Weekend. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gave an update on the confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths. The Governor Also AnnouncedPublic Schools in the state would be closed for another two weeks until april 15. Good morning everyone. Let me introduce who we have with us today. To my far right we have the president of Empire College who i worked with for many years and has been helpful here on this mission. Our commissioner of health to my left is the general Patrick Murphy who will say more in a moment and to his left is general shields. Thank you for being here today for this is an amazing a compliment transformative in just one week this center looks entirely different and this was a place that is literally going to save lives. Let me go through some facts if i can on a daily update of where we are and then i want to make some comments to all the women and men who are assembled and did such a great job on this facility. The increase in the number of cases continues. We still see that trajectory going up. Those are the dates from arch third to march 25 and a strategy, plan of action all along flatten the curve but step two was to increase Hospital Capacity. Flatten the curved meaning if you do it as well as you can do with hopefully there is no high point of the curve. There is no apex. Its a flatter, lower curve. Why . So the Hospital Capacity can keep up with it. That is what this is all about. Not overwhelming Hospital Capacity and at the same time increasing Hospital Capacity that we have so if it doesnt see those numbers which it will in most probability that we have the additional capacity to deal with it. Flattening the curve these are measures that we will put them place barring nonessential workers or social distancing closing bars and restaurants and all the things i did that made people very happy with me. But the way you make a decision is the benefit and the burden with the benefit, risk and reward but we are battling a deadly virus. Is there and intrusion on daily life . Yes. Is there an intrusion on movement . Yes. Is there an intrusion in the economy . Yes. But what is on the other side of the scale is literally saving lives and that is not rhetorical and not drama. That is fact and Public Education is very important. Its important to all of us. On the other side of the balance beam is public health. I decided to close the Public Schools because i believe it was safer to close the school and reduce the spread. We did that on march 18 and said we would do it for two weeks and then we would reassess the situation at the end of two weeks. Two weeks ends on april 1. We also said that we would waive what is called the 180 day requirement that every school had to teach for 180 days. We would waive that but that we would close the schools until april 1 and then we would reassess. Also we said that every School District before it closes had to come up with plans to continue functions that they were doing because School Districts do more than just educate, they provide childcare for essential workers and provide schools and they provide meals into schools so everything that they were doing they had to come up with a plan to mitigate the consequences of their closing, including Distance Learning for their students. I have to reassess because aprif days and i believe the schools should remain closed. I dont do this joyfully but i think when you look at where we are and you look at the number of cases still increasing it only makes sense to keep this schools rightparenthesis they have to continue the programs they are doing and they will continue the childcare and the meals and continue Distance Learning programs and i will continue the waiver on the 180 day mandate they have to be in operation but we will close the schools for another two weeks and then we will reassess at that point. That is statewide. At the same time we are working to increase Hospital Capacity and what is a possible apex of the curve it changes a little bit depending on the day to day, the data day today but now we are at 21 days for a possible apex. We want to do everything we can to be ready for that increase capacity that could hit us in 21 days and ramp up the hospital capacities. We are doing every thing we can and doing things that have never been done before and we are doing things that when we put them on the table people thought they were impossible but we are now doing the impossible. As you know well here with what you did over the past week. All hospitals have to increase their capacity by 50 and we are asking hospitals to try to increase their capacity 100 because we need that many beds and we are also looking at converting dorms and looking at converting hotels and we have been gathering equipment from everywhere we can. Ppe equipment is the most important piece of equipment for us, ventilators and literally shot. Around the globe to put it all in place. We are creating a stockpile of this equipment so that when and if the apex hits we can deploy equipment from the stockpile to whatever region of the state or whatever hospital needs it. We collected, we hold it as a hospital needs it and a regent needs it then we deploy it. The end 95 masks, surgical masks, or examinations, gloves and the protective grounds, coveralls and most