03252020 COVID-19 Press Conference



GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for being here today, for tuning in, whether this is on radio or on TV. Obviously, this is a rapidly evolving and escalating public health emergency. We have things happening obviously here on the ground in Louisiana, but we're also following developments in Washington, DC, out of the White House, and out of the halls of Congress. So it's more important than ever that we communicate accurately and timely to get information to the public. First, I want to start by thanking President Trump for signing my request for major disaster declaration for Louisiana. I submitted this request yesterday, and it was promptly approved last night. I also want to thank our congressional delegation, because I know that they supported our request for that declaration, and that certainly includes all of them, but Senator Kennedy, who I know contacted the White House personally last night, requesting to the President that it be signed.This will speed the flow of funding to FEMA approved expenditures and make crisis counseling available. The declaration should also allow for additional resources from the federal government and provide us with more tools and equipment to treat the sick and to increase our hospital capacity. This declaration brings Louisiana into the national conversation and ensures that we are not being left out of that conversation when talking about allocating resources to hardhit areas around the country. In total? and this may have changed just before I walked in. If it did, I apologize. There are five states currently with federal major disaster deliberations: New York, California, Washington, Louisiana, and Iowa. It looks also like the asset is poised tos pass a relief package that will be immensely helpful. That language is still being ironed out, but we understand an agreement in principle is in place. We are working very hard, even right now, to get our handson that language so that we can lean as far forward as possible to identify all of the benefits that we can take advantage of, whether it's funding, flexibility, any other measures that will provide assistance to Louisiana, to Louisiana itself, to local government, to businesses and employees, you name it, we are looking for every bit of assistance that we can make available so that we can do that just as quickly as possible. We also have concerns about making sure that there is relief, especially for workers who are not employees. They may be selfemployed or they may be 1099 contract individuals, so they're not eligible for traditional unemployment benefits, and we're receiving a lot of inquiries from these individuals. We believe that there will be some assistance in this regard in the bill, but it's not certain yet what that looks like. I want to get to today's case count, which we update now every day at noon, and I will tell you the case count is very sobering. You can see it here. We now have 1795?cases in the state of Louisiana and 65 deaths that are attributable to COVID19. That is an increase of 407?cases since yesterday and, sadly, that is an increase of 19 deaths. As I understand it, there are 48 of our 64 parishes presently with a positive case of COVID, but I can assure the public, COVID is present in every single parish across the state. And so nobody should look at that map and think, oh, I live in one of the parishes that's still shows a 0. This virus has spread across the state of Louisiana. This is real, and our state and everyone in it needs to take it very seriously. It is of the utmost importance that we follow the mitigation measures that we have in place. These are measures that we know will work, but they will only work to the degree that people comply with them. And so I am urging all Louisianians again to make sure that you're doing what we've asked of you. Make sure that you are limiting contact, limiting travel, doing only essential things when you leave the house and not leaving the house more than is absolutely necessary. Follow those social distancing guidelines. So keep six feet from yourself and someone else when you just have to be in the presence of other individuals. Make sure that you continue to wash your hands with soap and water vigorously for 20?seconds, use hand sanitizer when soap and water isn't available. Control your cough. Stay home when you are sick. That remains critically important. And I do want to thank everyone across the state of Louisiana who are heeding these measures. We know that compliance is increasing, but we also know we are not where we need to be. Everyone need to do their part to fight this virus, and we're going to have to stick with these measures as long as it takes to make them pay off. We have to start flattening the curve. We haven't seen that yet. And so we have to slow the spread and extend the duration of this again so that we do not present more patients to the hospitals than we have the capacity to care for. We have all watched this play out in the previous weeks and months in other places aren't the globe, and now we're seeing it play out around the United States and right here in Louisiana. With the numbers where they are, we are already placing severe demand on our hospitals and on your personal protective equipment. You hear this quite often referred to as PPE. Let me be clear about this. Our ventilator capacity is far from okay in Louisiana. The problem isn't just that the cases are growing every day. It is that they are growing rapidly every day, and this alarming growth has a devastatingly fast impact on our resources and the ability to take care of people. You've heard me say previously that Louisiana saw the fastest growth rate in positive COVID19?cases