He said they are following the white houses reopening criteria and will continue to monitor across the state. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for being here. I appreciate the public for tuning in on their television or their radio or their computer. However they happen to be watching. Or on their computer ar they happened to be watching. I have dr. Alex bu. Marshal butchfire browning who will be here to answer any questions you might have as pertains to what he has been doing with open safely and has become more apparent in a moment. The next proclamation will likely be issued on thursday and will be effective friday. We intend to leave it in place for 21 days. Which is june 5. The next time that we we intend to leave it in e today will place there and have the most recent data to look at. Like all decisions, this one involves a lot of time and work. I want to thank the department of health and dr. Billoux and his team. We wanted to make sure we were following the cdcvetted plan that was issued by the Coronavirus Task force and president trumps phased approach to reopening the country. I believe that we are striking the right balance with this plant. That balances between Public Health on the one hand and this Public Health emergency and reengaging more of the economy and getting more business is open, employers back to work, customers in the stores, restaurants, and so forth. Youre going to get more data in just a moment that is broken down in different ways from dr. Statewide, we do meet the statewide criteria from the white house based on the planning declining covid19like illnesses being and you will see in a moment that is particularly true with respect to cases in tests administered, which is one of the white houses criteria. And with respect to hospitalization. In addition, as we outlined on friday, and this too is part of the president s plan, we now have more Testing Capacity in state. And in fact, in the first week of may, the federal government wanted to resource the state with collection kits that will allow us to get to 200,000 tests per week. m sorry, per month. That would be a tall order. And so we feel much better about that as well. And that capacity we have for testing, for Contact Tracing will be in place by this friday, it greatly exceeds that which was available to us several weeks ago. The bottom line is the people of louis as a of louisiana have worked really hard since the Public Health emergency was first announced, in order to slow the spread of covid19. And i am proud and i want to thank the people of louisiana for doing that. Complying with the stayathome order and had they not, we would not have seen the progress that e have been able to see. I also want to remind everybody that until friday, the stayathome order is still in place. I mentioned that the doctor will come up in a moment. I did want to explain a little bit more about what phase i will look like. Again, we are doing this on monday. So that we have an opportunity to answer any questions throughout the week. The proclamation will be issued on thursday, effective on friday, and im encouraging people to read the product the proclamation itself because it will be a complete document that will give you links to different places that if you need to go see certain things, such as, we will still have three categories of businesses in louisiana. Those b deemed essential, the Cyber Security and Information Security agency that works in the department of Homeland Security at the national level, they are on their third edition of what constitutes essential infrastructure. We have embraced the full scope of those businesses that constitute essential infrastructure. They will continue to operate as they have without restrictions as to the number of persons that can be present and so forth. But they do have obligations, obviously, to employees and customers with respect to safety and social distancing and the use of ppe and so forth. Then you have a second category of nonessential businesses. I will get back to those in a moment. And you have a third category, and those that are closed businesses. There will be fewer of those but there will still be business types that will be closed in louisiana. For example, during phase one, tattoo parlors and such establishments, spas, unused meant parks amusement parks, children museums, bars without permits, they will remain closed. The second category, that is everything in between. If you are not essential infrastructure and you are not going to close, you are in the middle. Ust like we had a middle before, but the middle will be larger because there will be more businesses that are allowed it to open and they will include things like hair and nail salons, gyms and Fitness Centers. But there will be restrictions in place. Restrictions in place. Most notably, these businesses will operate at a maximum occupancy of 25 and must practice social distancing. Know they canwe practice social distancing when they reopen. Employees will have to wear a face mask growth phase covering. Proclamation that will us into phase one last 21 days, through june 5. The next anticipated announcement will be june 1. I also want to note that as we make decisions about things like salons and jams we received impact from the louisiana taskforces but also the associationsde about measures they put in place for the safety of their customers and employees. Cautious,they will be as they have been all along. That is why, at this time, i feel it is safe to take this , and not statewide doing it on a regional basis. I know there are a lot of different business uses and building types, and we are aware that for some, the new guidance is not as simple to apply as it may be for others, and every Business Owner needs a proclamation to understand how it will apply to them. I will remind the Business Community about opensafely. L. A. Go. Guidance toovide help establish how many people you can have inside at a certain