Transcripts For CSPAN Florida Gov. DeSantis Coronavirus Brie

At a News Conference in tallahassee, florida, Governor Ron Desantis gave an update on the coronavirus and his states phased approach to reopening. This is just under an hour. Gov. Desantis good afternoon. Im here to give an update on covid19 and specifically an update on where we are with the Reemployment Program and the compensation we have been paying out and what we are going to continue to do going forward. Doing what have we been with the plan . From the beginning, protect the vulnerable, increase testing, promote social distancing, tight Health Workers and prevent introduction from outside the state. We are going to continue to be doing that. Nothing changes. The contours of that will shift a little bit. Those are still key priorities as we go forward. We are now in phase one in the state of florida. Other than our three southeastern photo counties that have had to deal with a little bit more significant epidemic. This is something where we received input from a wide crosssection of people across the state including many of our great physicians. We did have a reopen for the task force that crated a number of great recommendations. Considered that report when we devised phase one. There is going to be a lot of similarities to where we are now. Schools are going to remain on distance learning. We are going to continue to have Senior Living facilities cordoned off and protected. You do see things and some of the things like the bars are going to be remained are going to remain closed. Youre going to see elective surgeries being able to resume today. Elective does not mean that necessary. Just means when you schedule it. Because we have so much Hospital Capacity, it was not any reason to keep that prohibition in place. I think that will be good for folks. We also are now doing retail. 25 of indoor capacity. We have had a lot of retail operating. Home depot, walmart, all of those places. Many of those stories were operating with card side pickup with curbside pickup. This will allow limited capacity. Many restaurants were doing carry out and take out. Indoors at 25 capacity. This is a measured step. This is not flipping on a switch. But i think as we go, we are going to be very thoughtful about it. That is what most floridians expect. Of course, vulnerable individuals should avoid close contact with people outside the home. These are people 65 and plus with underlying medical conditions. I was at halifax hospital yesterday talking about the elective facilities. One of the doctors has treated covid patients. He had not had a single healthy individual under the age of 50 end up on a ventilator. We know this disease affects some groups more than others. When youre looking at the nursing homes, but even beyond that, we want to ensure we are doing the appropriate social distancing with those individuals. We are still no large groups throughout the state of florida. You should always be considering social distance as you are going about your work or if you are in public. We have been talking about facts versus fear. Just making sure we are datadriven, that we are focused on what is the truth and not allowing things to get carried away. Dubois county in mid april allowed recreational access to its beaches. This for some reason drew the attention of a lot of folks in the national media. They were saying this was a bad thing. Of course, you look at the photo that is used, get that lands right in that area so it looks like there are so many people crowded. You had that. You had a lot of negative things said about the people of northeast florida on the internet and in some of these articles. Things are was, going to be so bad. They are not social distancing. This is going to cause problems. This was 17 days ago. Before we talk about the facts, local media in northeast florida did a great job. They showed how the pictures were misleading. They showed how if you look at it, the chance of you acquiring it was dramatically lower than it would be at cosco. That brought some muchneeded perspective. We are now 17 days later. We should ask, what has happened . You have this frenzy. Here we are. Lets look at what is happened. Hospitalizations in eufaula duvall county. Down 20 since mid april. , down 50 alizations since mid april. Duval county, in down 32 since mid april. New case positivity. In the last two weeks, young had one time where was over 5 . There were places around this country that would kill to get to 10 . Many of the times, the cases are arer 2 of the total test coming back positive. The facts are that since this has happened, hospitalizations, declined. Has all those people were wrong. The folks in duval county behaved appropriately. I will not hold my breath on that happening. Safe, smart stepbystep is how we are going. Working with the business and medical community. Education is very important. We employment assistance. Just a little background on what has happened. The system florida has is this connect system. It was contracted for in march of 2011. They paid a firm 40 million for it. Wereoto amount of cost 77. 9 million. The contract was amended 14 different times. Issuesere a bunch of when this thing was launched. Those issues are not necessarily the same issues that caused the problem here. This is a capacity issue. That never seemed to be something people paid a lot of attention to. That is kind of where we were with this. If you look at the different cost, there is a lot of money that went into this. This is going back, i have talked to different people in the legislature. People want an accounting of why it is one thing to not have a good system if you go the cheaper whatever, but to pay that much money and then all of the problems we have had to deal with his a. B. Problem. I am going is a big problem. Im going to be directing the Inspector General to do an investigation into how the connect system was paid for, the different amendments to the contract and go through the whole thing so we get the results about that. I think that is something that is very important for the people of florida to know. We had a situation where this thing was not going