in the first two weeks than just about anywhere else in the world. As previously mentioned also, one of the consequences of this is ventilator capacity. And, in fact, in talking to the Department of Health and the Office of Public Health, this is probably the most significant near term issue related to our capacity to treat COVID19 patients. We're not unique in this regard. You've seen other states making the same statements. And it's not all due to COVID19, by the way. There are always patients in the hospital, especially during flu season? and we are on the tail end of flu season, but it is still a significant factor in our state? and other patients in the hospital at any given time with respiratory problems that require them to be on a vent. Their treatment requires that ventilator. They require that ventilator to live. And then you add to that the increasing number of COVID patients who need ventilators, and that's why we are seeing the capacity with respect to ventilators being eroded in a way that, quite frankly, is alarming. If our growth continues, we could potentially run out of vents in the New Orleans area in the first week in April. And of course this depends upon whether the curve gets flattened or whether the trajectory stays where it is, and it also depends on our ability to procure and allocate timely, ahead of the first week in April, additional ventilators. There is a tiny bit of good news. We're actually distributing 100 ventilators today to the region 1 area around New Orleans. We do believe that over the next few days, there will be another 100 ventilators, and we think that we may have access to an additional 100 ventilators early next week. But I don't count tomorrow's and I don't count next week because we don't have them in hand. But assuming we get those ventilators, that's a total of 300 that we will have allocated, and we're going to continue to try to get more. But even if we allocate all 300 of those, we know just in region 1 we're still 600 ventilators short. And we haven't even begun to get to the Baton Rouge area and the Shreveport area, and they're going to need additional ventilator capacity as well. And with respect to ventilators, we're competing with every other state in the nation, and we're competing with many other countries across the globe as well, not just for ventilators, but that remains the case for acquisition of PPE, things like masks and gloves. And we have requested, and we have received supplies from the national stock pile and from private vendors as well. And we are grateful that we've been able to receive what we have, but, quite frankly, it is not enough. We 0 out the warehouse every day. We receive supplies, breakdown the supplies, and usually turn them around in about 24?hours. To make this happen, the National Guard, the soldiers and airmen are working extremely hard doing some terrific work for all of us, but they're making shipments as lately as 3:00 in the morning, or I guess you could say as early as 3:00 in the morning. Most of the masks that we have received up to date, and it's about 100,000 of these N95 masks, most of those have come from the strategic national stock pile. A little bit of good news. I've been in contact today with Tim cook, the CEO of apple. Apple is donating 100,000 N95 masks to the state of Louisiana. We hope to have those in our state and our warehouse so that we can allocate them very, very quickly. And I want to thank him and the generosity of the people at apple for making that possible. To say the demand is out pacing supply would be a gross understatement. As you've heard me say over and over again, our healthcare workers are heroes. They're working extremely hard under difficult circumstances in order to preserve life. And I want to thank them again, and I'm asking everyone to lift them up in prayer and do what we can to support those individuals. One of which is making sure that you're doing what we're asking you to do with respect to the mitigation measures so that we can reduce the patient count, flatten the curve, and make their lives easier, make their PPE stretch further, and so forth. I want people to know that we're doing everything that we humanly can to deal with this emergency, and I thank all of our partners at local government, and I thank all of our partners in the federal government, and certainly all of the people working at the state level as well. But our efforts really are going to be in vein to a large degree if we don't get people to do their part by following the stay at home order that I issued on Sunday and that was effective at 5:00?p.m. on Monday. I know that there are many people paying attention and abiding by those? the directions in that order, but I'm still hearing from some parts of the state where compliance is less than we would want it to be. And so I'm encouraging everybody to be a good neighbor. We know what it means to be a good neighbor to one another, because we've been doing that for a long time. And we know how to come together in times of disaster and emergency, but this one is a little different. Rather than rushing to your neighbor in order to provide assistance, you're a good neighbor when you stay away and pick up the phone and call them. You can Facetime them. You can Skype them. Check on them. And we want people to stay in contact with one another, but virtual contact, not actual physical contact. Finally, I want to address those who are filing for unemployment claims. I understand that many people are having problems resetting their passwords in order to file. If anyone needs assistance with their username and password, please email hire@lwc. with the subject password reset and include in the email your name, phone number, and the last four