Governor cuomo good morning. Pleasure to be with all of you. Pleasure to be back on long island to introduce the participants we have here today. On my farleft, dr. Jim from empire state college. To my immediate left, michael yearsg, who worked for 12 with governor mario cuomo, the best governor to serve in the history of the state of new york. Years with mario quam a mario cuomo is a long 12 years. When you worked with my father, those were dog years, 12 years, and michael basically ran the Health Care System for the state of new york and develop the Health Care System during that time. Northwell Health System, the largest hospital system, Health System in the he will be extraordinarily helpful here in dealing with this virus and more helpful as we go forward to. So i pleasure to be with him. To my left, secretary derosa. And to her right, dr. Howard zuker, the commissioner of health, who has been doing a great job. A pleasure to be here today. One of the most challenging times that this state has faced in modern history. At challenging time all across the nation. Ofot of questions, a lot anxiety, a lot of opinions out there. Everybody has an opinion. Everybody, you watch the news, talk to people, everyone has an opinion on what we should be doing. Everyone has thoughts they want to share. One of the things that makes it frustrating for my team, i say im interested in your opinion, im interested in your thoughts, but lets start with facts first, right, and then once we agree on facts, then we can get to opinions and thoughts and beliefs. But lets start with facts. And thats what ive been doing for the people of the state of new york. That me give you facts. Our total hospitalization rate is down again. You see this curve. We talked about it on the way up, which was a painful journey. Apex thatout the turned into more of a plateau, a flattening. Now we are seeing it gradually decline. We would have liked to have seen a steeper, faster decline, but this is where we are, a painfully slow decline, but its better than the numbers going the other way. You see total hospitalizations, you see it on intubations, and you see it also in the number of new cases today. This is important because while we are sing the hospitalization rate go down and you see the number of new faces new cases going down, the number of new cases is still problematic. 600 new cases yesterday. With everything we have done, still 600 new cases yesterday. Either walking in the door to hospitals or people in hospitals who are then diagnosed with covid. But that number is also going down. One of the most stubborn situations and the most distressing are the number of deaths. And that is down from where we were, but it was still 232 yesterday, which is an unimaginable and painful reality that we have to deal with. And when people talk about how good things are going and the decline in the progress, thats all true. People wereue 232 lost yesterday and that is 232 families that are suffering today. Also a caution in the number of deaths. Andow the reporters Everyone Wants to trace these numbers and document these numbers. I think we are going to find when all is said and done that the numbers are much different than we actually thought they were. The amount of information that is now coming out that changes what we believed or what we were told happens almost on a daily basis. This was a virus that started in china. Says, it week the cdc didnt come from china. It actually came from europe through the east coast. That is how it got to new york and chicago, etc. That by the time we turned off travel from china, the travel ban, the virus was already gone and it was in europe, and then he came here from europe. We didnt know at the time, so february, march, flights were landing from italy, from the u. K. , etc. , bringing the virus. We didnt know. They are now saying the virus may not have come just in february, march. The virus may have come late last year. They are doing testing in chicago now on people who passed last november and december to see if they passed from the covid virus. So i think this is all going to change over time. So a note of caution. And i think its going to be worse when the final numbers are tallied. We are also not fully documenting all the athome deaths that may be attributable to covid. So i think the reality is going to be actually worse. But there is no doubt its a time of unprecedented anxiety, stress. People want answers, they want answers now. Havent had a paycheck, dont know where their job is, dont know if they are going back to work, where they are going back to work, when they are going back to work, and they want answers now. I understand that fully. Answers,e we look for lets make sure we are all understanding the same question, right . , dothe question here is not we open or reopen society, when we reopen . We have to reopen society. Its like asking when do you start breathing. You have to breathe, right . The economy must function. People need incomes. The economy has to work, the state needs revenue. People have their lives, get out of the house come have to be able to see friends, see family. So its not a question of do we reopen. It is a question of how we reopen. That is really the question we have to grapple with and that we are dealing with in new york. Our position in new yorkanswer e reopen is by following facts and data, as opposed to emotion and politics. Right . Everyone has emotion. I want to go back to work today. I want to see my family today. I want to go to the bar and socialize with my friends today. I do, by the way. Emotion. Not about its not about political position on reopening. Its not a democratic position, republican position. There is no politics to this. Deal with facts and deal with data. You,se that to instruct even more important at a time of high emotion. Understand the emotion, appreciate the emotion, but deal in the facts and data. And you have it. Number calibrate by the of hospitalizations, the