time. Once you let just are once you register, you will be notified as guidance evolves. As we move from one phase to the next, the guidance changes. If youre trying to understand what the 25 means, note occupancy capacity is based on gross Square Footage at the particular use of your building. And 10 feet between tables. We will still encourage you to closely interact only with members of your household. If youre going out to eat on a you andnt, dining in, your household could sit at one table, but you need to be at least 10 feet from the next table so you have three feet between people so you have six feet between people. What you cannot do is say i am limited to 25 of my occupancy, i will put them all and 25 of my Square Footage. That does not work. Were trying to do this as safely as we possibly can. The capacity does include customers and employees. Obviously the Square Footage does not include outdoor patio seating. Social distancing for outdoor or patio seating will continue to be required. This is different for our businesses and different from than the way we operated before the Public Health emergency, but it is required if we will cautiously to allow our businesses to serve more people, bring in of their employees, and allow us to remain safe. The occupancy is based on science and is in with the white houses guidance that require strict social distancing protocols. Speaking of the white house, i do not believe theres any distinction between what is in the proclamation on thursday and what is in the white house guidelines. We have embraced those guidelines, so if there is a distinction to be made, it is that we moved early in some areas like the resumption of nonemergency medical procedures and surgical procedures and a couple of other areas as well. Examples ie, to the just made can be found i going la. Gov to get the information to prepare your business. With the exception of gaming establishments, no Business Owner or church owner is required to register or get approval on their plans in advance of may 15 in order to open. You do not have to go there and register with the fire marshal la. Gov in order to open. We are asking you do so if you are a business so you can get more information sent to you automatically without you having to ask for it. As we look at the latest numbers, i would ask you to keep in mind that they are typically lower on mondays because we are reporting testing that came over the weekend. Also want to point out that we had an issue with the server on friday, which is why i think we were late updating on friday as well. So the way that played out on saturday, we had a larger number of tests and positive report of positive reports than we had over the previous several days, and we are fairly certain that about half of fridays results were reported on saturday. So if you average those days out, you will see that things are pretty level overall. And that issue has been resolved. So getting to today, we have a report of 215 new cases. That was on the daily total of 4958 tests. Those 215 cases bring us to a total of 31,815. You can see that we updated the number of people who are presumed recovered. 22,608. So you have got about 9200 or so active cases among those around the state who have tested positive. These numbers do not include people who have never been tested. There is a certain percentage of people out there with covid19 who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic have not been tested. The amount of covid is certainly in addition to the cases you see on the board in front of you. Sadly, we have 29 new deaths to report, for a total of 2242. We have now conducted and reported almost 221,000 tests in the state of louisiana to date. With that, im going to yield the podium to dr. Billioux. He is going to come up and discuss the latest data. He will take questions about any of the data he presents. And then ive got the fire marshal here with additional information, should you all have any questions for him. And i will be back in a moment. Dr. Billioux . Dr. Billioux thank you, governor. Im going to walk you through some of the data that we looked at and talk a little bit more about, as we prepare for transitioning into phase one. As we did two weeks ago, the team at that apartment of health, the office of Public Health, including our epidemiologist and internal biostatistics, met with academic partners from two lane, lsu, and went over the data we have. Some of which we will show you to understand the trends we are seeing in the criteria for cases that, we are looking at for the epidemic that we are looking at. Go to the next slide. I first wanted to show where we were on the 27th. This was the slide we showed on april 27 after we had the initial discussion. And what we conveyed at that time looking at the data was that covid like illnesses, people presenting to Emergency Departments of covid as a percentage of all visits, were increasing across the state. Cases per hour assessment at the time work increasing in a few regions. Region 2, 4 and eight. And in region seven, the shreveport area, we were seeing a general plateauing in cases at that time. Most concerning to us, we saw an increase in hospitalizations over time in region two. Baton rouge, capital area, and region eight in the monroe area, as well as plateauing in what we were seeing in hospitalizations rather than a decrease in the southwest near mick charles in region five. As well as in shreveport in region seven. When we looked at the data two weeks later, what we see is generally improvement in trend. When we look at syndrome x surveillance, the covid like illnesses, we did note that the areas around alexandria and covering others, it showed a plateau in people presenting as a proportion of total emergency visits. However, overall the symptoms were down for covid like illnesses across the state. Cases. Here we saw only two regions, region six and eight in the monroe area where we saw an increase in cases just