to cut it. We had a light of decision points early because it was clear as we got into the end of march this thing was not going to cut it. We looked into, do you create a new website and try to do it that way . The problem with that is it would have taken 30 days for the company to survey and figure out what needed to be done. We did not have 30 days to sit around. We thought about maybe doing it by hand and having these people in. We thought about maybe you do that. The problem is is that there is so many different databases that thisto be pinged on that it would have taken months to do that. Was, you areision going to have to rebuild some of this architecture. We had to get engineers in there. Get rid of some of the bad code. Clean out a lot of the things that i clutter the system the things that cluttered the system. Obviously, we had a situation where one challenge where people could not access the system. You had times where this thing was down 50 of the time, 60, 70. At one point, it may have been down 80 of the time. People had just lost their job. They do not know when the next paycheck is coming. This created a huge source of angst with the public. We had to figure out, people need to be able to submit a claim. How that is processed they have to be able to submit a claim. There was a mobile website that was functional. We had to build an adapter to transfer data from the new mobile site to connect so that you would be able to process what people were doing. We also created a paper application because some folks did not have access to the internet anyways. To print andagree mail the applications to the state of florida. 100,000,e got over 150,000 via the paper route. We offered additional areas. Is, how do you troubleshoot it . At least let them submit the information. One of the things i was worried about when we got into this, the do thought the website was good. Their concern was about being emptyhanded. I say, you have to have people who can answer the phone. They did not have enough. They did not do it right away. , we i got john in there went to 2000 calls center agents. The training for call center folks before we made changes took them three weeks just to train one person to take phone calls. When deo came to me and said that, i said, what are you going to do . Train for three weeks . John put in 24 hour training. We were able to get people for the pin and two days for the call center. I amis just important going to that is just important. Im going to go through some of the statistics. Is you the reemployment have to search for a job purity if you lose a job under normal circumstances, you are not allowed to simply apply for reemployment. Have to show you are searching for a different job. You have to make a certain number of job searches. That takes time. You probably would not be allowed to apply for two weeks. We thought in this circumstance, we wanted to get the money out as soon as possible. We knew there were not as many jobs coming online. I suspended the work search requirements to allow people to submit the application so we could get in the system. There is also the problem of because the connect system was so faulty, people could not get up. Say, we are going to automatically recertify you for the two weeks saying you are unemployed because we understand for the next however many weeks, that is likely to continue to be the case. That took some pressure off the system that would have continued to weigh it down. That was helpful. We also added because there was such a need for capacity, we had folks from State Government driving through the night when the additional crash occurred bringing additional servers. They have a total of 72 servers so they can boost the number of concurrent users. You go back to january and february, maybe thousands would be on the site. We are in a situation where you would have 150,000 people on the site. He needed to find a way to do more capacity. The engineers added a sophisticated hardware so there systems. San this was so slow. They have been able to speeded up. They have made huge amounts of optimization to the software to be able to make the system more stable and increase its performance. That has been very difficult. We have people working through the night. What they were doing was doing at between midnight and 6 00 a. M. They were taking advantage of the weekends to make changes and focus on processing, which is something that is very important. Obviously, one challenge was, yes, we waved all of this stuff. Iter normal circumstances, would take two weeks to apply and another three weeks to get paid. Situation. A crisis we wanted to do it as quickly as possible. Suspend the waiting we. We brought in 2000 Agency Employees to supplement these efforts. That Something Like putting the application and to connect. It may be doing some of the verification. They have had an all hands on deck approach. We have never seen anything like that. I wanted to make it all hands on deck, but you have to have a workforce that would respond to a peer the state workforce responded to it. They all felt we needed to do whatever we could to get more money out. There was all of the hardware improvements to the connect system that has been done over these many weeks. Have been really significant. It has required a lot of brainpower. The people that have been involved in that have done a really good job under very difficult circumstances because this is not a simple architecture. It is a very convoluted architecture. There has been a lot of data built up over the last decade that was slowing down the system. They are getting data out. They are changing codes. I will show you the results, but i think it has been good. Problems wither getting paid is even if you submit on connect and the state processes it, it has to ping certain federal databases. You have to have a valid Social Security number. That was going through the federal Social Security check. They were doing maybe 1000 checks a day. You have hundreds and hundreds of thousands, that is not going to cut it. We were able to say, we have databases in the state of florida. They could verify this much quicker than the federal