Missouri governor mike parsons it says the state will work to increase diagnostic and Antibody Testing and will start conducting random tests to determine whether covid19 is prevalent in a particular community. He also talked about the states phased approach to reopening. Gov. Parson thanks for being back. This place seems quiet after last week, but good to see everyone back. I hope everyone enjoyed the weekend and was able to get outside a little bit this weekend. On friday, we traveled to kansas city to visit the Ford Assembly plant, and it was impressive to see what ford had been doing. Ford Motor Company issued a return to work manufacturing playbook for the reopening of its manufacturing plants and other facilities we had a chance to see, the new policies in action. Some of, i want to go over some of the new procedures they had. The daily covid19 survey and noncontact temperature scanning prior to entering the facilities, something all employees have to go through. Daily cleaning and disinfection of workstations and common areas. Guidelines and recommendations for social distancing inside and outside the workstations. And in the appropriate use and application of ppe. Ford also has designed measures to control the flow of people entering and exiting the facility. Over 7000 employees work at fords Kansas City Assembly plant, and it was impressive and encouraging to see the steps ford has taken to hold themselves accountable and ensure its workers and customers are healthy, safe and protected. Smallther companies and businesses across the state have also stepped up to assist and implement new health and safety measures. Im so proud of missouri and the people of this state for what they are doing. I want to thank them for their efforts, and thats the reason we are recovering here in the state of missouri. The economy is reopening. Our unemployment claims have declined as missourians return to work. Id like to share another positive story with you, about a covid19 patient in missouri. A young, otherwise healthy pregnant woman had been hospitalized for covid19. Last week, she was beginning to take a turn for the worse. The next day, the doctors began the treatment of remdesivir, a drug in the early stages of being used to treat covid19 patients. After receiving the drug, the young woman began to show very quick signs of improvement. In addition to those 400 vials of remdesivir that we delivered, the Highway Patrol did it last w eek all over the state, and we see the positive results. Earlier last week, we received over 1200 new vials on friday to distribute. These were immediately shipped to 33 hospitals to treat 115 patients in intensive care units throughout missouri. Again, this is all very positive news, and we continue to be helpful for the future. As you know, testing is one of the four pillars of our showme strong recovery plan, and this will continue to be a priority moving forward. We have significantly increased our testing capacity, and now must be thinking of ways to increase the number of tests being done. As we do this, it is important re positive cases there will be. Emphasize i want to that not all of these positive cases are hospitalized. The vast majority of people have already recovered or are currently recovering at home. Some people with the virus do not show symptoms at all, which is why we are working to identify these individuals and isolate them as quickly as possible. Were especially working to increase testing in high risk settings such as longterm care facilities. The longterm communities, including residential care, assisted living, immediate care, and skilled nursing. We have a total of 163 homes that have had a positive case. Either a resident or staff or both. Cases, 72 have not had an active case diagnosed in the past 15 days. Hathe 91 homes that have 41n active case diagnosed, have had faculty wide testing completed which we were able to move in quickly and be able to test everyone in those facilities. We will be working with the 50 homes that have not completed facultywide this week. We are working on a prioritization of these homes to ensure that the facilities most in need can complete facility wide testing. Dr. Williams is here today and he will be able to answer he will give you an update when i finished here about testing they did in st. Louis. I want to say this in wrapping up. The one thing we are going to continue to do, and im going to push my directors, everybody in the state of missouri as much as i can we are going to have to get better every day at testing and we are going to have to do more and more testing. That is crucial for the time as we speak today as it is three or four months down the road. It is going to be a priority of this administration and we are going to continue to push those numbers up daily. As we get closer to the end of may, we are still optimistic about the days and weeks ahead. However, i want to remind everyone that we must stilstill be very cautious and proactive. Much of missouri has reopened. Even some of our urban areas such as st. Louis and kansas city are beginning to lift restrictions. This is a good thing. We cannot let our guard down and we still must understand to open up the economy and fight the virus. We have to remember that this virus is still out there and we must continue to protect ourselves and others. Continue to social distance. Continue to use common sense and make safe and smart decisions. As long as we will continue to do this, missouri will continue to improve. I will say again, and i have said many times before, to fight this virus, it is going to take everyone in the state to do their part, which means it goes back to your responsibility as individuals. A government will only do so much. At the end of the day, it is up to all of us to do a better job at social distancing and keep in mind the viruses out there and keep in mind the