All great policy work for the state for many years. To his right, gareth rhodes. He is not a doctor either. At the department of Financial Services but has worked with me and the state for many years and has been a great talent here. It is a pleasure to be here today. We are at syracuse state university, the upstate medical school and hospital. Had a chance to say hello to the nurses and doctors who work here. I wanted to say thank you for all the all they have done here. It has just been an extraordinary experience but we have seen the good, the bad and the ugly with this. The good is beautiful. Let me talk about some of the facts we are dealing with today. Facts are our friends, right. People want to know the facts without spin or opinion. That is what we have been giving them. Total hospitalization rate is down. Which is good news. Hospitalization is down. The number of into patients is also down. The number of covid hospitalizations per day these are new people who are newly diagnosed with covid. It is under 1000, which is good news. It is still a significant number of people. 900 people. We have 900 new infections yesterday on a threeday rolling average. You see the numbers coming down. That is good news. This is the worst news. Ab is today think the nightmare will be over but it is not. Yesterday passed away from this virus in this state. 335 families. Reducingr is basically but not at a tremendous rate. The lithic tremendous is the number of new yorkers who still pass away. Everyone is talking about reopening. You cant sustained being closed. The economy can sustain it. Individuals families cannot sustain it. We cant sustain it on a personal level. Our children cant sustain it. Reopening,k about this should not be a political discussion. Philosophicale a escutcheon or because people are protesting or some people want it and some people dont want it. Discussion onl reopening, right . Lets demystify it a little bit because in this environment it is becoming rhetorical rather than factual. We want to reopen, but we want to do it without infecting more overwhelming the Hospital System. We were at upstate medical today. Our great fear was the number of people infected would overwhelm the Hospital Capacity. That is the balance. Dont overwhelm the Hospital System. Then design that system in reopening. Factually, with data design a system that does just that and that is what government is supposed to do. Government is not about spouting political and physical and philosophical opinions. Government is about running services, designing programs that actually work for the people to address the problem. And in this situation, we can actually measure. We have data. We have facts. So, measure what is happening in society and calibrate your reopening to those measurements, right . So, were adopting a set of rules, a set of guidelines. We have studied reopening plans, all around the country. We have spoken to every expert on the globe who has been through this before, and we have come up with factual data points to guide us on reopening. First point, dont overwhelm the Hospital System. If the Hospital System in an area exceeds 70 capacity, which means you only have 30 left, or if the rate of transmission of the virus hits 1. 1, those are danger signs. We know that. Remember, Hospital Capacity. If youre at 70 on your hospitals, there is a two week lag on this virus, so if you ever hit 70 , you can expect the number to go up for the next two weeks as people who just got infected actually get ill and some of them come into the hospitals. So, 70 is a safe metric to use for your Hospital Capacity. If the transmission rate hits 1. 1, thats what they call outbreak. That means it is going to spread much, much faster. You wouldnt start reopening unless you had a transmission rate below 1. 1, really below 1. But if it hits 1. 1, that means that youre in trouble. So, those are two main data points. If you look at the state, and this state is different than most states, this state has new york city, one of the most dense urban areas on the globe, and then we have upstate new york. And if you look at our infection rate upstate new york, it is very different than the rate of downstate new york. And if you look at the rate of upstate new york, it is comparable to many states in the midwest and the west. We hear the discussion every day, well, some states are reopening because thats dont have that bad of a problem. Some of the places in upstate have a problem that is comparable to states in the midwest or the west. Much, much different than new york city. Ok, then lets come up with data points, factual points of what we have to do to reopen. So, everyone has the same opening template that were dealing with. And we have to be smart about this. Again, i know it is emotion, and i know that people are feeling emotional. But emotions cant drive a reopening process. Were talking about infection rate and Hospital Capacity. Separate the emotion from the logic. And we have to act as our logical selves here. And thats what smart means. Be smart about it dont be emotional and dont be political. Dont get pushed politically into a situation. Protesters are in front of the capitol, we better reopen. No. Im not going do that. Thats not how we make decisions. The first point is cdc set guidelines as to reopening for states. We think those cdc guidelines make sense. You have to have a 14day decline in the number of hospitalizations before you go forward. Second, identify industries that you can start reopening that will bring people back to work, get the economy going, but, you know that you can do the appropriate precautions and social distancing. So, in phase one, were talking about the construction and manufacturing industry. Those are two industries that employ a lot of people, but we believe you can put the right precautions in place and learn the lesson from where we have been. And, say to those businesses, this is not just about government, but say to the business, tell us how you are going to incorporate the