importantly the ventilators. Why ventilators . This is a respiratory illness and people need ventilators who come in for a acutecare and the people on ventilators much longer then most most patients are on ventilators. Most people are on a ventilator for two, three, four days and these patients can come in and need a ventilator for up to 20 days. You see why that need for ventilators is so important and again all of this is to make sure we are ready for that apex when the entire system is distressed and under pressure and that is what we are working on. For the Hospital Capacity at the quote unquote apex we need 140,000 beds and we have 53000 beds and that is why we are scrambling and that is why we are asking you to do as much work as you are doing. We need 40000 icu beds and the icu beds in the intensive care unit beds have a ventilators and when we started 3000 icu beds with 3000 ventilators so you see how monumental the task and how monumental the mountain that we have to climb of the 140,000 how do we get to the 140,000 . As i said, all hospitals increased by 50 and some hospitals will increase 100 and they will get the goldstar hospital award and i dont know exactly what that means but we will figure it out. Fema and the army corps and the National Guard have been working to put up these emergency hospitals. So far we have planned for four and the one we are in today at the center and one in Westchester County center and one at stony brook and old westbury that will be 4000 adjustable units and they are all underway, as we speak. Not as far as long as we have done the work at Javits Center but they are on their way. Again, with all these beds we still have over a shortfall so weve only gone to plan to be. Plan b will be to seek to build another for temporary emergency hospitals which will get us another 4000 beds because we have been scouting sites for a few days and we have settled on a few sites working with the army corps of engineers and i will ask the president today if he will authorize another for temporary hospitals for us. I want to have one in every borough and i want to have one for the bronx, queens, manhattan, Staten Island and brooklyn but one part nassau, sussex, westchester so Everybody Knows downstate for the essence of the density is right now that everyone equally is being helped and is being protected. We looked at a site in the bronx at the new york expo center, 90000 squarefoot site and seen what we did here we think it would work very well and again, the army corps of engineers has worked with us and look at all these sites and one in queens, the aqueduct racetrack site 100,000 square feet there and one in brooklyn was called the brooklyn cruise terminal in the Port Authority but its a wideopen space and it was converted very easily, 182,000 square feet and in Staten Island the college of Staten Island which is a puny facility, 70000 square feet again inside could be converted and has power and has Climate Control et cetera. We would do with the thing that weve done here successfully so we know it works and is suitable in building the interior of space we have exterior space that we could put up a temporary tent for supplies, equipment et cetera. That would give us coverage all across the downstate area with approximate facilities to every location downstate and frankly it is the best plan that we can put together and execute in this timeline. We also have beyond the next phase of temporary hospitals if the white house grants that request we have the navy ship comforts coming up that will be on its way soon and will be right here in new york harbor and it is a massive of civility in and of itself, 1000 beds, 1200 medical personnel and 12 operating rooms and a pharmacy and laboratory and it should be here on monday so that will also help us in this quest. Then we are looking at dormitories and converting dormitories down state and we are looking at city college dormitories, Queens College and we have the dormitories because the colleges are closed and the students have left so i have dormitories that we can convert. We are looking at hotels and Nursing Homes and we are looking at the Marriott Brooklyn bridge hotel and the nursing home called brooklyn center. As you can see we are looking far and wide very creative, aggressive and whining all the space that we can possibly find in in converting it to be ready in case we have that overflow capacity. We also have it planned out so that this is coming online before we think the apex hits and at the same time we are trying to flatten the curve to delay and soften that apex, right . Those are the two strategies. Slow the spread, flatten the curve and in the meantime, increase the Hospital Capacity so whatever that search is that you have you actually have the capacity to deal with it. Right now we have a plan where over the next three, four weeks, which is the same timeline as the apex possibly coming, we will have the capacity as high as we possibly can get the capacity. In terms of where we are today because we are tracking the numbers we want to see what is happening and are we getting closer to the apex and rb is succeeding and flattening the curve . We have been testing and we have tested more in this state than any state in the United States and retest more per per capita than china or