economy has to go. We have to get people back to work and that is what we are going to do in this state. Thanks everybody for being here today and god bless. Let me let dr. Williams,. He wants to give an update. If you want to ask questions, ask him questions and then i will be back. Dr. Williams thank you, governor. To those physicians called me and thanked me for remdesivir i just got 15 minutes ago you are welcome. I know how that felt to be able to give that to a person and see her turn around in 24, 48 hours and her baby is doing well as well. We are thankful for that. When you think me, you are really thinking the governor and his team for working with our federal authorities. The national guard, the people who flew it, the people who got it there quickly. I will convey their appreciation to them. As the governor said, one of ou r pillars that has served us so well is testing. We have been very strategic about that. It helped us in the height of the infectious epidemic here. And it is so much a pillar Going Forward foundational he to us to make sure that things are continuing to go well. It is an Early Warning sign. Appreciative to missouri and to have followed social distancing. We have another plea for you. We really want to encourage missourians as we move into this that if you have any symptoms muscle aches, fever, cough, anything we want you to be tested. We want to see exactly how were doing as things change. To those clinicians, so those patients, to those people last week, i am just getting tested because i take care of somebody might have had it or i work in a health care facility. We want to encourage all those people to get tested. I told you about that last week. We were at six mobile testing sites. So far, the early results, we did 288 tests. 14 were positive. 97 are pending. That information is incredibly helpful to us as we look, as we change things. It is what we have always use the testing for, to help guide the advice we give the governor. I will make a plea that if you are a clinician and a patient wants to be tested, please test them. The other thing the governor mentioned, i told you we were going to do this and i hope it was going to be today and it is. We are issuing an order today that any longterm facility that has one patient who is positive or one staff member who is positive, we are recommending comprehensive testing. Going and check everybody. A capability we did not have a month ago. As the governor said, there are 50 facilities right now that meet that definition as of today. We worked all weekend, we are working today to go in and test everybody. Strategyur boxed in which we think will serve us well. We are kicking up testing into another gear, and that is around prevalence testing. We did a small group of that about two weeks ago where we checked 3000 people. But, these are where we are putting out, for lack of a better term, kind of triggers or alarms to see what is going on. To all those people who agreed to do that, we thank you. The third one is simple testing and that is the most important. We have learned from this certain groups are at high risk, and one of those are clearly the longterm care facilities, our jails, prisons, meatpacking plants. Going forward, we are going to ask many missourians to agree to be testing. We are going to do a lot of that. We want to see if anything is brewing, if anything is trying to kick up. That starts today. We will be doing that in a very large way. I were talkingd it is his idea but i told him i was going to take it it is like building a muscle. We do this testing and we get out there, that may serve us well Going Forward in the fall and the winter. It was actually the governors analogy but i told him i was going to take it. I think it is a great one. It enables us to get into that habit, testing and using that. I am happy to answer any questions. Im over here. Dr. Williams hey. Thats pretty good. Are we still lacked capacity with 100 tests a day or has that increased . Dr. Williams i looked at it. We are getting close to about 8000, 9000 a day. One thing that has been added is many of the hospitals are using their own machines to do preop testing. I saw the latest projection would be about 10,000 tests a day in another week or so. Right now, we are hovering around 8000, heading towards 9000. When you say you would like to expand sentinel testing quite a bit, does that mean every longterm care facility . Dr. Williams we are looking at that. We have 162 longterm care about 12 to 13 meatpacking plants. We are in conversations with them what periodic surveillance would look like in the summer, yes. Those are all such facilities, not just the ones that have cases . Dr. Williams Going Forward, it would be all such facilities. We have hit the two week mark in statewide state home order has been lifted. Do you expect the coming week to be any different in terms of what you are seeing reflective of the fact more people are out . Dr. Williams we are thankful. I looked at the numbers, for two weeks, we have been trending under 200. We are thankful for that. Always w, there is usually about a twoweek lag. I am dr. Optimistic. I feel good. As the governor said, think missourians have been great about social distancing. So, obviously, we have more today from st. Th louis and kansas city and others who are moving away from those orders. As the governor always says, we watched daily. We watch it like a hawk. One other question. I believe the governor said 115 patients have been treated with remdesivir in icu. Any word on they have shown improvements . Dr. Williams we got a call on saturday with all the doctors. The 10th one in a row we have had. Im trying to remember anecdotally. There were some cases of people who had gotten better. The one that clearly stood out was the young woman with her baby that was delivered by emergency csection. That one. I just got a call from