits, were increasing across the state. Cases per hour assessment at the time work increasing in a few regions. Region 2, 4 and eight. And in region seven, the shreveport area, we were seeing a general plateauing in cases at that time. Most concerning to us, we saw an increase in hospitalizations over time in region two. Baton rouge, capital area, and region eight in the monroe area, as well as plateauing in what we were seeing in hospitalizations rather than a decrease in the southwest near mick charles in region five. As well as in shreveport in region seven. When we looked at the data two weeks later, what we see is generally improvement in trend. When we look at syndrome x surveillance, the covid like illnesses, we did note that the areas around alexandria and covering others, it showed a plateau in people presenting as a proportion of total emergency visits. However, overall the symptoms were down for covid like illnesses across the state. Cases. Here we saw only two regions, region six and eight in the monroe area where we saw an increase in cases just looking at actual cases reported. I will show you some examples of that in a moment, as well as a general plateauing on the state level overall and in regions two, the baton rouge area, and region nine, the north shore. And florida parishes. We will talk in a moment about why that could be, and we talked in these press conferences and other engagements about the fact that the last two weeks coincides with an increase in testing overall in the state. Our assessment as we were looking at cases, we have definitely taken into context the increase in testing. I showed you those numbers on friday. As well as the general decrease in the present of positive cases per test performed. I will show you a graphic that depicts that. In general what im saying is we did more testing and fewer of the test results that came back were positive. While we were seeing cases expand, we did think some of that was a function of having more testing in the state. As we continue to have more testing, i would expect that to be the case in multiple regions. When we turn to hospitalizations, we did see that region two, where we had previously seen an increase, is now in a decreasing trajectory, and reaching five, the southwest , where we had previously seen a plateau, has started to decrease. Region eight continues to increase on its previous trajectory. Region seven, where there have been a plateau in hospitalizations, we have seen an increase. I will take you through some graphs to show you what we are looking at on the next slide. This is what we look at the state level. The top graph is depicting the percentage of covid like illnesses to the Emergency Department as a proportion of total Emergency Department visits. You can see that certainly has a peak that comes up toward the beginning of april and has been coming down statewide. The middle chart is an epidemic curve. Here, we are depicting the change in new cases being reported as a three day running average over time. The colors depict whether that change denotes an increase or a plateau from the previous day. That is why you see color shifting. The brown color, showing your seeing an increase in growth. The purple color means you are seeing a plateau. There is not a significant change in the number of new cases reported across the days. Then where you see the light purple, maybe blue in the middle, that is where we see a sustained decline. I will note that in addition to epidemic curves, we also look at total testing being performed, we look at the number of positive tests that are being performed. This is just one way to depict how we look at cases at the state level. Here you can see that there has been this undulating growth to plateau pattern. Most recently in the context of significant increase in the amount of testing statewide. Hospitalizations may be easier to interpret as a graph. This is the threeday running average of total daily admissions to the hospital where somebody is admitted i should say people in the hospital with a diagnosis of covid19. As you can see, that has been on relatively steady, if not steep, decline. Previously, we know that the first hotspot in the state and ,he hottest spot in the state and one of the hotter spots in the country, was the greater new orleans area. What we see when we look at region one, the greater new orleans area, is really a largely good story here. We are seeing the surveillance of symptoms have been coming down steadily since the peak. We have seen the cases also coming down. Obviously some plateauing especially as we have seen some increase in testing in that region. That is one of our most robust regions. Hospitalizations, a steady decline, steeper than the overall state decline. Region one continues to have much higher to go up and much farther to go but they seem to drive a significant amount of the improvement in hospitalizations. I wanted to highlight the two regions that give us concern. We will start with region seven. The shreveport area. We see that symptomatically, we are seeing the same decrease we saw in other regions statewide, the people are presenting to Emergency Departments in region 7 as a proportion fewer covid like illnesses. When we look at cases you have this rolling plateau, may slightly decreasing trend in cases. If we look at the last 14 days or so, we think that is probably decreasing. What i think is important to point out is region seven is another region that has a fair bit of testing going on. This is in the context of fairly good testing in that area as a percent of the total population. Hospitalizations wise, you can see what we were looking at before where you have this plateau graph, but then the tail moves where there has been increasing over the last