south korea so we ramped up very quickly on this testing. New tests 16000 total tested 138,000 and number of positive cases total cases 44000 new cases 70037337. It continues to spread all across the country and the number of deaths were up to 519 in new york and it is up from 385. That will continue to go up and that is the worst news that i could possibly tell the people of of the state of new york. The reason why the number is going up is because some people came in to the hospitals 20 da days, 25 days ago and have been on a ventilator for that long a period of time. The longer you are on a ventilator the less likely you will come off that ventilator. That is not just true with this virus but true with every illness. Everyone is on that ventilator for a prolonged period of time the outcome is usually not good. We are seeing a significant increase in deaths because the length of time people are on the ventilator is increasing and the more it increases the higher the level of deaths will increase. Again, we expect that to continue to increase and it is bad news and tragic news and the worst news but it is not unexpected news either. If you talk to any Healthcare Professionals they will tell you as you talk about a loved one if they are not off that ventilator in a relatively short period of time it is not a good sign. Overall, 44000 people have tested positive, 6000 currently hospitalized, 1500 intensive care units and that is up 290, those of the people who need the ventilators. 2000 patients have been discharge, that is up 528. People coming into the hospital and getting treatment and leaving the hospital, most people get the virus will never even go into the hospital in the first place. We have to keep this in focus. 80 of the people who get the virus will, what they call, self resolved. You will feel ill and maybe you wont feel that ill and you will thank you have the flu and you self resolved, 80 of the people. 20 will grow into a hospital and some of them will get shortterm treatment and then go home. A very small percent and they tend to be older people, more Vulnerable People and will people with an underlying illness this respiratory illness compounds the problem they have. They have a compromised immune system. They were fighting emphysema. They were battling cancer. And on top of that they now get pneumonia which is what this coronavirus is. That is the population that is most vulnerable. They will then go on to a ventilator and some percentage get off quickly and some percentage dont get off and the longer they are on the higher the mortality rate is. New york is still, by far, the most affected state both in terms of number cases and in terms of number of deaths. Why . Because we welcome people here from all over the globe so travelers came here and people from china came here and people from korea came here and people who are traveling around the country and stopped in china and stopped in south korea and stopped in italy, came here and because we are a very dense environment. Social distancing, stay 6 feet away, that is hard in new york city for a walk down the sidewalk and tell me that you can stay 6 feet away from someone. We are so dense and so together which is what makes us special and gives us that new york energy and gives us that new york mojo but it also that density becomes the enemy in a situation like this. This is the total number of people who have been hospitalized and we have been watching these numbers every day and we are now compiling the numbers i think in the smarter way before we were getting individual patient data and every hospital had to tell us about each individual patient and what their address was and where they came from and what the underlying illness was and putting the information together was laborintensive so it was erratic the way the information would come in but sometimes the hospital was too busy to put all that information together so they did not send it in until the next day or the next day after. This is a more uniform set of data and this is all the numbers of people in that the entire number of people in that hospital who have the covid19 virus, without getting into the specific names and individual circumstances so its easier for them to get that data and you see again the steady incline in the number but and this is good news, early on you see that the number was doubling every two and half days and then it was doubling every three days and now it is doubling about every four days. It is still doubling and that is still bad news because it still means you are moving up towards an apex because that number still goes up but there is good news in that the rate of the increase is slowing. They are two separate facts. The rate of increase is slowing but the number of cases are still going up. Alright . Those two points are consistent and that is what we are seeing. We want to see the rates slowing and then we want to see the number of actual cases coming down or flattening and that is the flattening of the curve. But, this is where we are today. To keep it all in perspective people dont know what to make of the coronavirus and what will happen and what will happen and Johns Hopkins has studied every coronavirus since china and 542,000 cases they have studied and of all those cases have been 24000 