kansas city. To your point, we will gather that data. We will look at that. We have another call this saturday so we will get a followup on that as well. Hi. So, boone county had on sunday a large jump relative to what we have seen in the past month. Four cases. Is that number concerning at all, or what number should we start being concerned if we see a large spike . Dr. Williams the first thing we always do is we immediately drill down on what explains that number. When you have an increase like that, the first thing you think of is a congregated facility, whether it be a jail, longterm care facility or whatever. Im not familiar yet, and i will this afternoon, what happened in boone county. To your point, that is the kind of thing we want to stay vigilant about. Theres a difference to us between four patients who didnt know each other who got positive versus four patients in one facility. We interpret those differently. But to your point, we are watching those very carefully. Obviously, once we start increasing testing, there could be another spike in cases. We will start seeing some more. Is there a certain point where thats too many . What does that look like . Dr. Williams the number in the literature is 10 . What we would like to see a Positivity Rate of less than 10 with testing. That is the federal kind of guideline. You look at our most recent testing, i have seen numbers at 4 , 5 . Our state lab will always be a little higher because it is a selective population. 10 is the number we keep a close eye on, both regionally and statewide. Hi, i have a couple of questions about Antibody Testing. What is the future of Antibody Testing look like in missouri . Willoughby the box to strategy where you test everyone or can anybody get an Antibody Test . Dr. Williams i looked at the numberers this morning. There have been about 12,000 Antibody Tests, of which 296 have been positive. Check with that number. I may not have that exactly right. It was 200something out of 12,000. We know that Going Forward. Those are presumptively positive. We dont count them on our data on our website. We treat them differently. So, that kind of gives us an idea about that. Realizing we checked those reweeks after you then tested positive with the pcr test. To your question, how will we use that Antibody TestingGoing Forward . What i think is going to happen, and we talk with a lot of county commissioners who are interested in this, i think first utilization will be around Health Care Workers and First Responders who have been through this spring and curious whether or not they were asymptomatic or what they had was. I think that will be the first utilization of it. I think the second utilization of it later in the summer will be prevalence studies. We will go in and instead of doing the pcr test to see if you are actively infected, we will get an idea going into the fall how many people people have asked me how many people do you think in missouri would test positive . We want to find that out. That will be a largescale Antibody Testing that we will do. Then at some point, we think it probably has some utility for our congregated facilities like prisons and meatpacking plants and others. I have been in conversations with those people. We think it is a little early for that now, but i think around july and august, we will start that process of doing Antibody Testing as well and signal testing and prevalence studies. How many people in missouri that have covid19 have been treated with covid19 antibodies . Dr. Williams yeah, i dont know that number. Anecdotally, i was on a phone call with springfield saturday morning and they treated several patients but i dont have that cumulative number. My sense is from talking to people, they think it is helpful. You add the number of people who tested positive and the number of people who have positive antibodies, in time, that determine who gets a vaccine . Dr. Williams certainly with the Antibody Test. You bring up a point, which is when we talk about antibodies, because this is a novel emerging virus, that does not guarantee immunity. We dont know that yet because it is new. People will say, dr. Williams, for other diseases if you have antibodies, that usually speaks to immunity and it does, but we dont have enough science, scientific knowledge to be quite antibodies with immunity. As a clinician, i cannot say you have antibodies, you are good, dont worry. We are not there yet. That will remain to be determined. I do think having antibodies would be useful to know if you are in health care or with sandy carson and Public Safety and that kind of thing. Again, thank you all so much. I will extend as i started, we really encourage all clinicians, all missourians if you want to be tested, if you have been around somebody or take care of people or whatever, if you are just concerned, we hope your clinicians will test you. We thank you for doing that. And its very helpful to us, so thank you. Good afternoon, governor. Looking back at friday with what was passed through the legislature, are there any bills you know for sure you will sign . Gov. Parson i think there are some in there. We are going through the process of evaluating all of that. I think my staff told me earlier today, there are 27 bills that made it across the finish line which is good news. I do think there was a lot of changes in just those 27 bills. Through i think comes his full reciprocity. Getting that done and the military reciprocity we got done rightear were huge lists there to get that done. That last one that the legislators did as a leader in the nation when it comes to full reciprocity. If theres ever a time to pass it, it is a good time doing it there. Im trying to think of the others. We need general counsel to go through it and make sure everything is all right, that we can get it out and signed. We think it is constitutional. Second