two weeks. The steady increase is definitely there. Given the numbers in the region of the population is less than region one, what is being depicted there is an increase of 44 total admissions over the last two weeks. So it does not mean that there are hundreds of people in the hospital showing up each day more and more. However, i will note we have 380 admissions between region seven and region 8 that were added net. During the time of the last two weeks. If we look at region eight, we see again a similar plot when we look at surveillance, because it is all about the volume of tests. The greater the numbers that are showing in the Emergency Department, the smoother the curve will be. In general, we see smaller numbers of people presenting to hospitals or emergency rooms. That means freight shop aircraft. But the general trend is down for symptoms. When we look at cases, especially looking at the curve, we see this increase to plateau, increase to plateau pattern. Again, we have been increasing significantly the amount of testing we have been doing. We have been doing more testing, especially in the parishes that border mississippi, and we will have more sites there, like an like in east carol and madison. We expect to have flattening of the trend in monroe. We hope we see a decrease over time. Hospitalizations, we have seen this stable increase with some movement around this trendline that shows the last 14 days. Again, just to emphasize, while the trend is increasing over the last two weeks, that is a net of four hospitalizations. People are coming and going from the hospital, being admitted and discharge. On the whole, there has been an cases over four net the last two week period. For hospitalizations, net can be absorbed by the Health System in the greater monroe area. The same as 44 being absorbed by the Hospital System in shreveport. What i want to convey here is these are trends and we are watching them closely. Especially as now as we are taking steps to relax restrictions, it is incumbent upon all of us, especially in these regions, to take seriously the opportunity to social a mask, too wear stay home if you are sick. And as we are going to see as we see with Contact Tracing in these areas, to work with us on abiding by isolation or quarantine recommendations and staying in your homes for that 14 day period. Because we dont want to see these numbers rise to crisis level. I will move to talking a little bit about phase one. The governor already highlighted many of these sorry, i skipped a slide. I promise that i would come back to this idea of percent positivity. As we presented on friday, with the increasing amount of testing going on statewide, this is the same graph that i showed on friday at where we have seen week to week a significant increase in the amount of testing that is at the state level. The blue bars are the total testing, the orange bars are the positive values. What you can see is while there is an upslope in the blue graph, there is a downslope in the arndt, meeting the percent that is positive is coming down as we increase testing. Last week we had over 39,000 tests done, and there the percent positive would also be lower. That general trend makes us more comfortable about what we are seeing in the epidemic curve, where we are seeing these increases or plateaus in different regions. We have to take all of that into consideration and encourage members of the press where they gauge with the academic epidemiologist who have a tremendous amount of knowledge and can give you the same assessment we have when we look to the state, which is that it is complex. The next slide, i will talk about what is in phase one. To the Resilient Louisiana Task force, the governor is looking , thee white house guidance following is in the phase one safer at home, sanitation, and that 25 needs to be to accommodate spacing, to accommodate keeping individual six feet apart from each other if they are on the same apart,ld, table six feet without causing problems. You have churches, solo and noncontact sports, barbershops and salons, zoos and aquariums, especially where they do not have tactile equipment. If youre keeping space between the party in front and behind masks, you are wearing checking is happening at the entrance of these facilities. We think these can open. Gyms and Fitness Centers and malls or stores with exterior entrances, they will be able to have people coming in as well. Restaurants, coffee shops, cafes, bars, breweries, people seated at table. There will not be standing aloud in these facilities. The capacity will be managed by theaters,get casinos, video poker, and racetracks, particularly racetracks with no spectators. Although we are opening up these facilities, i want to reemphasize that does not mean everybody in the public should these openenjoy businesses. We certainly want the businesses to reopen and to thrive, but we want to continue to message to the public that if you are the highrisk group, if you are 65 or older, if you have Underlying Health concerns, the risk from covid remains and you need to take measures to keep yourself safe. Recommend theyly knock you out, they stay home at this point. There is still a significant amount of covid. More than 9000 active cases based on our estimate of the recovery as of today. The risk is still remaining for covid and we want to make sure those individuals at highest risk are taking control over keeping themselves safe and their family members who are part of the household with those individuals should also be thoughtful about the risks they take and bring back to their homes. On the next slide, we want to emphasize that what we are talking about is not a return to precovid louisiana. What we are talking about is a new normal. We are talking about