digits of your social security number. We're also putting information on our website, which is gov.coronavirus. As I said yesterday, blood banks are critically low in supply, so if you're healthy and are not showing any symptoms, please consider donating blood. It is safe both to donate blood and to receive blood, but we are running low. Food banks are also running low on donations, and I know a lot of you are struggling, but if you are able to make a monetary donation to a food bank, please do that. As little as a dollar can sometimes feed up to four people. So I would ask you to go to and make that donation if you can. This is a rapidly evolving situation. We will continue to update you as things happen and we have additional information to share with you. As always, I ask the people of Louisiana to join their prayers, join your prayers to mine for healing and protection. We've been through many trials together. We're going to get through this challenge as well as one Louisiana. So, with that, I'm going to take your questions. I do, as I normally do, have Dr.?Alex Billioux here from the Department of Health to address questions that may relate to testing. Yes, sir?AUDIENCE MEMBER: Governor, on the ventilator issue, can you talk more about where exactly we're looking for ventilators? You've also gotten a lot of national attention in recent days. How exactly does that help us? And you also mentioned the federal stock pile. Are we getting vents from the federal stock pile? And if so, how many. GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: I'm not aware of ventilators from the federal stock pile. I'll get that answer to you soon. We are contacting vendors? and by the way our hospitals are also trying to source ventilators from the vendors that they would normally acquire them from. We are working a list of vendors as well, and we have requested them through the federal government. And again I'll let you know whether we've gotten any from the federal government soon. But this is a very, very difficult item to find because everyone is looking for them all at the same time, and they're just in very short supply. The demand is high. We do have additional strategies to create ventilator capacity by retro fitting existing breathing devices that are not really ventilators but they can be made into ventilators by retro fitting them and by changing them, and we're identifying those devices and making sure that our hospitals are taking that into account and that we use that particular technique in order to increase our capacity as well. But this is the nearest term big issue related to capacity to render the care in our hospitals that we know that we're going to need based on current modeling. Yes, ma'am?AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'd like to ask a question about housing hospital patients. Will you guys ever consider using the royal convention center in New Orleans?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Yeah, so we have several strategies, and we're going to be making an announcement soon, because we know we need additional medical monitoring capacity. It would be like a step down unit. One of the ways that we can increase the capacity of our hospitals to deliver care to more patients is when a patient is sufficiently recovered and no longer needs to be in an acute care bed or ICU bed, that we have another place where they can go, then that frees that bed up, makes it available to someone who does need that level of services. And so we have some strategies that we are looking at. We're going to make an announcement on very, very soon. I will tell you we are giving consideration to the Morial Convention Center for this and some other places as well, and we will have more information soon on that. Yes, ma'am?AUDIENCE MEMBER: And another question is I see the numbers here, but can you elaborate on how many people may have recovered from the this virus?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Well, first of all, it would be entirely speculative for me to say that we have had one person, ten people, 100 people recovered, because it's not something that we are able to track at this time. And by the way the method or the? we're actually looking to CDC for guidance as to what criteria needs to be met by someone before we can say that they are, in fact, recovered. I don't believe any state in the nation right now is reporting data with respect to recovered individuals. And, in fact, I'm just going to ask Dr.?Billioux. He's sitting over there, and he's waiting to come up here and respond to a question. And I know that he knows more about this than I do.DR. ALEX BILLIOUX: Yeah, so as the Governor said, we're not aware of states that are able to report that at a large volume, with our entire population. We do know that people recover and that, you know, most people that have COVID are having mild illnesses. The CDC has, you know, given us recommendations on identifying people who have recovered both by testing, which these days is is not our preferred method, because we want testing to be going to finding folks who need to know their status. Rather, we're looking at symptoms. So the CDC says if your fever is completely recovered without having to take a medication to get your fever down and your symptoms are significantly improved for three days in a row, we would consider that your COVID is likely recovered. The challenge is we have to talk with individuals to get that information, and so what we're looking at is how would we as a state have that information. I think most important we want to make sure the folks in need care at the moment are where we're focusing our efforts. GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Thank