lessons that we just learned. How do you incorporate social distancing . How do you incorporate fewer people in this space you so reduce density . How do you have the right ppe . How are you going to monitor . Are you going to take temperatures of everyone who walks in . Thats for businesses to decide also. Separate point, make sure that you dont have what we call, attractive nuisances, not really the right use of the term. Attractive nuisance is a legal term. But, an attractive nuisance in this context you open up a facility, or an attraction that could bring people from outside the region to you. You have all of this pentup demand in the whole tristate region. Make sure that dont open up something thats going to bring hundreds of people from the outside in. What business precautions will those individual businesses take . Watch the healthcare capacity. Your Healthcare System cannot go over 70 capacity. Again, there is a twoweek lag. If youre at 70 , bells should go off. Dont go over 70 in your icu beds. Many of the people who come in with covid, need an icu bed because it is respiratory illness. As a matter of fact, almost at the heat of this, almost every bed in a hospital turned into an icu bed. Thats why we needed the ventilators. Because, these people who get seriously ill with covid need that level of care. Remember, you have a flu season coming up in the fall. And the number of hospitalizations normally goes up in the flu season. So, anticipate that. Stockpile the equipment. We learned a lot of painful lessons here. One is, you have to have the ppe, you have to have the masks and you have to have the gown. There is an International Demand on it. So, make sure we have a stockpile of reserve of the ppe. We have to have testing. How many tests . Dr. Birx recommends 30 per 1,000 people. Different people have different numerical personals. But, i think that we start with that. Do we have enough testing sites . How long does it take to turn around a test . And then are we advertising to people, this is where you go in and this is what you do to get a test, if you think you may be infected. The whole thing with keeping that infection rate down, is find a person early who is infected, let them know it, and then, trace and then isolate. Do we have a tracing system in place . Mayor bloomberg is helping us to organize this. It has never been done before. Nobody ever heard of tracing to this extent. But, tracing is once a person says that they are positive, you trace their contacts back, you notify people, you test people. That is a whole different operation. The current recommendation is you need at least 30 tracers per 100,000 people. So, we have to have that in place. You have to have isolation facilities in place. Isolation facilities are when someone gets sick, you know that they are positive, and they dont want to go home to quarantine, because, if they go home, they could infect their family, which is what is happening now, a lot of these new cases. So, we have to have a facility where somebody who is positive, could quarantine for the two weeks, without going home. And we have to identify them now. We have to coordinate regionally, schools, tracing this all has to be coordinated on a multicounty effort. We have to reimagine telemedicine. Reimagine teleeducation. We have to have a regional control room that is monitoring all of these indicators and gives us the danger sign if we get over 70 capacity, if the infection rate pops up. We have to have one Central Source that is monitoring all these dials, that hits the danger button so you could actually slow down the reopening. And then we have to protect the respect the essential workers which is ill talk about in a moment. On businesses, they have to have social distancing, continued testing, ongoing monitoring protocols. Thats all part of the new normal and businesses are going to have to do that if they want to reopen. They are going to have to adopt the federal and the state guidelines on this issue. Today were announcing an Advisory Board that is made up of statewide business leaders, academic leaders, Civic Leaders who are advising us on just this and they have been for weeks and i want to thank them very much. Manufacturing, construction, as the first phase, businesses, thats 46,000 jobs in a place like Central New York so its major employer, and these are businesses that can adopt to the new normal in terms of their employees and in terms of the places of business and in terms of the processes that they put in place. On the healthcare capacity, again, we just lived this. We cannot be in a situation where 70 capacity is exceeded. You need at least that 30 buffer on hospital beds and you need 30 of your icu beds available if that number starts to tick up. In terms of testing, we have to have the testing regimen in place and we have to prioritize the people who get tested. Symptomatic people, individuals who came in contact with a symptomatic person, and front line and essential workers. They do have a higher right infection because they are putting themselves in harms way and we want to make sure that they have the testing so we have an early alert system. You have to have the right number of sites. Testing wont work if it is impossible to get. Testing wont work if it is too hard to get. So you have to have the right number of sites for the area that youre dealing with. The advertising is very important. It has to be available but people have to know it is available and they have to know what the symptoms are that would have them go get tested because, again, this is about people understanding it and people buying into it. This is not government orders. This is people get it. They know the facts, they know what they are supposed to do and these do it because they have been, weve communicated successfully the circumstances and the facts. But you need that testing and you need it to trace the contacts. Otherwise, you see that infection rate increase. On the tracing, the estimate is 30 tracers for every 100,000 people. So