We pray for those who have lost loved ones and for those who are still hospitalized. Even during the weekend when the actual reporting slows down a bit, we continue to see record high case counts. And we continue to be concerned with our percentage of positive tests. And there hospitalizations. We are watching closely to monitor hospital bed capacity. As well as icu bed capacity. Right now, our hospitals do have bed capacity and that is good. But as dr. Cohen will tell you, that can change really quickly. As we see North Carolinas upward trends, we must redouble our work. Detecting and isolating the virus. Our department of health and Human Services team is pushing assistance to local Health Departments, especially in counties experiencing the highest growth. Durham, forsyth, guilford, johnston, lee, mecklenburg, and wake are of particular concern. Over the weekend i talked with Vice President pence about North Carolinas concerning numbers. I asked him and the federal government to help us with increasing testing sites and capabilities. Especially focused on these counties. Another focus will be testing all nursing home residents and staff and this testing is ongoing. Im now going to ask our secretary of health and Human Services to share an update for us. Dr. Cohen . Thank you, governor. Slowing the spread of the virus early on has allowed us to build our capabilities to be ready to respond to this surge in covid19 cases. That included building up supplies of protective equipment, strengthening and expanding hospital capacity, expanding our ability to test people, and staffing for contact tracing. We are now drawing on these capabilities. As we respond to the increase of covid19 cases that we are seeing across our state including ramping up testing in , harder hit communities. As the governor mentioned, we are targeting Additional Resources to nine counties. I will list them here for you. Mecklenburg, wake, durham, johnston, alamance, guilford, forsyth, lee, and duke lind. As we track our trends closely, we know there will be other counties added to that list. It is important that people get tested. Unfortunately we have heard that some are having trouble getting tests because of conflicting criteria. We are reaching out to providers, urgent care facilities, pharmacies, to remind them of expanding testing criteria and our desire to ramp up testing of those who dont show symptoms. We have appreciated their partnership and this is going to be key in our ongoing strategy to help slow the spread of this virus. Those who dont show symptoms. We have appreciated their partnership and this is going to be key in our ongoing strategy to help slow the spread of this virus. Those who may have been exposed but do not have symptoms, especially people from historically marginalized populations who are disproportionately impacted by covid19, should get tested. People who live or work in high risk settings, or in settings where they are at higher risk for exposure should get tested. And anyone who has attended a mass gathering, including a protest, should get tested. If you are not sure, you can visit the check my symptoms tool on our website. You can also find testing sites near you. There are about 500 posted across the state and on our website. Once you are tested, remember to answer the call from your local Health Department so that others who may have been exposed can get the support and resources they need. You can get a sense of what this process looks like with some new infographics online. And it is important to stay home if you are sick and stay home for 14 days if you had close contact with someone who had covid19. We all have the power to keep this virus level low. We can protect our families and neighbors if we all do our part and do the three ws. Wear a Face Covering. Wait six feet apart. Wash your hands frequently. It is the combination of these actions. Please continue to take care of yourself and those around you. Thank you, governor. Gov. Cooper thank you, dr. Cohen. As our Emergency Operations center stays activated for our response, a dedicated team at the North Carolina office of recovery and resilience remains focused on another response. Recovery from hurricanes. Some north carolinians and their communities are still recovering from the devastation of hurricanes. These families are dealing with the threat of covid19 while trying to rebuild homes and businesses. Despite the virus, the work of hurricane recovery continues. Today the state opens a new application process. Much work already has been done. To date, North Carolina has provided more than 3. 5 billion in state and federal funding for recovery. Already, the recovery offices approved more than 1300 homes for the Community Development block grant funding. The Program Starting today took the federal government almost two years, 500 days after florence made landfall, laying out the requirements of how this money can be invested. When it was time, North Carolina was on it. An action plan within 24 hours. It was the first state to receive approval of our plan. We know help can never come fast enough if you have been devastated by disaster but the diligent work will need recovery money, getting into the hands of people who need it soon. I would like to recognize laura hogshead, the chief operating officer of the office of recovery and resilience to share a few words about what this application process means for homeowners in North Carolina. Laura . Laura thank you, governor cooper. I speak for the entire team when i say that we are proud to serve under your leadership as we work to help north carolinians rebuild their Community Stronger and smarter. When this office was established in 2018 we had our work cut out for us. Many suffered through two devastating storms in two years. There have been long delays in getting access from the federal government. It took 500 days to publish the federal notice needed to gain access to 542 million in Community Development grants for Disaster Recovery funds