deaths. That is a lot of deaths. Yes, but compare the 542,000 cases it gives you a sense of the lethality of this disease and if you look at the 24000 they will be overwhelmingly older people, Vulnerable People, people with underlying illnesses et cetera. The amount of support that we have gotten from new yorkers in the midst of this crisis is just extraordinary. I am a born and bred new yorker, if you cant tell my queens accident and i can tell you a bronx accent and your manhattan exit and your Staten Island accent. But new yorkers never cease to amaze me. How big your heart is where they talk about how new yorkers are tough and yeah, you know living in a place like this you have to be tough but as tough as we are and as loving as we are and as big as our heart is and when someone needs something there is no place i would rather be then new york. The number of people who are volunteering and who have come forward we put out a call for additional medical personnel because we have to staff all these additional beds and we put out a call, 62000 volunteers, the number it went up 10000 in one david how beautiful is that . These are people who are retired and who did their duty and who could just sit at home but they are coming forward. Same thing we asked for Mental Health professionals who could provide Mental Health services, electronically over the telephone and who through skype et cetera and many people are dealing with Mental Health issues. This is a stressful, taxing situation on everyone. On everyone. Isolation at home, you are home and you are home alone, day, after day that is a stressful situation but you dont know what is going on and you are afraid to go out and you are isolated with her family and that is a stressful situation. Not that we dont like to be with our family, we all do but that can create stress and there is no place to go and no one to talk to about that. This Mental Health service over the telephone is very, very important. I want to speak to the most important people in the room for a moment who are the people who are responsible for this great construction behind me. First, i would like to deduce general Patrick Murphy to my left. General murphy is tested, smart and has tested tough. Ive been with the general for nine years could i have seen him in hurricanes and in super storm sandy and floods and everything Mother Nature could throw at us and i have seen him in terrorist attacks and there is no one better. He leads from the front and knows what hes doing and you could not have a better commander at this time then general Patrick Murphy and i want you to know that. I want to congratulate the army corps of engineers for what they did here and i used to be in the federal government and i worked with the army corps of engineers all across the state and worked with them on the pine ridge indian reservation building houses and one of the officers of the army corps of engineers is still in service and reminded me of that. They are top shelf. What they did here is top shelf. I want to thank the Javits Center staff that has stepped up and i want to thank our National Guard. You are the best of us. You are the best of us. Whenever we call on you you are there and what you did in this facility in one week creating a hospital is just incredible. I dont know how you did it and you did such a good job that im asking for for more from the president but the downside of being is as good as you are and what you did but what you did is really incredible. I want to make two points to you. I want to make two promises to you. This is a different beast that we are dealing with. This is an invisible beast. It is an insidious beast. This will not be a short deployment. This will not be that you go out there for a few days and we work hard and go home. This is going to be weeks and weeks and weeks. This will be a long day and it will be a hard day and it will be an ugly day and it will be a sad day. This is a rescue mission that you are on. The mission is to save lives and that is what you are doing. The rescue mission is to save lives. As hard as we work we are not going to be able to save everyone. What is even more cruel is this enemy doesnt attack the strongest of us but it attacks the weakest of us. It attacks our most vulnerable which makes it even worse in many ways. These are the people that every instinct tells us we are supposed to protect and these are our parents and our grandparents and these are our aunts and uncles, these are our relatives who are sick and every instinct says protected them, help them because they need us. Those are the exact people that this enemy attacks. Every time ive called out the National Guard i have said the thing to you. I promise you i will not ask you to do anything that i will not do myself and i will never ask you to go anywhere that i wont go myself. The same is true here. We will do this and we will do this together. My second point is you are living a moment in history and this will be one of those moments that they will write about and will talk about for generations. This is a moment that will change this nation. This is a moment that forges character, forges people, changes people. It makes them stronger, makes them weaker but this is a moment that will change character. Ten years from now you will be talking