you. Yes, sir?AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, maybe another question for Dr.?Billioux. About 35?percent of the fatalities are individuals that are 60 or younger. What do you make out of that when you take a look at the age ranges of the people who are dying?DR. ALEX BILLIOUX: You know, any death related to COVID is tragic. We are looking at this data not only in the state of Louisiana, but across the country. I think early on we had data from China, from Korea, more data coming from Italy. And it does look like our populations may be a little bit different. We know that the kinds of things that put somebody at risk for not doing well with COVID are not only age but also underlying medical conditions. And so when you think about the things that we're looking at? diabetes, high blood pressure, you know, other concerns to the immune system? it may be that, and we know that we have more of that in our state than potentially in some of these other populations, and that may be one of the reasons that we're seeing those ERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Yes, Melinda?AUDIENCE MEMBER: In terms of the? along the same lines as the convention center, I know the letter that you sent seeking the federal disaster declaration also talked about Louisiana buying trailers and the UL assistant President also talked about dorms as possible locations for housing people as they leave the hospital. Are those still being considered as well?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Well, we cast a wide net to take an inventory of available spaces that could be used as these medical monitoring stations, these stepdown units that we just talked about. And we wanted to find out where the inventory was, get the doctors together, get the National Guard together to figure out what would be required to stand them up as an operational stepdown unit and which would be the most desirable from a medical perspective, especially as the relates to staffing. So I will tell you, there were a lot of things looked at, including dorms, which are not being used currently on most of our campuses, or at least not to the degree that they have been in the past. But I can tell you we are no longer presently looking at dormitories. And we are presently continuing to look at hotels in various parts of the state that may be able to serve this function. It's very difficult? and I mentioned this before? when you create what is essentially a hospital but it is not connected to an existing hospital, the staffing becomes a real challenge. And staffing is even a bigger challenge if you create lots of smaller hospitals and then you have the logistical problems of getting the staffing to where they need to go but you also have to get all of the supplies, the PPE, the pharmacy, the wrap around services that you need. So as we work through this, we inevitably worked our way towards looking at a large capacity facility where we think we can build out rapidly the capacity that we need from bed space to equipment and then have a much easier but not easy time to staff as well. And so that's why we? some of the areas that we initially considered are no longer on the table. Greg?AUDIENCE MEMBER: Today has the biggest oneday spike in both cases and deaths. Is that an indication that it's still on a worst case scenario, or just more testing being done?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Well, it's both, and we need more data. And when I say both, I'm not hedging, but it's a fact that we went from about 6,000 tests in the aggregate as of yesterday to more than 11,000 today. And so we almost doubled the number of tests that had been administered. The good news is we didn't double the number of cases, but the number of cases that were new and added today were 407. Yesterday that number was 216. The day before was 335. And so until you have more data points, you don't really know. I am troubled because if you just look at this from a perspective of case growth, we're staying on that curve that we were on before. But more testing is always a good thing because the facts are whatever they are, and we hate being in the dark. And so we like having more testing, and I assume that the number of tests administered every day will continue to rise for some time, giving us a clear picture of what we're dealing with. But the trajectory of our case growth continues to be very alarming. We have not begun to flatten the curve yet, and that is the Number?1 message that I am trying to deliver to the state of Louisiana. We have a long way to go. We have to do better at our mitigation measures, and we need for those mitigation measures to start showing up in this data before we can draw an easy breath?AUDIENCE MEMBER: Governor, back on the ventilator issue. Have you guys requested ventilators from the federal government? And if so, how many? And also, what is the projection for how many people are growing to need ventilators as part of that model that you talked about in the New Orleans region?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: I am showing that we have requested about 2,000 ventilators. I am unable to tell you presently with the information I'm looking at how many of those would have been requested from the federal government via the national stock pile, how many we are trying to source from a vendor. So, Sam, I just owe you some more information on that. And I'm sorry the second question was what?AUDIENCE MEMBER: You talked about this projection that we're going to run out of ventilators in the New Orleans area. How many people do we project are going to need ventilators as underlies that prediction?