allocated to North Carolina. We did not stand still waiting for washington. We engaged in advanced Strategic Planning that allowed us to submit the required action plan to hud. As a result, North Carolina was the first to have an action plan approved from that allocation of federal funding. This leads me to the most important announcement that we made. We opened application where the Homeowner Recovery Program, a program that will help survivors of both hurricane thorns and Hurricane Florence and Hurricane Matthew. The Homeowner Recovery Program provides Financial Institutions ability to repair homes damaged by either or both storms. The program is available in counties impacted by florence or matthew with a focus on low to middle income families that suffer the most damage. Our team has worked closely with hud to increase flexibility and help as many storm providers as storm survivors as possible while meeting federal requirements. This is important to people who have already applied, and do not need to reapply. Your applications will be reexamined using the new flex ibility that the Homeowner Recovery Program affords. Due to the pandemic, or team worked quickly to create an Online Mobile friendly application that allows people to apply from wherever they are. That application is now live on our updated website at rebuild. Nc. Gov. Storm survivors can get assistance with the application process by calling 833askrbnc. When it is safe to do so, we will open 18 rebuild nc centers. Storm survivors can find information on this website. Lastly, while covid19 may have required us to adapt to the current recovery program, it has not slow down the delivery of previous funds. Hurricane matthew spending has remained on pace with hud throughout the pandemic as it has been since september of 2019. Through the rebuild program, 185. 4 million have been committed to Hurricane Matthew recovery, and we have a total of 646 homes in the construction process with 359 of those already complete. Homeowners who have damage from hurricanes or matthew should visit rebuild. Nc. Gov to apply. Thank you. Gov. Cooper thank you, laura. Thank you to you and your team for the hard work and the long hours you have put into make sure that money can move as fast as federal government will lead let us. Especially as we have battled covid19, it is critical to move ahead on these other emissions. We created the north Carolyn Office of recovery and resilience as part of our Emergency Management operations. You and your team over there have been doing a stellar job. You have done it safely during this covid19 crisis. I commend you for the great job youre doing in bringing homes to people who need them. Also with us today is our secretary of public safety, eric cooks and our Emergency Management director. Monica mcgee and brian tipton are our sign that was sign language interpreters. Josiah melendez is our spanish line which interpreter. We will take questions from the media. If you can identify yourself and your organization, we would appreciate it. Thank you. First question. Our first question is from adam wegner with the observer. This is in regards to the crowds we have seen the past few weeks at the speedway. It seems that with those crowds and the cases ticking up, there would likely be outbreaks somewhere. We have not heard of them in regards to stores or restaurants or events. What has your organization done to alert the public to the outbreaks . Do you suspect some are happening and not being reported . Gov. Cooper that kind of behavior in crowds really worries the Health Experts. We tell people to avoid being in crowds if you can. Even if you are inside or outside, perform the three ws. Where a cloth Face Covering, wait six feet apart and wash your hands frequently. Let me turn it over to dr. Cohen. Dr. Cohen as you know, we work very closely with our local Health Department to try to understand how the virus is spreading across our state. We have talked many times on how we track those outbreaks right now, on our website, we post and track outbreaks in congregate living setting. We track them in childcare settings and in schools. As we talked about many times, those outbreaks are not consistently reported. There are only a few that are required by law. The ones i just mentioned, so we will do the detective work and tracing. They say will you work with us and help us understand what to do next. Those other settings that come to our attention. Those are good. We want folks to get in touch with your local Health Department. If you are saying more than two cases, or five that is a cluster, get in touch with your local Health Department so we can help track down and trace contacts, and also to make sure that people are taking the proper protocols. Whether that is additional deep cleaning or a temporary closure or what have you that needs to be done in order to make sure that we do not see further viral spread. We need to make sure that they are taking all the precautions that we lay out in the detailed guidance that is out there. Those are incredibly important. If you see the virus spreading in your place of business, please call the local Health Department. We can all Work Together on this. It will take all of these actions together, individuals, business actions and our state and local officials working together in order to slow the spread of this virus. Thank you. Gov. Cooper thank you, next question please. Our next is from Chandler Morgan with wbtv. This is Chandler Morgan. My question is regarding the big crowds we are seeing at restaurants. We are seeing a lot of crowds where capacity is too high or people are disregarding social distancing on purpose. Is this kind of behavior adding to the spike in numbers . Is the state considering other guidelines for restaurants to prevent this behavior . Gov. Cooper right now, the restaurant guidelines are 50 of capacity. There are other steps that restaurants are taking with cloth Face Covering and trying to make sure that there is