infection rate, the number of deaths, the percentage of Hospital Capacity, the percentage you are finding on Antibody Tests, the percentage found on diagnostic tests, positive and negative. You are collecting, tracing data. Ache your decisions based on the information and the data. That is what we are saying in new york. That actually works. And by the way, we know it works. When you look there is a chart today you look at what is happening in new york, ine is going down, the number of cases is going down. We have turned the corner and we are on the decline. You take new york out of the national numbers, the numbers for the rest of the nation are going up. They are going up. To me, that vindicates what we are doing here in new york, which says follow the science. Follow the data. Put the politics aside and the emotions aside. Showse are doing here results. Hospitalization rate is down, the number of deaths is down, and the number of new cases is down. And the number of new cases is down. I have been focusing on the number of new cases. Thats where our Health Professionals are focused. With everything we have done, close schools, close businesses, everybody shelter at home, all of the precautions about wearing a mask and gloves, etc. , you still have 600 new cases that walked in the door yesterday. A week before that, we some 1000 new cases every day. Where are those new cases still coming from . Because we have done everything we can to close down. How are you still generating 600 new cases every day . Where are they coming from . Lets look at the facts and data, lets understand and see what we can do. We have done over the past few days is we asked hospitals to look at the new cases coming in. Yesterday, 600 new cases. Where are those people coming from . What can we learn from those people to further target and refine our strategy . When you look at where they are coming from, they are primarily coming from downstate new york, which is not surprising. Basically equally distributed. Long island is 18 . That is a number that jumps out at you. Rockland, westchester, that is down to 11 . When you look at the racial breakdown of who is getting hospitalized, it is disproportionately minorities, africanamerican and latino. Again, in downstate new york. 62 48. R percentage male, the virus doesnt discriminate generally. And a very High Percentage of comorbidities, which is what we have been talking about and what we understand. It is not a surprise. This is a surprise. Overwhelmingly, the people were at home, where there has been a lot of speculation about this, a lot of people had opinions, a lot of people arguing where they come from and where we should be focusing. 18 of people, came from nursing homes, less than 1 from jail or prison, 2 from the Homeless Population, 2 from other concrete facilities. But 66 of the people were at home, which is shocking to us. Disproportionately older. By the way, older starts at 51 years old. Im a little sensitive on this point. But if older starts at 51 years a large numbers state,ld folks in this in this country. That whole vulnerable population being old, old is now 51 and up. So think about that. 70, 20 . 70 to 80, 19 . But 51 years old is old, ok. And i am very old. Method, weion thought maybe they were taking public transportation. We have taken special precautions on public transportation, but no, because these people were at home. 2 with car services, 9 driving their own vehicle. Only 4 were taking public transportation. 84 were at home. Were they working . No. They were retired or unemployed. Only 17 working. Are not working, not traveling, predominately downstate, predominantly minority, older, predominantly nonessential employees. Thats important. We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percentage of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work. That these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers. Thats not the case. They were predominantly at home. Justis only three days, about 100 hospitals. 1000 people. It reinforces what we have been saying, which is much of this comes down to what you do to protect yourself. Everything is closed down, government has done everything it could, society has done everything it could, now its up to you. Are you wearing a mask, doing the Hand Sanitizer . If you have younger people visiting you, may be out there and maybe less diligent with social distancing, are you staying away from older people, older starting at 51, by the way . It comes down to personal behavior. This is not a group that we can target with this information. It is really about personal behavior. Another issue we are looking at is what is happening in these hotspots, clusters, that you see popping up. It is happening across the country in meat plants, where you have a significant number of people getting infected. There is now a meat shortage in the nation. We have a hotspot in new york, upstate new york, and it is around an agricultural business. But it is not a Meat Processing plant, it is actually a greenhouse farm. And we have dozens of cases coming from the employees in this situation. What does that tell you . It is not really about meat or vegetables, there is nothing about the fact that it was a Meat Processing plant, because we have a Vegetable Processing plant. It is about worker density and large gatherings. That is the caution flag. That has been the message. It is not about poultry, meat, or vegetables. It is when you run a facility with a large number of workers in a dense environment. We learned that already in new york, when we had the new rochelle hotspot, which was the first hotspot in the nation, new rochelle westchester. The lesson was one or two people infected who had large gatherings or a dense gathering. That virus just takes off on you. And we learned that in a new rochelle, we are learning it again in Meat Processing plants and poultry Processing Plant across the nation, and we just went through it