wearing masks, encouraging each other wear masks. That is how we keep each other safe. It is how i do my part to keep you safe by wearing a mask. We want to make sure people continue to monitor themselves. If you are ill, stay home. Contact your health care provider. Seek assistance. Do not go out and do unnecessary visits. Do not visit a restaurant if you are symptomatically. We are going to do our part at the state level through Contact Tracing and testing, increasing opportunities for people to be tested in their communities, increasing our capacity to leverage the Contact Tracing infrastructure we have to reach out to people who test positive. Find out who might have been exposed, reach out to those people and encourage them to quarantine for 14 days. Our system will only be as effective as the public complies with them and adheres to them out of a desire to stop the spread, out of a desire for us to move into phase two, we often take that upon ourselves, that is something we can do as citizens for the state. Wearing masks in public and staying apart from each other and staying home are key components. There is a lot of information we conveyed. A lot of questions people will no doubt have. On the next slide, we want to highlight for the general public , 211 has been a resource since the beginning of the epidemic. We have encouraged members of the public to reach out of them. We continue to get them updated guidance. They continue to be your best resource for questions, especially about your local network. La. Gov. Have and we will be putting guidelines on la. Gov coronavirus. Opensafely. La. Gov, which has a wealth of information for businesses that should be practical. If you go there, youre registering for your business to get information that helps you understand how you can keep your patron safe, which is what your patrons will want to feel comfortable coming back to your facility and what we can all do to make sure we continue to open safely and we do not risk having to pause or go backwards. As the governor said we will continue to monitor the data over the next 21 days and hope that we continue to see improvement, if not greater improvement over time, knowing we are also doing our part through Contact Tracing and testing. Thank you all. Im happy to take questions. Sam. Sam when you announced two weeks ago that you were extending the order you had a similar chart with increases and plateaus. I am wondering why we have the red increases and platitudes, two weeks ago it meant we could not be open. It seems to me them and we not meeting the 14day threshold the white house recommends. Why are we still allowed to reopen now . Dr. Billioux what i was trying to convey when we went through the spreadsheet, through that table, if you look at cases, you see there are more plateaus listed. I think there are actually fewer increasing parishes, but more importantly, what happened over the last two weeks, we significantly increased the amount of testing. We saw that in the bar graph. We understand that as we increase testing, we will see more cases known. What we present in that table is the truth, that we are seeing plateaus in cases, we are seeing increases in certain regions. When you that have to assess what that means for moving forward, we have to look at that in a bigger context. We have had this discussion over press conferences before and actually in committee and the legislature. We increased testing and we see more cases. Does that mean we will forever be shutting down the state . The answer is no. We also have to look at what is going on with people presenting for Emergency Departments and what is going on with hospitalizations. Both of those are rosier pictures than they were two weeks ago. Even with the plateau and symptoms. Overall, the state continues to show a downtrend. When you look at hospitalizations, certainly we are not happy that region seven, the shreveport area saw the trend from plateau to increase, but there were other regions concerning to us previously for plateau, an increase in region two. Those have changed to decreasing. The challenge from our perspective in Public Health, and we talked of Public Health experts, as there is no playbook. There is no playbook on how you can deem your state is 100 ready to reopen. What we need to look at is overall, when you see the trend in the right direction, we see the trend in the right direction , with less adherence to stayathome. We know more people are out and about over the last couple of weeks because we have been encouraging people to go out and about and enjoy the outdoors. We have seen more traffic on the roads. If we are still seeing these general trends decreasing while we see more activity, it is a heartening sign, even if you just look at the actual metric it says Something Like increasing. Outside the occupancy limits, are there any other limits on the size of public gatherings . Is it just the occupancy rate . Dr. Billioux for gatherings, we are still recommend in small we are still recommending small gatherings. Facilities, we are recommending the occupancy level. I dont think there will be any change to the gathering guidance in this phase. The occupancy level is for people coming into establishments where we are controlling the amount of spacing, the symptom checks at doors and the like. I think this is a question for the governor, but im already seeing criticism from various business groups about the 25 occupancy limit and the idea there are some businesses that cannot afford to reopen if that is all the space they are going to have. Governor edwards that is unfortunate. The goal is not to keep them from reopening, it is to balance safety on one hand and the need to open more stores, get people back to work, and get people into the