Highlight dutch holidays. This is 50 minutes. Good afternoon and thank you for tuning into todays update. Starting tomorrow, we will be time, 1 00 regular every day seven days a week. This is the best place to get your information, the most uptodate, Accurate Information on the coronavirus. Today, i am very sad to report another death in the state of rhode island bringing us to a , total of 35 losses. We have 220 new cases for a total of 1450 cases. We now have 143 people in the hospital. The number of people in a the hospital is what we are very focused on now. Tracking how quickly that number doubles and increases. 143 people in the hospital, we are at a good clip of increase, which means we are in the rapid spread phase of the virus. You should assume that there is Widespread Community transmission. A few 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 that in rhode island, rhode island in partnership with cbs, open a Rapid Testing facility in in the 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. We 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 test is to go online to cbs. Com. If you have symptoms of coronavirus and you want to get tested, go to cbs. Com and make cvs. Com and make yourself an appointment. At the time of the appointment if you have to drive to twin 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 weight in your car in the parking lot. Please do not go into your local cvs pharmacy, because you will not 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 pediatrician. 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 cvs, they will send you to one of the numerous sites around the state being operated by the National Guard where you will be swabbed and 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 rhinovirus, go to cvs. Com and make an appointment for that 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. For cvs. Com you can only make an appointment for today. That will be changing soon. By this time next week, you can go on on a monday and you can make your appointment for a tuesday or a wednesday. That functionality is not up yet. For today, go on in the morning, make your appointment for that same day. I hope that clarifies. Again, please do not walk into the cvs pharmacy. Its dangerous. If you have the virus you will you will be you will be spreading the virus. We do not want anyone who is sick leaving their house, period unless you already have an appointment to get a test. Maybe that is the simplest way to remember it. If you are sick in any way you should not be leaving your house. The only acceptable reason to leave your house as if you is if you already have an appointment for a test. Go, get tested, dont leave your car, go back home and stay in isolation in your house. A couple of other announcements. This afternoon the courts 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 courts. 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. Importantly what this means for , the people of rhode island is that you cannot be evicted at any time, or any reason between now and may 17. Because, an eviction is a Court Procedure and courts closed for nonessential services. I will say i hear from people all the time who are struggling to pay the rent. I want you to know, you will not because you cannot pay be evicted to pay the rent. If anyone tells you otherwise, i want you to call my office it is , not true. The courts are closed and you cannot get evicted. 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 it is impossible to pay a mortgage if you and your family are out of work, so i want you to know that i do not have a good answer to that right now. I hear you, i am working on it, and soon i hope to be able to make an announcement around mortgage payments to give everybody breathing room. We have been getting a lot of questions about food, and food delivery. This is an issue for so many people. So many kids used to getting at at schoolmeals a day but schools are closed. Arerly folks, seniors who used to relying upon Senior Centers for their two or three meals a day and people in isolation,in and we need you to stayathome, but also we need you to be able to eat so we are ramping up food delivery. I want to remind you that we have a new website, it is called rs. Com if you are in your house and homebound, if you have been ordered into quarantine, if you are sick and cannot get out, i want you to go s. Com and we have many ways to get you the food that you need. It, andyou a sense of the last week more than 40,000 Rhode Islanders have used that website, we are distributing over 25,000 meals a day through meals on wheels, Senior Centers, schools and other community partnerships. We distributed nearly 100 thousand nonperishable meals to communities across rhode island through a partnership with the food bank, thank you to the food bank, and i especially want to fresh food. Rocks we partnered with them and they have delivered meals to over 8000 800 families since we launched this partnership. Is making sure that Rhode Islanders are safe, healthy, and well fed. That is the italian mother and me, we should always be well fed. We are doing everything we can to make sure everybody has the food that they need to get through this. Every day we are adding more people, more groceries and getting more donations and we will have a greater ability to deliver more food. If you are hearing me, and you are stuck at home, and you need. Com. D, ridelivers if you cannot get to a smart. Hone or computer call 211 it is the united way hotline and they will help you get food delivery. On a new you can go service that we have offered, nextdoor. Com and it may be that a neighbor or friend in your community would be willing to bring you food. You can register what your needs are. Contact tracing. I would like to talk for a minute about Contact Tracing. So, when we started five weeks ago, we had a very blunt approach. It has been pretty blunt the whole way, shutting down whole sectors of our economy, asking large groups of people to stayathome. Evolving, as is our knowledge is evolving, we are trying to move to a place where we get much more pinpointed in our approach, more testing to figure out more quickly and accurately who is positive and what we call Contact Tracing. A lot of people have said, you keep talking about Contact Tracing, what is it. What it is is a very detailed process, 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 the city this 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. I am proud to announce that we in rhode island have partnered with a Company Called salesforce. Com. Im sure many of you have heard of it. Especially, in business. Its a Global Software company and we are partnering with them to make our Contract Tracing contract more efficient and reliable. It should give you great for you, the average rhode island or, you will not notice that. 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. Over time, in a week, two weeks from now, i want to have the whole system be much more automated. You can imagine a system where you track your symptoms online, on your phone. You set yourself up an appointment on your phone to get tested. After you have tested this 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. It is impossible to keep a mental list of everyone you have been with any day or week. So, what i need you 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. When 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 Contact Tracing. I want to address the Jewish Community in rhode island. Tonight is the first night of passover. Its a time when families all 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 the the 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. Ogether, your passover seder it is a time when the jewish people retell and celebrate the story of triumph and freedom over an enemy. I think that is more appropriate than ever this passover as we 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 should be able to, but i want you to know we are thinking of you, 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. And i will say to all of our jewish brothers and sisters in a happy passover to all. I especially want to thank the rabbi and the rhode island board of rabbis for working with us and giving direction to your congregation. I have been 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 rules, and all the best today, tonight and in the coming days. I also want to recognize members of other faiths. This is holy week for christians. Holy thursday, good friday, holy saturday and of course easter. Everything will be different this year, just like him sunday just like palm sunday was different. Easter will be different. Churches will have to remain closed. I will ask you to do the same and get creative. Continue to worship, continued continue to pray. Continue to find hope in your faith and in your face, faith communities, but do it in a safe way. I have heard about churches having services, over the radio and people sitting in her car in in their cars in the parking lot. That is great as long as everybody stays in the car and keeps the 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 because mosques 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. I have been getting a lot of questions around the order that came down yesterday from the mayor of providence. First, i want to thank the mayor for his leadership. He has shown 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. He announced yesterday that parks and boulevards would be completely closed. He did that for good reason, he wants to keep people safe. We have had the chance to speak with the mayor and have the department of health speak 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 walking distance of a park or 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 there 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 and help from 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. If one week from now we have reports people are in huge crowds at Roger Williams park. Blackstone boulevard is packed, then we will have no other choice than to totally closed on close down the parks and boulevards. And i really dont want to do that. Everybody deserves exercise and fresh air, a little sanity to get out of your 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. I will 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. On 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 making free fabric, and 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. For everybody else, every 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. I know today they were giving away food and meals, and i want to thank you mark and ocean state job lot, locally owned and grown Rhode Island Company really stepping up when we need it most. With that, i will turn it over to dr. Alexander scott. Dr. Scott thank you governor for those updates. Good afternoon. 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. There is nothing like getting information from someone you know and love. If there is someone in your life 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 us by passing along these important messages that you are hearing every day. As the governor said, we have 220 new cases today. This brings our total to 1450. As the governor also shared, we sadly have five additional fatalities to report. We now have