social distancing within the restaurants. We have pretty good reports across the state that most of the restaurants are complying with this. Obviously, they want an increase in capacity. Hopefully that will come down the road as we move into other phases but we are concerned that if there are restaurants that are violating this, we encourage local officials to talk with all of their businesses to try to make sure that they comply with the law. Dr. Cohen, do you have anything you want to add . Dr. Cohen i recommend everyone go on the website for guidance. The Restaurant Association partnered with us for the program of count on me and see. I encourage even more restaurants to take the training then post outside so that people know that you are a count on me and see trainee. We want to see more restaurants participate in it. We always knew that restaurants were a higher risk activity. People are sitting down, sometimes indoors for extended periods of time. We know that when you are eating, you are taking off your Face Covering when youre actively eating. Those are risky situations and we are concerned. We want to make sure that everyone is doing their part. Businesses and individuals. I think it will take all of our Work Together if we want to continue to make progress. We want to be able to move through additional phases. We need to do those actions together. I know that we can. I appreciate the Restaurant Association for participating in that training. I would like to see many more do that and then see our patrons go to those restaurants that are participating in the count on me and see program. Gov. Cooper thank you, next question. Followup, Chandler Morgan, wbtv. Thank you for that answer, specifically, restaurants that convert into bars and choose to open later in a different setting, it would be the guidelines there . It seems to be a lot of issues when it comes to capacity once they change into that setting at night. Dr. Cohen there is no change in guidelines. They are continuing to maintain that reduced capacity and they maintain that social distancing and can take all of the precautions that are in our guidelines no matter the time. We really want everyone to follow those guidelines really intently. This is going to take effort on all of our parts if we are going to be able to live with this virus. I will remind you that our trends are going in the wrong direction. Our fate is not sealed. We have power over this. We can all take individual action together. Restaurants included, no matter what time of day, what they are serving to make sure that people are doing everything they can to the virus level low and see the spread down. Gov. Cooper next question. The next question is from andrea. I am with abc 11. We are only two weeks away from the end of june. Where you stand on that potential for phase 2. 5 . Where bars and gyms can reopen before june 26 . Should we assume that bars and opened in phase two, and phase three . Gov. Cooper we will let the people of North Carolina know on the first of next week whether we will go into the next phase and if so, what that phase will look like. We are continuing to monitor these numbers. Right now, they are not trending in a good direction. We still want to give this more time and we want to encourage people to continue to perform the three ws. Lets press to make sure that we can flatten this curve. Thank you. Next question. Our next question is from travis with wral. I am travis with wral. The research of masks indicate they are most effective when a lot or all people wear them. Is that on the table at all for your administration . If so, when with the decision be when would the decision be made . Gov. Cooper it is absolutely in discussion right now. Regarding whether we make cloth Face Coverings mandatory and in what way we do it. Right now, they are mandatory for employees of personal care like a nail and hair salon. They are required for those employees. Our Health Experts are looking at those same studies, showing the effectiveness of cloth Face Coverings. We want people to voluntarily do this. We are looking at additional rules to make things mandatory. Thank you, you are right, there are more studies coming out that are looking at Face Coverings directly in the covid19 context. Before we were looking at Face Coverings for other viral respiratory illnesses. We have a lot of studies with a lot of different methodologies that show the importance of Face Covering. Youre right, the Face Covering really shows effectiveness when we can get many people doing that altogether. That is why we keep harping on the three ws and saying that we can do this together. We can have individuals take action here, and if we do this collectively, the data shows that we can still flatten this curve. I know we see things going in the wrong direction but if we ask collectively, we can take control of our fate here. I know folks want to move forward with additional openings and activities. I know that people want to get their kids back to school, i know i want to get my girls back to school this august. This is the way to do it. It is to focus on these elective collective actions we can do, whether it is an individual or we run a business that is open. It is following those guidelines and doing the three ws. The science is becoming pretty powerful to say that if we all do this together, we can truly flatten the curve and slow the spread of this virus we can continue to make progress. Thank you. Gov. Cooper next question. Our next question is from the Carolina Public press. Good afternoon governor and dr. Cohen. Thank you for taking my question. Regarding homes and rehabilitation facilities that claim to have positive cases. I understand that you have a plan to test everybody but i have a question about the ones that say they have no positive cases. People have contacted me concerned about their loved ones, and they say that the facilities are not saying whether those facilities are testing staff. I have asked dhss who told me to