thats a data point. Thats what it means to have tracing in place. And then isolation facilities is a proportionate number of people who test positive, who say, i cant go home or i dont want to go home. I dont want to infect my family. I dont want to infect my significant other. I have enough issues without having to explain how i infected my significant other with covid, which is a valid point. So, isolation facilities are available for those people. And then the regional control room, where youre monitoring all of those metrics, youre monitoring Hospital Capacity, the rate of infection, the ppe burn rate, how businesses are complying, and it has an emergency switch that we can throw if any one of those indicators are problematic because remember we have gone through hell and back over the past 60 or so days. What we have done has been tremendous, really tremendous. What people have done, what the American People have done, what new yorkers have done, has been to save lives, literally. But we have to remain vigilant. This is not over. I know as much as we want it to be over, it is not over and we have to respect what we accomplished here. When they started this the projections for this state were 120,000 new yorkers would be infected and hospitalized. Only 20,000 were infected and hospitalized. How could they be so wrong . They were not wrong. We changed reality. The differential, the variance, is what we did. It is close down. It is wearing masks. It is all of that. We reduced the rate. We socalled flattened the curve. That meant 100,000 fewer new yorkers didnt get seriously ill, didnt go into a hospital, didnt overwhelm the Hospital System. And a age of those people who got seriously ill would have passed away. So we literally saved lives. We cant now negate everything that we accomplished. We have to do the opposite. We have to take this experience and we have to learn and grow from the experience. And we have to build back better than before. As a society and as a community we need better systems. This exposed a lot of issues, fundamental issues. We have to do a better job on teleeducation. Remote learning, sounds great but you have to have all of the equipment, people have to be trained and teachers have to be trained. We jumped into it. We have to do a better job. We have to do a better job on telemedicine. Not everybody has to show up at the doctors office. You can do a better job. We have to do a better job on our basic Public Health system. I mean when you look back the virus was in china last november and december. Last november and december. Why didnt someone suspect, well maybe the virus gets on plane last november, december and lands in the United States the next day, right. Everybody talks about global interconnection and how fast. Everybody knows, there is a virus in china. Last november, december, china says dont worry were taking care of it. Yeah, but all you need is one person to get on a plane. As it happened, one person got on plane and went from china to europe and then it went from europe to new york. The flights from china basically go to the west coast. The flights from europe basically go to the east coast. We got it through europe. But, where was the whole International Health community . Where was the whole National Host of experts, the who, the nih, the cdc . That whole alphabet soup of agencies. Where was everyone . Where was the Intelligence Community with the briefings . Saying this is in china and they have something called an airplane and you can get on an airplane and you can come to the United States. Governors dont do global pandemics, right. But, there is a whole international, national Health Community that would do that. Where are all of the experts . Where was the New York Times . Where was the wall street journal . Where was all of the bugle blowers who should say, be careful, there is a virus in china that may be in the United States. That was november and december. Were sitting here, january, february, still debating how serious this is. And again, its not a state responsibility. But, in this system, who was supposed to blow the bugle and didnt . Because, i would bank that this happens again, and is the same thing going to happen again . I hope not. So, we have to figure these things out. We also have to remember that as a society and as a community, were about government and were about systems. But even more, were about values. What makes us who we are, are our values. And thats my last point which is, point number 12, protect and respect the essential workers. I had two nightmares when this started. One, that i would put out directives on what we need to do and 19 million new yorkers would say, i havent been convinced, im not going to do this. Because look at what the directives were. Were going to close down every business. You have to stay in your home. I mean, the most disruptive Government Policies put in place. I cant even remember the last time, i cant even see in the in the history books the last time that government was more disruptive to individual life. No businesses, everybody stays home. No schools. What happens if new yorkers said, were not doing that . Were not doing that. Its too much. It is an overreaction, its political. Everything is political nowadays, right . So easy to say, well, thats just political. That was a fear, because if new yorkers did that, governmentally had no ability to enforce 19 Million People staying in their homes. Thats why the communication was so important. Give them the facts, give them the facts, give them the facts so they understand why. That worked. Second nightmare was, what if essential workers dont show up . You have to have food. You have to have transportation. The lights have to be on. Someone has to pick up the garbage. The hospitals have to run. What if the essential workers said, im not showing up. You communicated so effectively, the fear of the virus, that the essential workers say, if everybody is staying home, im staying home too. It couldve happened. I went through the