question, the scheduled execution of Walter Martin scheduled to take place tomorrow. Do you feel any reason to intervene . Gov. Parson i do not. That will move forward as scheduled. So, kind of billing on the bills. With the absentee voting bill and the vote by mail, do you expect to sign that bill into law . Gov. Parson we will take a look at that. I dont want to commit to that today until we get that evaluated by the legal team and the people in the administration. I mean, i know that is going to be one you will be wanting to know whats going to happen with that bill. A lot of people want to know because of the june election. That will be one of the first ones. A followup for that. We have some county clerks saying with the deadline, they want be able to offer that for the june election. What would you tell voters, just kind of for that june election . Gov. Parson i think we know we are under a timeline so we will try to look at that real quick and make the decision. We just have to make a decision on that one pretty quick, even implement it by the election time to do that. There are several things out there. It will be dependent on election times, when they are scheduled to go to elections, whether it is the primary or general. All those things we have to decide in the next few weeks. About what dr. Williams mentioned the order for testing. Could you kind of explain more about that . Or do you have any idea you mentioned testing is so important. Gov. Parson we got to do as much tests as we can right now. Frankly, one, because we know more now and we know how to do a lot more testing, such as boxed in testing. We talked a lot about nursing homes, st. Louis region. We are still having troubles up there. We are doing a better job. But, we need to be able to really start evaluating people out there on simple testing where you evaluate people from across the state that want to be tested. Really, theres a shortterm advantage to that and then a longterm. Because we know flu season is going to be starting up in september, october. That sounds like a long way away, but it is really just three or four months away and we have to be prepared for that. As much information we can have between now and then, i think, one, it will help the people of the state to understand more and more about covid19. Again, and other difference between the flu and coronavirus. All the testing we can do. We can identify the people that had it will help us and everybody down the road, especially with school starting. There are two parts to that testing. The testing is just value. Weve got to do a better job of that. We are going to do that. I think it is very important for the people of the state. Hi. I want to go back to something you brought up last week about Domestic Violence being up. I know there were not a lot of specifics last week. Do you have any information about that this week . Gov. Parson i think that is something we are watching, Domestic Violence. The longer this day went on in different areas of the state, things like that increased. Mental Health Issues increased. Suicides. All of those things started to increase a little bit. You can understand Domestic Violence. The childabuse went way down. What happened there . Optimistic, ii am hope it is just down that much. But the realistic side of me thinks theres a reason for that and we need to make sure to protect people. I think those are all concerns we know are out there. Again, you just cant give all your attention to this virus and forget about all the things that is created when you look at all the other things. Whether it be the economy, Health Care System all those things we need to work with. Are you moving into getting Additional Resources into investigating any of this at all . Gov. Parson we are finding information when it comes in. We are reaching out to those lawenforcement enforcement issues up there. Different people like that. The mayors that we have discussions with weekly. We try to find out what has spiked. I think right now we are all trying to figure that out. We kind of assume because everybody has been at home, maybe that is whats creating it. Maybe it is the frustration of the day. Maybe it is the pressure of not having a job. Things people are going through in our personal lives is what creates that. The sooner we can find that out, the sooner we can address it. Letting it linger on and on is not a good policy for the state or anybody. As part of the new extension of testing, is every offender and staff member in the Correction System will be tested as well . Gov. Parson it will be up to the directors. We know that is out there. We are going to be extremely aggressive on testing in the state of missouri. More than what we have seen so far. I met with my directors today and gave the guidelines we will put more emphasis on it and put more resources in it. Whether it is the department of corrections, state workers, people who go to church, it does not matter to me. We have to get people testing and the ones that want to be testing, we will provide that test for and we will work awful hard to make sure that happens. Thanks, has unfiltered coverage of the government response to the coronavirus pandemic. Of our lived any coverage, watch any on demand at cspan. Org coronavirus. Here is a look at our live coverage tuesday. At 10 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin testify before the Senate Banking committee about the distribution of Financial Aid under the cares 2 trillion bill that Congress Passed in march in response to the coronavirus. Atcspan2, the sun is back 10 00 a. M. Eastern to consider the senate is back at 10 00 a. M. Eastern. Texas Governor Greg Abbott says the state will begin to move into phase two of its reopening plan after a sustained decline in new covid19 infection rates. He gave more details at a News Conference in austin. You all set . Very good. Go