system. We brought in the Highway Safety order vehicle to verify the Social Security numbers. We will see the number of claims that have been able to move in and move out. We would not have been able to do that had we not been able to do the Highway Safety Motor Vehicle verification. That removed a bottleneck and has allowed more people to be paid. That required us to show the department of labor we have the data and we could do the proper verification. Obviously, we have had a lot of stuff. It has been the number one thing we have worked on other than health since this all started. Once we got into the situation where you started to see the economy stop, i knew there was going to be a situation where people were not going to be able to get a job. We suspended that immediately. Connect, after very little uptick, started crashing. The third week of march, you started to see way more after that. We suspended the oneweek waiting period. We did the chat bot florida jobs. Org because we wanted to get people frequently answered questions. We did bring the state employees, over 2000 additional employees, to be able to have an all hands on deck approach. We added 72 new servers, which was helpful. We had career source and local ment helping us. The mobile application online, which is a faster option for floridians. Terapril 15, secretary sa took the helm and was able to bring fruition to things we wanted to be there like an expanded call center. We were told people were hung up in the system because they could not get on to certify the weeks. I issued an executive order to suspend that. All of the Hardware Upgrades , they have had different people, engineers across the state of florida and the government, come in and different agencies to help out. A new dashboard to show the claims process. There are a lot of duplicates. You you get down from that, get to, what are the verified claims and how many have been processed is what we have been looking at. We have a lot of Call Center Staff over the last couple weeks you have been using some buildings in Florida State to do the paper applications. Highway safety as i mentioned. Uphave five call centers now and running in the state of florida for reemployment assistance. That is the most we have ever had by far. Havetate employees we surged, they have done 100,000 processing of applications. April 27, we claimed the weeks for floridians automatically. When you started getting into late april, the system was running a little better. People were claiming their weeks anyway. A lot of them were able to do that. The pandemic unemployment assistance claim application was launched april 29. That is for people who do not qualify for reemployment assistance for the federal share of the unemployment. Just got those rules recently from the federal government. That is going to be launching. We are doing phase one. Extended the work search requirements. If you could not get on for a week, you were unemployed that week. That should count in your favor. Here is how the numbers should shake out. Just over the last five years obviously this is an unprecedented spike in reemployment applications. A little bit of a spike after Hurricane Irma but nothing on this level. Even if you were to do the Great Recession, the Great Recession would be higher than Hurricane Irma, but it would not reach the weekly spike as early as covid19 has done. Claims weekly. Of if you look at the last 10 years, youre looking at under 10,000. The 58,570 we have as a weekly average in florida for 2020, that counts january and february where it was very low. If you were to look at midmarch into the present, that 58,000 would be even higher. Call center staff. Modest callvery center for the past five years. All of a sudden, a goes up to millions and millions of calls. It has gone down because the processing has gotten better. People are starting to see the money going. It is a huge spike to where the week of april 4, there were 3 million 807,000 calls to the call center. Total weekly cause, almost nothing in early march when the pandemic hit. It goes up. That beginning of april was when we were in a situation where people were looking for answers. The system was having problems. As the system has gotten better, the calls are still significant, but they have become a little less so. That is just calls per year. The entire year preceding this, this is what we have done in the past 90 and the past six or seven weeks. Just through the beginning of may, you are way above where we have been in recent years for the year. That is a big deal. The number of claims. Processing,at the these are the number of claims that have been processed in the state of florida. Thinkbably have we about 900,000 claims that need to be processed. There are a lot that are duplicate. John can explain, but if you look at every claim submitted, there people who have summative paper and connect. When you filter that, you are looking at 711,000. There are a couple thousand that need to be processed. When you see the jump you have seen in terms of the increase, that is a function of having the state employees in a group, that is a function of having major architectural changes made by engineers to the system to be able to process these claims in a way that is effective. The beginning part of this, very little. It was a slow system. A lot of times, it was not even up. They have been able to increase it. John has been a big part of that with his leadership of trying to get this thing on track. We will show you how works with the payments. If you look at those two spikes, the previous weekend before this one, there was almost 400,000 made over the weekend. Last weekend, 456,000. The other times are still getting close to 100,000. If you are doing when hundred thousand in a day, that is a pretty good clip. What is happening over the weekend, they are taking the connect down from the public. You still have the ability to apply. They are making additional upgrades as needed. We see the different bugs that are there. They just process all day long and put these checks through. The fewer people that are on the system, the quicker the processing goes. That is why you