again, and we are going through it in madison and oneida county. That is something we have to watch and keep in mind. At the same time that we are going through this reopening exercise,i want to make sure we dont miss the opportunity in the moment. All arertunity is we going through this, lets learn the lessons and keep this moment in history to actually improve from where we are and build a background. I want to set the bar high and set the goal of not just everybodywhat we did, go back to where we were, i dont want to say that we spent all of this time, all of this pain, all of this suffering, all of these deaths, only to go back to where we were. Go back to a better place. How do you find a Silver Lining in this viral storm . And actually improve your situation . Island, we went through superstorm sandy, it was her. Thousands displaced. We learned and we built back better. Long island is better for having gone through hurricane sandy. How can you say that . Because it is a fact. We learned, we improved from a horrendous situation. How do we do that here that is part of what we want to do. People talk about making changes in society. Change is very hard to make. Change is hard in your own personal life. How many new years resolutions did we make as a society that are still in effect in may . I was supposed to lose five pounds, i was supposed to be running every day, forget it. One week. Maybe 10 days. Show thaty does people are ready for change at certain moments. And i believe this is one of those moments, like superstorm sandy, 9 11, after National Disasters around the country, where people say i get it and im ready to make changes. And thats what we want to do. Thats when we talk about it not just being a reopening, its about rebuilding, reimagining, and moving the state forward at this moment. And we want to do that. How do we come up with a better Transportation System . How do we have more social equity, a Better Safety system, better housing, better economy, better education, better Health Care System . We need the best minds available to take this moment to put together with the best thinking that we can find to make the best improvement. One of the lessons is in Public Health and our hospital system. We worked in an impossible situation when this started. We were told we may need 130,000 hospital beds for covid. That was the initial projections. We only have 50,000 hospital beds in the state. How do you get 50,000 Hospital Capacity . 130,000 it was impossible. By the way, we dont really have a public Health System. We have separate hospitals across the state. But they dont really function never really, they worked together on a daytoday basis, they dont share patient load, ppe, and we scrambled and made it work. How do we institutionalize that . How are we ready for the next covid or the next whatever it is . How do we use telemedicine better . How do we allocate health resources, hard in the Health Care System . Lets take the lessons we just learned and institutionalize it. We have asked Michael Dowling to do that. He was a big part of the scramble we went through. In my opinion, the most innovative. How do we take that and institutionalize it . Next time Something Like this happens, we can just open a book and it says here is what we do. And we want to thank michael for his service with that. He will be working with dr. Zucker from the department of health. Another area is education. We went through Remote Learning overnight. What happens when you close the schools . Ok, we will go to Remote Learning. What is Remote Learning . We werent really short, we had read about it, we were not really prepared to do it. We then had to do it. We implemented it. The state did a phenomenal job. Gospel god bless parents who had to figure out how to use computers, technology, zoom this and zoom that. How do we really learn those lessons. We went to bill gates, he will work with us on reimagining the education system. How do you create a testing and tracing system . What is a testing and tracing system . We never did this before. We have to take thousands of covid tests, Antibody Tests, diagnostic tests, and have an army of tracers to do this. We are doing it for the first time ever. But how do we learn and institutionalize it . We have to do this with covid, but we are not going to go through this trouble and forget it. This will happen again. Some say this virus comes back in the fall or the winter, or there will be another health emergency. Michael bloomberg has generously said he would work with us and use his philanthropy to develop that testing and tracing. On a larger scale, how do we really use new technology in the economy of tomorrow . That is the lesson we are all learning. Work from home, telemedicine, teleeducation, it is all about technology and a better use of technology. And really incorporating the lessons into that. Probably the best mind in this country, if not on the globe to visionary, a true especially in the field of technology, and that is eric sch midt, former ceo of google. Future that no one else envisioned, and developed a way to get there. We have asked him to come work with us to bring that kind of visionary aspect to government and society. Lets look at what we just went through, lets anticipate our future through that lens, and tell us how we can incorporate se lessons. He has tremendous demands on his talents and time, and he has agreed to help us head an effort to do this. We are doing this, and thank you for being with us. Thank you, governor. You have been doing an incredible job for our state and the nation. And im really pleased to help. The first priorities are focused on telehealth, Remote Learning, and broadband. We can take this terrible disaster and accelerate all of those ways we are making things much better. The solutions we have to come up with have to help people most in need. People are in different situations throughout the state. We have to consider all of them and not pi