talk to the county Health Department. Facilities are not answering if there testing anybody. As a journalist, i find this puzzling. My father died this month in kansas in the facility and they will not tell me if they were testing anybody. Does dhhs know whether Nursing Homes without reported infections are actually testing residents and how many of those tests are being performed . If not, please tell me why, and do you think this is acceptable . Gov. Cooper so sorry to hear about your dad. It must be a very difficult time for you and your family. I want to extend my personal deepest sympathies. It is important that we have this information, and it is important that we get people tested in our Nursing Homes so that we can identify people and make sure they are isolated so that other people can be protected. I will turn it over to dr. Cohen to more fully answer your question. Dr. Cohen let me extend my sympathies about your dad and share that i think testing is important and i want to answer your question but i want to make sure we know that all the things we are doing, testing is not the only thing we can do. We want and do have a comprehensive strategy, not just for longterm care and convert it living settings, but across the board. It is important to connect the dots between what is going on in restaurants and what is happening in our longterm care settings. We often cannot see those dots because the virus is so tiny but when we have more viruses circulating in our community, and folks who work in longterm care, whether it is food delivery or the nurses or other personal care attendants, they go out to restaurants as well. They go out to the grocery stores. When there is more virus is spreading, those working in longterm care are getting exposed to viruses more often. Then they bring that virus to longterm care facilities. We want to do testing because that is really important because you can often have covid19 and not have symptoms. The person doing food service at one of those Nursing Homes can feel completely fine. They went out to a local neighborhood the night before or two weeks before. Then they are going to work and feel completely fine and spreading the virus. We have to make sure folks are wearing protective equipment, Face Coverings. Are we doing other things . Restricting visitors because those of the people coming into those settings. The testing is a huge, important component of that. Not only are we doing testing when there is one case, we are not waiting for an outbreak, it is two cases. It is one case that has been reported, we have tested staff and residents. The question has been, are we going to do proactive testing when we dont see virus there . And what we committed to for Nursing Homes is to do that proactive testing. That is hard. It is not an easy thing to do. It is not going to be done overnight, but we have already done this in our state. We are now doing the work with nursing facilities across the state on how we can marshal the resources, both the time and people involved with the financial challenges. Testing is important. We want to do it. I want to make that important connection that it is not testing alone that is going to help here. It has to go back to all of those actions. The questions we were asked before, they impact what is going on in our longterm care settings as well. It goes back to all of those individual actions the together. Built together. I am so sorry about your dad. I dont want to see anymore of that happen in North Carolina. We have the power to change it. Next question. Thank you both for answering my question, but i am really hoping you can Say Something about the facilities that dont have any positive tests, i want to know if there testing anybody if they are testing anybody at this point . Thank you. Dr. Cohen my understanding now, if they dont have any cases, we they are not doing proactive testing. We are working to change that and do the proactive testing. That has not happened in the state facilities that are run by my department. We are doing the work to work with other Nursing Homes to do testing proactively. If there is one case in those facilities, everone gets tested. Case, peoplend a are not doing that proactive testing. We are now starting that work with everyone. We have done it for our safe facilities and now we are doing for those skilled workers in the facilities. Gov. Cooper thank you. Next question, please. Our next question is rose with North Carolina health news. I have a couple of questions for you. One is if we will ever see a demographic by county . I think there are some counties where the demographics of who is getting covid and who is ending up in the hospital with covid is very different than other counties. That would be of interest to us. The other question is, i would like you to talk about criteria for Covid Patients coming into the hospital . Some patients say theyre coming in for hip replacement. Then they test for covid. Are they counting them as Covid Patients . Or are the people you are hospitalcoming to the with covid primarily, and that is their primary diagnosis . Gov. Cooper i will let dr. Cohen address both of those questions but i will say this, we want Demographic Data that is as specific as possible. We want it statewide. We also want it by county. I will tell you that we have a very disjointed and independent Health Care System across the state. Trying to get all of this data and focus it in one place is a difficult exercise. There is still some reporting that we want and are not getting, but we are working on trying to make sure that all of that demographic information is reported to us but we talk about that frequently in our meeting. How many different places are collecting information about testing, and how many we have to bring into the state. I will let dr. Cohen address that as well. Dr. Cohen on the collecting of demographic information by testing, that is much different on the positives, when we have positive tests, our tracers and others