stores and restaurants. I have not done an exhaustive analysis statebystate, but if you look at it, 25 is pretty common across the country, and in states that never reached the level we did in terms of cases per capita and the hotspots we have had around the state in new orleans and in jefferson parish. That 25 is designed to allow for the strict social distancing that is called for in the white house guidelines. It was not arbitrary. It was not a number picked out of the air. It corresponds to the Square Footage of the business, trying to make sure people can engage in those businesses safely. I would point out a couple of things on the safer at home slide for phase one, the 25 limit on solo and noncontact sports does not apply to the team. You dont have to field 25 of the baseball team, for example, but it does apply to the stands. If you are outdoors and you can spread the spectators around, that would be fine. So, with that, i will take more questions. Under what circumstances would cause you to roll this back . You will keep monitoring. Theres a chance covid is still here. What would you have to see . Governor edwards were looking at the data every day. If we saw a spike in cases and it was more than what you would expect to see just because you are increasing your Testing Capacity, that it actually caused an increase in hospitalizations, we have to take a serious look and try to figure out is this something we can keep a lid on because of the additional Testing Capacity and the Contact Tracing capacity we have. We will just be talking about that as we go with dr. Billiou and his team. We are also talking to the elected leaders from whichever region that might be taking place in. That is the scenario in monroe with cases increasing and hospitalizations increasing. Is that because testing results were not coming in, that testing was increased, or or were they not adhering in that area to social distancing . Governor edwards i cant know for certain. I have no reason to think that the folks in region eight, the munro area, were less adherence to the stayathome that people elsewhere. Not every place is affected to the same degree and at the same time. Thankfully that is so. When we saw the huge increases in cases in new orleans and jefferson parish, that do not play out everywhere. You thatubmit to things do not happen in isolation. If you want to look at monroe and shreveport, for example, you probably also need to look at dallas and jackson, mississippi just to see what is happening along those corridors, but i would point out there is a net increase of four hospitalizations over the last two weeks in monroe. We showed it as an increase because that is where it graphs out, but it is a net of four. With respect to cases, we believe the cases are showing up because the testing is increasing. Will greatly increase our Testing Capacity in northeast louisiana in the coming couple of weeks, especially in the rural delta parishes that we have. Going back to the spike in cases, depending on where they , we talked about [inaudible] could you be looking at a regional . Governor edwards i think it is entirely appropriate to consider. We do not have it yet in front of us. When we do we will look at it. If we ever have to slam on the brakes in terms of easing the restrictions, and might be we do that by region as opposed to the approach we have been taking thus far, which is to do things at the statewide level. Comfortable with the approach to do this at the statewide level. I would tell you that if you pull out the phased guidance from the white house, from the cdc, that we do meet the requirements to go to phase one. Doubt, whether you look at the information overall or by region, we are much better off today than we were a couple of weeks ago. This conversation i had on saturday with the Vice President and again today on a video telephone conference, i was also talkon saturday to talk to to dr. Fauci and others. The admiral is over testing for the country and people reaffirms the absolute commitment the federal government has to our testing plan to get to 200,000 tests per month for may and june and going beyond that as well. All of that played into the the decision that we have. You look at the data dr. Billioux presented in the overall trends are positive for the state of louisiana. , because intioning some ways it seems like yesterday, in some ways it seems like a year ago, but it was just several weeks ago we had the highest growth rate in cases in the country, and in the world. We were number two in the u. S. For cases per capita. Clearly we had a hot spot was unrivaled in the country. Since april 27, the number of Covid Patients is down by 273. 373. The number of patients on ventilators is down 105. , weree with dr. Billioux are not declaring victory, this is not mission accomplished. We still have our eyes all over the state of louisiana. We will be monitoring this carefully. We have particular interest in monitoring what is happening along the i40 corridor between shreveport on the one hand and munro on the other in regions seven and eight. That will be a particular focus. And are Contact Tracing efforts Contact Tracing efforts. It is important that people understand that while we are easing restrictions, this is not mission accomplished. We are not declaring victory. There,s still covid out just like there is all over the country. We really need people to wear that mask when they are out in public and they are dealing with people who are not part of their immediate household. We then keeping that physical social distancing of six feet away from others. We need to make sure they are washing their hands frequently. Soap and water. If there is one thing that is critically important, it is that literally even though i do not