Gov. Raimondo this is the best place to get your information. The most uptodate information on the coronavirus here in the state of rhode island. To report very sad and other death in the state of rhode island as a result of coronavirus. Bringing us to a total of 35 losses. Cases for anew total of 1450 cases. We now have 143 people in the hospital. The number of people in a hospital is what we are very focused on now. Tracking how quickly that number doubles and increases. , wepeople in the hospital are at a good clip of increase, which means we are in the rapid spread phase of the virus. That there isume Widespread Community transmission. Quick notes today. I am trying to respond today on the basis of the questions we are getting most frequently at this point in time. The first note i have is around testing. A couple of days ago i announced , rhode rhode island island in partnership with cbs, open a Rapid Testing facility in a parking lot of twin river in lincoln. This is going very well, and its a test where you drive through, you are swapped, tested and have the result within a half an hour, hopefully less than a half an hour. Hear that a lot of people are going into cvs pharmacies requesting a test. You cannot do that. The only way to sign up for a cbs. Com. O go online to if you have symptoms of coronavirus and you want to get tested, go to cbs. Com and make yourself an appointment. At the time of the appointment to twinave to drive river, they have a facility there, they are working in collaboration with us and you get your results right there all you way in the car in a parking lot. These do not going to your local cvs because you wont be able to get tested. These tests are rapid. We want those test to be reserved for people who are 60 and older. Health care professionals, people who have to go to work, essential workers. People who need to get a rapid result. Its only for adults. Its 18 and above. If you are under 18, or if you are young and healthy, but you have symptoms of coronavirus, we need you to call your doctor or your kids p beautician. And if you call your doctor or call the pediatric and, they can then make you an appointment for a test, but they will not send you to cbs, they will send you to one of the other numerous sites around the state being operated by the National Guard ande you will be swabbed get the results of your test in one to three days. Very important. These tests are most accurate on people who have symptoms. We are not encouraging testing of people who dont have symptoms. If you have symptoms of coronavirus, go to cbs. Com and for thatppointment day, or call your doctor and they will get you an appointment for one of the other testing sites. At this point we have capacity to do well over 2000 tests a day. If you tried in the past to get a test, try again, our systems are better and they will be better tomorrow than they were today. Final point. Cvs. Com. Com, you can dv you can only make an appointment for today. Andcan go on on a monday you can make your appointment for a tuesday or a wednesday. That functionality is not up yet. Morning, go on in the make your appointment for that same day. I hope that clarifies. , please do not walk into the cvs pharmacy. Its dangerous. If you have the virus you will you will adding that be spreading the virus. Wed ought anyone who is sick to leave their house unless already have an appointment to get a test. Way youre sick in any should not be leaving your house. The only acceptable reason to leave your house as if you already have an appointment for a test. Youret tested, dont leave car, go back home and stay in isolation in your house. A couple of other announcements. Courtsternoon the extended their closure for all nonessential business through may 17. I want to thank the court for taking this step. More generally, i would like to think the court for their cooperation. My office has been in touch with the chief judges of all the cords. You have all been terrific in helping us. You have been helping Rhode Islanders through this crisis. I want to thank you for your cooperation. Means for the people of rhode island is that you cannot be evicted at any time, or any reason between now and may 17. The eviction is a Court Procedure and courts closed for nonessential services. I hear from people all the time who are struggling to pay the rent. You wont be a victory because you cannot pay the rent. Waianae to call my office, it is not true. The courts are closed and you cannot get elected. I also know people are struggling to pay their mortgage, and we are working on ways to provide relief around that, and i hope to have an announcement in the next few days or next week to help you get some forgiveness. I know its impossible to pay your mortgage if you or your family is out of work. I dont have a good answer to that right now, i hear you, im working on it. Very soon i hope to be able to make an announcement around mortgage payments to give everybody some breathing room. We have been getting a lot of questions about food and food delivery. This is an issue for so many people right now, so many kids who are used to getting at least two meals a day in school, but schools are closed. Folks, elderly folks, seniors who are used to relying upon Senior Centers for their two or three meals a day, and of course people who are in quarantine and isolation, we need you to stay out home if youre in quarantine. But also we need you to be able to keep. We are ramping up our food delivery. I want to remind you that we have a new website. Ri delivers. Com. If you are in your house and homebound and have been ordered into quarantine, if you are sick and cannot get out, i want you to go to ri delivers. Com, we have a number of ways to get to the food, groceries or meals, prepared meals that you need. Sense of it, and the last week, more than 40,000 Rhode Islanders have used that website. Over 25,000ibuting meals a day through meals on wheels, Senior Centers, schools and other community partnerships. We distributed nearly 100,000 nonperishable meals and communities across rhode island for a partnership at the food bank. Thank you to the food bank for all your doing. Thent to acknowledge fantastic local grocery. We have partnered with them and they have delivered meals to over 800 families since we launched the partnership a few days ago. My top priority is making sure Rhode Islanders are safe and healthy and well fed. That is the italian mother and me, we should always be well fed. Canre doing everything we to make sure everybody has the food that they need to get through this. We are adding more people, more groceries and getting more donations and we will have a greater ability to deliver more food. Me and arere hearing stuck at home and you need a hand, ri delivers. Com. If you cannot get to a smart phone or computer, pick up your phone and call 211. 