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Obviously more than we have. I don't have that number with me at the moment, but I will get that information to you as well. You know, we have? we're looking at information, and it changes a little bit every day, both as to what we believe the demand is going to be and what we think the supply is going to be. Obviously the supply isn't growing anywhere near enough to make us feel comfortable, but we know that in the first week in April, we run a significant risk of not having the ventilators that we need to treat the patients who will require ventilators for proper treatment in region 1, in that area around New Orleans. But you can look at the case numbers in the Baton Rouge and Ascension area, and then go up to Caddo and Bossier, and, you know, that there's every likelihood that they're shortly behind that. So ventilators are critically important. Greg?AUDIENCE MEMBER: Outside of people's primary concerns? state in health? and the more feedback I'm still getting is they need guidance for students and their parents as far as? and I asked you this yesterday and you said the Department of Ed was working on it? but whether or not these students, if they don't go back to school, will be advanced a grade. Is there any closer to deciding on scenarios yet?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Well, they're one day closer, but I don't have any more information than that to share with people, and anything that I said right now would be more speculative than fact and I'm just not going to do that. They are working. It's going to depend on how long the schools are out, how much? if they go back this year, how much time do they have to administer tests and so forth. But I can assure you, the Department of Education, led now by Beth Scioneaux, under the direction of the BESE board, they're working on this and they're working in coordination with our school district superintendents around the state of Louisiana. In the meantime, I encourage every parent, everybody out there who has these children, who we all agree should be in school? it's unfortunate they can't be? try to keep them in engaged in things that are educational in nature. We have programming on LPB. We have distance learning. We have information that is flowing every single day through school districts to principals and teachers, and we're trying to get that information to parents. And so I encourage them to do that. We don't want? regardless of when they go back, because I can't answer that question today, we want the least amount of regression to happen with respect to these children's education in that time period. Leo, did you have a question?AUDIENCE MEMBER: Matter of fact, I do. GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Yes, sir?AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wanted to find out if since so many forecasters on Wall Street now are saying that we could be off 30?percent for GEP for the second quarter, the first down quarter in 121?quarters in almost 11?years, we are caught in the unique situation of where we are at the mercy of the cross fire between Russia and the Saudis and we're now $30 under what our budget is facing. At the same time, we're spending money that we really didn't have, are we operating out of a surplus right now? Where's the money coming from to handle this now, what, 1$20?billion to handle this?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: We are. And as you know, we had a supplemental bill spending before the legislature based on the REC meeting that where the forecast was not adopted, but it showed a current year excess. Obviously we are eroding that excess, and these expenditures are an issue, but I'm not going to stand here today and tell you we are at a deficit, because I don't believe that that's the case. Secondly, one of the things that the bill has in it that will be available within 30?days of President Trump signing it, and it still has to be passed by the Senate and the house and signed by the President, is direct aid to states. And my understanding of the language as it was when I was briefed on it, and assuming it doesn't change, is there will be some funding in there for all 50 states, and that will be very, very helpful, but they're also going to have some funding in there for hospitals. And to the degree that they can fund hospitals, then that's money that we then don't have to spend on hospitals, have to spend on other things. And then I would remind you that the spending that we're doing that is working its way through FEMA is a 75/25 split. So that's very helpful. We also know that the FMap, the percentage of the Medicaid budget that we have to pay relative to what the federal government pays, improved by 6.2?percent because of the last bill that Congress actually did pass. So there are some things that are working in our favor, as well. I can't tell you that I'm unconcerned, but right now, my biggest concern is this health emergency, and we are moving forward with everything that we know that we can and should do in order to deal with this emergency. Yes, ma'am?AUDIENCE MEMBER: I wanted to know, like, what's next with when it comes to flattening the curve? What's post projections like? And if you can answer, how will the convention centers be staffed if you were to go that route?