at local Health Departments will reach out and collect the additional data. What we are trying to do is get that on the front end. The federal government has moved to require the collection of demographic information that was hugely helpful to us in the state. We have now been working on the i. T. System to make that data a much more automated process that is not done quite yet. We are working very rapidly to make this a much less manual process. Right now we go one by one and make phone calls. That is really challenging. We need to be able to collect that information in a more systematic and automatic way to help us drive our decisionmaking about what we need to do next. Stay tuned for more there. As far as people coming into the hospital, whether theyre coming in for a specific covid reason and then they are found to be covid19 positive, we asked our hospitals to report how many people in your hospital beds currently have covid19. That is how we asked the question. There may be some people who came forward for different reasons. I would remind you about this virus, we are beginning to understand all the ways in which a virus could present. We know this virus causes inflammatory disease, particularly, we are seeing this new multiinflammatory disease of children. We are also seeing inflammatory disease in adults. If someone comes in with a heart attack, a heart attack or an can be an inflammatory event. Is that covid . Is that just a heart attack . I dont know if that has any clinical different at this point. I think what we want to do is track our utilization. What we are seeing in our Health Care System is where getting overwhelmed. I think it is important to know that if someone is in the hospital and has covid19, not just because understanding their clinical pattern but also for isolating them and making sure they are not comingled with other patients that are not covid19 and seeing that virus spread through a health care setting. It is really important that we come into a setting so we can do Infection Control prevention that is needed in the hospital setting. I hope that gets to the heart of the question. Thank you. Gov. Cooper next question. Our next question is from haley with wght. My question is about protesters and testing. There is a push to get protesters tested. What has the data revealed . Is there a spike in protesters being positive for covid . Are we seeing super spreaders . Are there any trends . Gov. Cooper i think any time you have a group of people crowded together, many of them not social distancing, many of them not wearing cloth Face Coverings, you have the Great Potential for spread of covid19. Dr. Cohen may have information on whether we have traced any particular protest to cover 19 infections. Usually the contact tracers in that kind of a situation will trace things down and letting people know and it is not necessarily anything that would come to our attention. But we want people to get tested if they have been in any kind of crowd, because of their increased chance of getting infected. Dr. Cohen, do you want to add to that . Thank you. Next question, please. Our final question is from the business journal. I am curious, you talked early on about the importance of using science and data and reopening the economy. Given how bad these numbers have been in the past couple of weeks, im wondering whether you have thought about pulling back. And is part of the reason you have not because people may not listen at this point because theyre so eager to be out . Gov. Cooper we have three major initiatives here. We want to make sure anyone who gets sick with covid has a hospital bed and icu bed and a ventilator, if they need one. Number two, we want to slow the spread of the virus. Number three, we want to cushion the blow to our economy. We have a lot of our businesses that are open and a lot of things pushing our economy along. We still have some restrictions that potentially we can ease, as we go further. But we are looking at these numbers and we are concerned about them. At the first of next week, we will announce our decision based on science and advice from Health Experts, is to, if we are going to go into the next phase that would start on friday of next week, and if we are, what it will look like. That is what we are doing right now. We believe that we can get a handle on this. We are encouraging people to continue to do the three ws. We are looking at trying to get more people to use Face Coverings. We believe we can flatten this curve and prevent this second surge from happening. And we hope that we can do that soon. So im asking the people of North Carolina, lets pull together so that we can continue to move forward in easing restrictions. That being said, we will always what is the best for the health and safety of north carolinians. Next question . That was our final question, governor. Next question . Gov. Cooper ok. I appreciate all of you tuning in. We are grateful for the hard you are doing now and fighting the spread of covid19 and we ask you to keep it up. Thanks very 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] live tuesday on the cspan networks, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell testifies on Monetary Policy at a Senate Hearing at 10 00 a. M. On cspan. At 2 30, but Senate Judiciary committee on police use of force in committee relations. Witnesses include st. Paul, and the chiefs of police of houston, durham, and buffalo grove, illinois. The Senate Returns on a bill to provide funding for national parks. At 10 00 a. M. On cspan3, the Senate Appropriations subcommittee hears from the federal can indication commission on the auction program. And at noon military personnel hearing from judge advocate generals on Racial Disparity and the military justice system. Representative, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus fored about Legislation Police violence after the death of george floyd. And the Defund Police movement. The bill written by the black caucus would banned