about today your children or your grandchildren and you will shed a tear because you will remember the lives lost and you will remember the faces and you will remember the names and you will remember how hard we worked and that we still lost loved ones. You will shed a tear and you should because it will be sad but you will also be proud. You will be proud of what you did. You will be proud that showed up in that you showed up when other people played it safe, you had the courage to show up and you had the skill and the professionalism to make a difference and save lives. That is what you will have done. At the end of the day nobody can ask anything more from you. That is your due, to do what you can when you can and you will have shown skill and courage and talent and you will be there with your mind and you will be there with your heart. You will serve with honor. That will give you pride and you should be proud. I know that i am proud of you. Every time the National Guard has been called out they have made every new yorker proud and i am proud to be with you yet again and i am proud to fight this fight with you. I bring you thanks from all new yorkers who are just so appreciative of the sacrifice you are making and the skill you are bringing in the talent you are bringing and you give many new yorkers confidence. I say, my friends, that we go out there today and we kick corona vice coronavirus ass and we will save lives and new york will thank you. God bless each and every one of you. [applause] [background noises] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] yes, they are in a stockpile. That is where they are supposed to be because we dont need them yet. We need them for the apex and the apex isnt here. We are gathering them in the stockpile so when we need them they will be there. We dont need them today because we are not at capacity today. That is why they are not deployed because they are not needed. Second point, maybe you dont need 30000. Well, look, i dont have a crystal ball and everybody is entitled to their own opinion but i dont operate here on opinion. I operate on facts and on data and on numbers and on projections. We have [inaudible] making productions and the cdc is making projections and mckinsey and company are making projections for us and all the projections say you could have an apex leading one of 40000 beds and about 40000 ventilators. Those are numbers. Not i feel, i think, i believe, i want to believe, make the decisions based on the data and the science and we are following the data and the science and that is what the data and the science says. I hope we dont need 30000 ventilators. I hope some natural weather change happens overnight and kills the virus locally globally. That is what i hoped but that is my hope. My emotion and thats my thoughts. The numbers say you may need 30000. [background noises] you will see as these numbers increase hospitals reaching capacity. You will see if the numbers continue to increase hospitals overcapacity. That is this whole planning exercise and that is why we just are building 1000 fed facilities here and that is why we are Building Three other beds and thats why im asking the president for another 4000 fed facilities because those hospitals will reach capacity. To be alarmed, well, hospitals reaching capacity. Yes, that is what we have been saying and that is what we have been planning for and that is why we are here. [inaudible question] [inaudible question] what i said is initially when i close the schools i said lets do it for two weeks and see where we are at the end of two weeks. Two weeks is up. I said lets extended another two weeks and see where we are. At the end of two weeks if the same trajectory is going up and there has not been a change then you are right, you will extend it. [inaudible] we will extend it for four weeks, six weeks or eight weeks because i dont know what will happen. I dont know what will happen next week. Nobody knows what will happen next week. Two weeks and then we will reassess but you are right, if the numbers continue this way then yes, in all likelihood we will extended another two weeks. [inaudible question] let me ask doctor zucker but flatten the curve is only two things you can do. Life is options. One is social distancing which we have taken as dramatic an action as anyone anywhere. Two testing to find the positive isolate the positive, stop the spread. Doing more testing than anyplace in the country and per per capita more than anyplace in the globe. We are doing everything we can. Is that why the curve is slowing or the doubling is slowing . I would think theres a correlation but i dont think its a coincidence and the rate of doubling is slowing and that is the good news but the curve is still going out. Doctor, do you want to add anything . I concur with what the governor is insane. There are a lot of different factors that can be involved in the spread obviously the social distancing is, i believe, working and the virus is not spreading to more individuals as we it is spreading but its not where the numbers of hostile relations keep rising and doubling rate. As it was earlier. I think we will have a better answer to this probably in a couple more days when we see the trend. [inaudible question] [inaudible] the criteria you need a large open