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Again, I don't really understand your question about the curve. What comes next depends on the data point we receive on the number of positive cases relative to the amount of testing that we do, and then we plot that. As of right now, we haven't plotted a data point relative to cases that takes us off the trajectory that we've been talking about for many days now that is alarming, which is why these mitigation measures have to be successful. With respect to staffing whatever surge capacity that we create outside the existing footprint of the hospital, we have contractual relationships with entities outside of Louisiana that we are working on. We are also working with the state medical board, the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners, I think, is what it's called, and the nursing board to try to figure out if we can do some things to bring more healthcare professionals online quicker. We are doing things with medical schools. For example, we are trying to get the most recent set of medical school graduates credentialed, licensed sooner so that their residencies can start and they can be, whether they're actually in the COVID arena or nonCOVID arena, it helps. Because either way that they are deployed and employed can be very helpful. So that's what we're looking at. In the back, yes, ma'am?AUDIENCE MEMBER: We've received many phone calls and emails about people who believe their workplace is not taking the proper precaution to keep their employees safe. Where should we refer these people to, their questions?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Well, you know, first of all, I'm going to make this statement now, that there is plenty of guidance out there from the CDC and from CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is part of the department of Homeland Security, and we have been having conversations with leaders of industry in Louisiana, for example, the Oil and Gas Association, the Mid Continent Oil and Gas Association, the Chemical Association and so forth, directing them to that which could guidance and to that CISA guidance and pointing out that they can continue to operate as essential businesses, but there are ways that they have to do that in order to slow the spread of coronavirus and to protect their employees. And so we're having those conversations with those entities. And if there have been shortcomings in the way that they've been operating, I fully expect that those are going to be addressed very, very quickly, because we have pointed those out to those individuals?AUDIENCE MEMBER: As essential workers, do they get hazard pay, those essential workers?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: I'm sorry?AUDIENCE MEMBER: Are they entitled to? a lot of people were asking if they're entitled to hazard pay?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: I'm not aware of any hazard pay for private employees. That would be a function of their arrangement? their agreement with their employer?AUDIENCE MEMBER: This will be the last one. GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Yes, sir?AUDIENCE MEMBER: Governor, along the same lines, I drove around downtown this morning, and I watched workers cleaning windows, restriping pavement, and even repainting a building. I understand the CISA guidelines is pretty clear about who is allowed to work and the types of industries they belong to, but is the guidance clear enough on the work itself that should be deemed essential?GOVERNOR JON BEL EDWARDS: Well, first of all, I think the guidelines are clear. People do need to read them if they have questions. And we have three categories of businesses out there. Those that have been closed by the executive order; or those that have been allowed to be open by the executive order but with certain modifications, like our restaurants, for example, that can be open, but only for take out, for drivethru, or delivery; then you have a second category that has been deemed essential. And those businesses can continue to work. Their workers are deemed essential workers, but, again, they have CDC guidance and CISA guidelines as to how they are to function and what they are supposed to do to protect their workers in terms of social distancing and so forth. Then you have a third category of businesses that are in neither of those categories, and they get to remain open, but they have to practice social distancing too and honor the tenperson limit. And so this? we're trying to strike the right balance between allowing those essential activities to continue and make sure that people have access to nutrition and drugs and gasoline and banks and so forth, but also keep most people at home, complying with the stay at home order. And so it's not as unclear as some people would want it to be. And so, for example, we always anticipated that even a business that needs to be closed, it can go in and continue, without being open to the public, can do payroll, can clean, they can do other things that are needed for their businesses. And, quite frankly, on road construction projects, where you don't see a high density of workers who are coming into contact with one another, I think that's consistent with the guidance that we've given. Look, I want to thank y'all again for the opportunity to speak to the people of Louisiana through you all who are here in this room and those people who tuned in either on the radio or on TV. And I want to encourage you all to continue to do everything that you can to better comply with the mitigation measures that are in place through that stay at home order. I also want to encourage you to continue to join your prayers to mine for our state, and I can assure you, we are going to get through this. And it's a matter of time, but the difficulty that we have between now and then and how long it takes really is up to us. It is really up to us, and it's going to be faster, and it's going to be better if we will all engage in these mitigation measures and slow the spread and not overwhelm our medical capacity to deliver healthcare. So thank you, and we'll let you know when the next conference is. ................
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