211. Hotline and they will begin food delivery. Also you can go on new service and it maytdoor. Com be that a neighbor or friend in your community would be willing to bring you food. You can register what your needs are at next. Com. I would like to talk about Contact Tracing. Ago,we started five weeks we had a very blunt approach. Then pretty blunt the whole way. Shutting down whole sectors of our economy. Asking large groups of people to just a home. As our system is evolving, we are trying to move to a place where we get much more pinpointed. More testing. And what we call Contact Tracing. Processery detailed that if you test positive the department of health will get in touch with you and go through a really detailed process of figuring out all the people who you been in contact with. Because we then need to tell those people that they have been exposed to you, and they are at risk for having coronavirus. We have been doing this for five weeks, mostly manually. God bless the people at the department of health. Its unbelievable what theyve done. Amazing. Mostly manual, many, many man hours of work and they have done a beautiful job. But if im going to open us economy, and i am going to as quickly as we can, we have the more automated and more scalable. We have been working hard to build a system that is automated and scalable. Wem proud to announce that in rhode island have partnered with a Company Called salesforce. Com. Im sure many of you have heard of it. Companylobal software and we are partnering with them to make our Contract Tracing contract more efficient and reliable. It should give you great confidence that our systems are getting so much better, and were that much closer to getting back to work, because this is essential to get everybody back to work. The same thing will happen. If you get tested positive, you will be contacted by the department of health, and they will go through a system to figure out with whom you been in contact. Week, two weeks i want to have the whole system be much more automated. Imagine a system where you track your symptoms online, on your phone. You set yourself up an appointment on your phone to get tested. This you have tested automated Contact Tracing system , and then we monitor your quarantine and isolation all through an integrated system. Thats a snapshot of where i want to get in we are not there now. We are working 24 7 to get there, but thats the system we need to have before we go back to work or think about going back to work. You have also heard me every day, for the past few days, ask you to please keep a contact notebook. I have gotten a lot of questions. Do i really need to do that . Whats the point of it . Heres the point of it, i cannot get you back to work unless everybody keeps a contact notebook. Keep ampossible to mental list of everyone you have been with any day or week. Jew to do is, at the end of every day, or throughout the day, right down on a piece of paper everywhere you have been an everybody you have physical contact with. You go get yourself tested, if you have symptoms, and if you get a test, you should bring that Contact Tracing notebook with you to the test. You should not try to going get a test without it, because it means you are not prepared. I need everybody to get really serious about this so that when you get the phone call from the department of health and they say, who were you with yesterday or a week ago, where were you, what surfaces did you touch, we will be ready so we can move more quickly and keep you safer. So that clears up all the questions about what you talking about with Contract TracingContact Tracing. I want to address the Jewish Community in rhode island. Tonight is the first night of passover. Families allhen across the state and all around the world come together to celebrate a very special, very important, very holy holiday. This year will be different. This year it will be different because you have to obey social distancing order. Social gatherings cannot be more than five people. I know thats really tough. This will be different. Im asking you to please obey that and i know it will be difficult. Its a time for when you get together that jewish people retail and celebrate the story of triumph and freedom over an enemy. I think that is more appropriate as wever this passover all, together, maintain our sense of hope that we will triumph and have freedom against this common enemy. So i know that you will not be able to celebrate with your families and friends and communities in close proximity in the way that you want to and , but i wantle to you to know we are thinking of ,ou, we are deeply sympathetic and i personally hope that that message of hope and triumph over an enemy rings even truer this year for you and your family than ever before. Say to all of our jewish brothers and sisters in a happy passover to all. I especially want to thank the boardand the rhode island of rabbis for working with us and giving direction to your congregation. Incredibly inspired by the stories i have heard and all the plans for tonight, and ways of which you are adapting your customs and traditions to the coronavirus world. Thank you, thank you for the leaders in a community for working with us, helping us to enforce the social distancing today,and all the best tonight and in the coming days. I also want to recognize