indoor space with power, with hp ac and with a company no space where you can set up medical staff, supplies, staging area and you need a place that is now empty so you dont have to clear it and my strategic decision was one per county so every county every borough has one facility in their borough and we started and looked at about ten sites and we eliminated them and got them done to a short list and went with army corps of engineers because there were actually do the construction of it and we came up with a final list of these four and today im going to send that list to the president and ask them to approve those for that would be an additional 4000 units and we have 4000 units on the table and this is 1000 and those are 4000 so it would be a total of 8000 units from the feds, federal government for temporary [inaudible] [inaudible question] [inaudible] first we need the approval and the timeline to get them constructed is somewhere in the neighborhood of ten days but the first question is the approval. That is up to the president s. [inaudible question] [inaudible question] the hospitals we are trying to figure out what would be the approach we would have with this hospitals that have the right to do something further then we would recommend. [inaudible question] [inaudible question] the healthcare workers are on the front line as the governor had mentioned before and we are addressing what is the necessa necessary, both questions, we are working with them to provide information to their patients and they have been very responsive and obviously there are concerned about their patients. [inaudible question] yes, we do the budget discussions with the legislative leaders. The federal government said, promised, implied, stated that they would provide aid to state governments. They passed the bill that did not do that. You know, this is math in one point. We have no state revenues to speak of and we will have to dramatically cut our states expenses. You cant spend that which you dont have and you cant do that in the family and you cant do that in a business and cant do that in governments. The federal government only gave us 5 billion and that is only for coronavirus expenses and it is all it can be used for. We have lost about ten 15 billion in revenue. People dont work, they dont pay income tax, businesses are closed and they dont pay tax so we have about a ten15 billiondollar hole and the federal government gave us zero, zilch. We will have to cut and those are all new york terms, right two we will have to cut Education Aid because that is the number one expense and healthcare we can use the 5 billion from the feds for the coronavirus care but the main expense for the state budget is education and they know that. When they did not give the state funding all they did was cut the education budget to the state of new york which is a fraction. [inaudible question] there is not a lot to negotiate. When the number is zero it makes it an easy budget to negotiate because zero is an easy number. [inaudible question] there can be no evictions based on rent for 90 days. If you dont pay rent for 90 days you cannot be evicted. [inaudible question] yes, thats exactly what we did yesterday. The question was closing down construction sites. We are closing down nonessential construction sites. Some construction is essential, right . To keep the place running but nonessential construction is going to be stopped. [inaudible question] we have a list. I can get it to you later if you would like. [inaudible question] [inaudible question] [inaudible] people are out of work you are out of work, you can qualify for unlimited insurance and that is not what you were making and we set out to buy food and you still have to pay expenses. Rent which tends to be 40, 50 of a persons income, believe it or not, it becomes a very big expense to carry. I signed an executive order saying for the next three months a landlord, by law, cannot evict a tenant for nonpayment of rent. If you cant pay the rent that is an understandable circumstance and you said 90 days because we dont know how long this will go on and we could always revisit it but for now, for 90 days by law the landlord cannot evict you. [inaudible question] give them a big round of applause for what they have done and what they are doing. [applause] thank you. [background noises] [background noises] follow the federal response to the coronavirus outbreak at cspan. Org coronavirus. Watch congress about white house briefings and updates from governors. Check the spread throughout the u. S. And the world with interactive maps. Watch ondemand anytime unfiltered at cspan. Org coronavirus. More coverage this afternoon on the response to the coronavirus. Louisiana governor john edwards will give an update on the outbreak in his state and that is live at 3 30 p. M. Eastern here on cspan2, online at cspan. Org or listen with a free cspan radio app. This week we are featuring booktv programs showcasing what is available every weekend on cspan2. Tonight highlights from our weekly Interview Program after words. First, syndicated columnist cal thomas explores the rise and falls of nations historically and offers his thoughts on whether the United States will remain a superpower. Then journalist Andrea Bernstein chronicles the trump and kushner fa