have a stayathome order in effect come friday, people who are vulnerable, this should not make much difference to them at all. If you are 65 or older, if you have these chronic conditions like hypertension, diabetes, kidney disease, heart disease, obesity, you really need to be extremely careful and stay home unless you are doing something that really is essential. I would remind people that in addition to being safer at home, everybody still has their part to play. I know it is not easy and comfortable wearing a mask. I suspect as we get into june and july and august it will get hot, but it is incredibly important for people to do that. We do not want to have to go backwards. The worst thing we can do for our economy is have stops and starts. If were going to open up more of our economy, get more people back to work, get more people in our stores and restaurants and so forth, we have to practice these things. Notse, we do not have just us louisiana come, but this is key for the country. We do not have a lot of tools in the toolbox to keep the case cap down outside of the testing and the Contact Tracing. We need people to do their part. Louisianae people of will do that. I am reminded of all the commandments that were given to in luke chapter 10, other than the most important one, loving the lord with all of your heart, is loving your neighbor as yourself. One of the ways you can love r neighbor as yourself there is still a substantial number of people out there with covid who dont know they have it. They are asymptomatic. And a symptom act person feels like they are healthy. You cannot say you are not going to wear a mask because i feel good today. That really defeats the purpose. I am asking people to wear those masks. I have time for a couple of more questions. Can you talk more specifically about what criteria we will need to enter phase two, and what phase ii might look like . Will it look a lot like what the white house says . Governor edwards i will not talk about what phase ii might look like. It will be very consistent with what is in the white house plans. Theres only so much information we should put out a one day. We are asking people to focus on phase one. As we get closer to the decision on whether we will get to phase two, then we will Start Talking about phase two. The criteria remains the same. You have to keep making the same progress when it comes to covidlike illnesses being reported to the emergency room. Cases as a raw number or a percentage of tests and hospitalization capacity. All of that has to be trending in a positive direction for 14 consecutive days. The analysis looks similar to what we just went through. Because you have to have 14 days of data look at, it seems prudent to me to put this order in place for 21 days, we can collect for 14 days and then take a look at it. I am wondering how you might define rebound. You say you want no evidence of a rebound. I wonder if you have specific numbers . Governor edwards we will continue with questions like that to reach out to the cdc for their guidance and what they might be looking for and how they would measure it and so forth. We will explain that when we get to it. I dont feel the need to do it today. We will explain it when we get to it. Does the modeling suggests what the spike in cases you should expect . What kind of spikes are considered acceptable in light of the fact that more businesses are reopening. Governor edwards i dont know that we have been told that if we go to phase one as the white house plan envisions it as per cdc guidance, we will see a spike in cases of this percentage over this period of time. I dont know if they can be very precise. I can tell you this. Everything we are doing, we believe is safe so long as the people do what we are asking them to do with wearing the masks and keeping the six feet distance and washing their hands and staying home if they are sick and making sure they understand if they are vulnerable nothing should change for them. If people do those things, if their employers will reopen businesses and do so in a manner that is consistent with the guidelines, we do not have to see a surge in cases at all. I understand enough about human nature that not everyone will do what we ask them to do. The degree to which we will be successful will depend on how many do it. We do not know. Every single time i talk about this, i talk about the importance of doing these things that are cdc recommended, that are common sense and make a big difference as to whether we keep the cases down. I will ask you. In terms of what kind of spikes we are expecting to see because we going to phase one, i do not we received any information from cdc or other modelers of what that looked like. I did not necessarily mean from the cdc. The state is running its own models. I assume you are building the phase one expectations into the modeling. Can you say what you are expecting . Dr. Billioux our models have not modeled what it looks like to open and have Contact Tracing. We have worked at worked with Johns Hopkins to look at those scenarios. What they showed some of that is on the department. Can we get enough contact tracers to reach people . Is the testing adequate to meet that demand . A large component of it is how to people react and respond to Contact Tracing . Are they helping us as they reach out, find people who are exposed. Are they hearing to isolating if they have covid . Are they quarantined if they have been exposed . They looked at a shining example of how effective that can be, that is south korea. We know it will be challenging for us to be as effective as south korea was in Contact Tracing. What we are looking at is how effective can we be . That is hard to predict. Models do not predict. What they told us is if