members of other faiths. Its holy week for christians. Holy thursday, good friday, holy saturday and of course easter. Everything will be different this year, just like him sunday was different, easter will be different. Churches will have to remain closed. To do the same and get creative. Continue to worship, continued to pray. Continue to find hope in your faith and in your face, community, but do it in a safe way. I have heard about churches , over the radio and people sitting in her car in the parking lot. Thats great if wind is everyone stays in the car and keep their windows closed. These are the kind of creative ways that we have to continue to worship, but do it safely. In the muslim community, ramadan is coming up in two weeks. I will have more to say about that, but the same thing applies. Start making your plans now will not be open and we will not have an opportunity to have large gatherings and Prayer Services as we all like to do. Two other things. Getting a lot of questions around the order that came down yesterday from the mayor of providence. First i want to think the mayor for his leadership. Decisive and swift leadership throughout this crisis and keeping the people of providence safe and has been a good partner to me and to the state throughout all of this. Thatnounced yesterday parks and boulevards would be completely closed. He did that for good reason, he wants to keep people safe. Have had the chance to speak but the mayor. We have the department of healths beak with the mayor. I want to clarify that a bit. We are getting a lot of questions. This policy in providence will be implemented in a very similar way to the policy we have at the state around parks and beaches. Which is to say, if you are lucky enough to live within a park orstance of boulevard, then by all means, go take a walk. Go walk your dog. The parking lots will be closed and we dont want you driving their to go for a walk. Above all, we do not want to see crowds were people congregating on the boulevard, on any boulevard, in any park in your local community park. In an effort to assist the mayor with enforcement, we will be offering Additional Resources of help to the state police as necessary to make sure that we monitor this. We are going to try this. We will try it and see how it goes. We haveeek from now reports people are in huge crowds at Roger Williams park. Packed,evard is pack then we will have no other choice than to totally closed on the parks and the boulevards. And i really dont want to do that. Everybody deserves exercise and fresh air, a little sanity to out of your house so house. So help us help you enjoy a walk, to do it safely according to these rules and thank you mayor for working with us. End on a happy note, inspiring note, inspiring to me and i hope to you. It has been Crystal Clear to me that when the going gets tough Rhode Islanders come together. This is about as tough as it gets. The stories pouring into me every day of kids struggling in distance learning, they cant afford to pay their rent, they are sick, possibly they have lost a loved one to the virus, people in nursing homes, i hear you and want you to know we are working every day to address these needs. The bright side, a lot of people are stepping up to say what can i do, how can i help, how can i donate . I would like to thank a second to call out mark perlman. Starting today, job lot is , andg free fabric available to everybody, so we can all make our own fabric safe coverings. Every job lot has a display set up, and they have enough free fabric for one million masks. Obviously surgical masks and n95 masks need to be reserved for health care and truly essential workers and first responders. Else, everybody time you leave your house, we are asking you to wear a cloth mask. Not everybody can have access to that kind of a mask. Due to the kindness and generosity, everybody can go to job lot, get the material and make a mask. They were giving away food and meals, and i want to thank you mark and ocean ande job lot, locally owned grown Rhode Island Company stepping up when we need it most. Overthat, i will turn it to dr. Alexander scott. Dr. Scott thank you governor for those updates. I also want to thank you all for tuning in. The governor and i are sharing messages every day, but we also need you to help us by being the messengers as well. Like gettinging information from someone you know and love. Lifeere is someone in your who is not able to watch these daily briefings, or who may be is not as plugged into social media, or the news, please help thesepassing along important messages that you are hearing every day. The governor said, we have 220 new cases today. To 1450. Gs our total shared, wernor also sadly have five additional fatalities to report. Have 35 covid19 associated fatalities total. Of the five people whose passing we are reporting today, three were in their 70s, one person in their 80s and one person was in their 90s. A person in their 90s was a golden Crest Nursing Home resident. 80s lived ateir oak hill, as did one of the persons in their 70s. While im on the topic of data, i want to return to something i got asked about yesterday. Which is, democratics demographics, race and ethnic city. There ethnicity. There has been coverage about racial and ethnic disparities that are being noted in cities and states across the country. Highlights why we have, many times, before this pandemic, spoken often about zip code and how much zip codes matter. While we cant do anything definitive yet about rhode island, we understand when these types of disparities occur. We are still building out our data system for rhode island so we can look at things anymore granular way, and often times its because of the enormous amount of data that we are collecting in a very short window of time. Definitivelyo know , that there are certain environmental, social, and economic factors that make people more vulnerable. We talk often about making it so that your health should not depend on the zip code you are from. And knowing that zip codes can lead to differences in outcome. When we have stressed si