we are not effective, if we do not have adherence to Contact Tracing, we should expect there would be a challenge and we will see growth in cases again and we would have the same kind of picture we had going into this. That is why we keep emphasizing how important it is. There is only so much the state can do to get everyone staying at home, wearing a mask, and adhering to quarantine if you are asked to. That is how we are going to stop the spread. Put a fence around covid cases as they develop and keep them. Rom spreading that is what i can say about the modeling. Governor edwards it is possible when you look at the cases developing, especially as a percentage of the tests given, you can predict the rate of transmission. We know that is a state right we know that as a state right now. The models tell us where we think we are at a state level. We will continue to look at these numbers. When the number peaks, we will look at that tomorrow. Two more. Parents are asking when can Day Care Centers reopen . Governor edwards about 30 of the day cares have never closed. They will be reopening with the guidelines as they are able to do it. Coming through the department of education in partnership with the department of health. The last report i got on this is that 35 had never closed. They may have taken in fewer children and focused on the children of healthcare workers and that sort of thing. About 35 never closed. There is a forecast of a billion or more hole in the budget. Do expect that as lawmakers pass by june 1 therell be a special session, there will be a federal rescue, what are your thoughts . Governor edwards i dont think we will know anything more in the month of june. I would hope that while we are here in the regular session, we do essential work that the legislature has to do. Part of that is passing a budget. The number for the next year, based on the forecast adopted, is 867 million. That is a very challenging number, even with the cares act money that we have, even with the rainy day fund. Even with the f map enhancements that the federal government has given, and that is the percentage of the Medicare Program that the federal government will pay. Even with all of those things, it becomes a very challenging budget. There is no reason at this point to believe we will know more in june then we know now. I would encourage them to pass a budget. No matter what we do preparing for the next fiscal year, i think it is a pretty good bet that we will be coming back in october after a meeting to make adjustments to the budget for the remainder of the fiscal year. We do need to adopt a budget so come july 1, we can keep the government in operation across the state of louisiana. No doubt it is a very challenging situation. I do hope that something, that either the bill or Something Like it will get passed. It is one of the things we talked about today with the Vice President. We spent a lot of time on that. He certainly expressed an openness to it, as did the treasury secretary and thought that might come into focus much more over the next couple of weeks. It would be very helpful if that happened. Thank you all very much for coming out. We are scheduled to begin for wednesday. Is that right . Wednesday at 2 30 right here. We appreciate you covering this. I want to again tell the people of louisiana how much i appreciate them for the ce they have shown, for the compliance with the stayathome order, to put us in the position where we can enter phase one and do so safely. Whether we get through phase one safely depends on continued compliance. We are not back to life as we knew it before covid19. There is a new normal in place. Everybody has a role to play. I am asking that you play that role. It is extremely important if we are going to be successful, not have to go backwards in terms of putting more restrictions in place, which is the worst possible thing we can do for our economy, the worst possible thing we can do for our workers. We are asking everyone to comply with the order. We are under stayathome through the end of this current proclamation period. 15, we willay, may move to phase one. Please make sure if you have questions, you get them answered proceed ono you can the 15th with the new order. God bless you and thank you so much. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] today the Supreme Court continues hearing oral arguments via teleconference. First, a consolidated case dealing with president trumps financial records and whether the president s personal financial records can be subpoenaed. Then, a look at whether the president has immunity from subpoenas for financial records, including president trumps tax returns. That is unrelated to his duties as president of the united states. The Supreme Court, alive today on cspan. Ordemand on cspan. Org listen on the free cspan radio app. Immediately following the live Supreme Court session, join Jeffrey Rosen of the National ConstitutionCenter Reading alive discussion with scholars. Today expert witnesses on the , four coronavirus pandemic. They testify before the senate health, labor, education, and Pensions Committee about returning to work and school. Each witness, part of president trumps task force, is selfquarantining after three were potentially exposed to the virus. Live coverage begins at 10 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan three and ondemand at cspan. Org, and on the go with our free radio app. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam was joined by several officials of his administration at mondays coronavirus briefing. He previewed reopening measures and promised a formal timeline will be announced later this week. Other topics included state testing capability, surveys on nursing homes, and reopening concerns