looking at actual cases reported. I will show you some examples of that in a moment, as well as a general plateauing on the state level overall and in regions two, the baton rouge area, and region nine, the north shore. And florida parishes. We will talk in a moment about why that could be, and we talked in these press conferences and other engagements about the fact that the last two weeks coincides with an increase in testing overall in the state. Our assessment as we were looking at cases, we have definitely taken into context the increase in testing. I showed you those numbers on friday. As well as the general decrease in the present of positive cases per test performed. I will show you a graphic that depicts that. In general what im saying is we did more testing and fewer of the test results that came back were positive. While we were seeing cases expand, we did think some of that was a function of having more testing in the state. As we continue to have more testing, i would expect that to be the case in multiple regions. When we turn to hospitalizations, we did see that region two, where we had previously seen an increase, is now in a decreasing trajectory, and reaching five, the southwest , where we had previously seen a plateau, has started to decrease. Region eight continues to increase on its previous trajectory. Region seven, where there have been a plateau in hospitalizations, we have seen an increase. I will take you through some graphs to show you what we are looking at on the next slide. This is what we look at the state level. The top graph is depicting the percentage of covid like illnesses to the Emergency Department as a proportion of total Emergency Department visits. You can see that certainly has a peak that comes up toward the beginning of april and has been coming down statewide. The middle chart is an epidemic curve. Here, we are depicting the change in new cases being reported as a three day running average over time. The colors depict whether that change denotes an increase or a plateau from the previous day. That is why you see color shifting. The brown color, showing your seeing an increase in growth. The purple color means you are seeing a plateau. There is not a significant change in the number of new cases reported across the days. Then where you see the light purple, maybe blue in the middle, that is where we see a sustained decline. I will note that in addition to epidemic curves, we also look at total testing being performed, we look at the number of positive tests that are being performed. This is just one way to depict how we look at cases at the state level. Here you can see that there has been this undulating growth to plateau pattern. Most recently in the context of significant increase in the amount of testing statewide. Hospitalizations may be easier to interpret as a graph. This is the threeday running average of total daily admissions to the hospital where somebody is admitted i should say people in the hospital with a diagnosis of covid19. As you can see, that has been on relatively steady, if not steep, decline. Previously, we know that the first hotspot in the state and ,he hottest spot in the state and one of the hotter spots in the country, was the greater new orleans area. What we see when we look at region one, the greater new orleans area, is really a largely good story here. We are seeing the surveillance of symptoms have been coming down steadily since the peak. We have seen the cases also coming down. Obviously some plateauing especially as we have seen some increase in testing in that region. That is one of our most robust regions. Hospitalizations, a steady decline, steeper than the overall state decline. Region one continues to have much higher to go up and much farther to go but they seem to drive a significant amount of the improvement in hospitalizations. I wanted to highlight the two regions that give us concern. We will start with region seven. The shreveport area. We see that symptomatically, we are seeing the same decrease we saw in other regions statewide, the people are presenting to Emergency Departments in region 7 as a proportion fewer covid like illnesses. When we look at cases you have this rolling plateau, may slightly decreasing trend in cases. If we look at the last 14 days or so, we think that is probably decreasing. What i think is important to point out is region seven is another region that has a fair bit of testing going on. This is in the context of fairly good testing in that area as a percent of the total population. Hospitalizations wise, you can see what we were looking at before where you have this plateau graph, but then the tail moves where there has been increasing over the last two weeks. The steady increase is definitely there. Given the numbers in the region of the population is less than region one, what is being depicted there is an increase of 44 total admissions over the last two weeks. So it does not mean that there are hundreds of people in the hospital showing up each day more and more. However, i will note we have 380 admissions between region seven and region 8 that were added net. During the time of the last two weeks. If we look at region eight, we see again a similar plot when we look at surveillance, because it is all about the volume of tests. The greater the numbers that are showing in the Emergency Department, the smoother the curve will be. In general, we see smaller numbers of people presenting to hospitals or emergency rooms. That means freight shop aircraft. But the general trend is down for symptoms. When we look at cases, especially looking at the curve, we see this increase to plateau, increase to plateau pattern. Again, we have been increasing significantly the amount of testing we have been doing. We have been doing more testing, especially in the parishes that border mississippi, and we will have more sites there, like an like in east carol and madison. We expect to have flattening of the trend in monroe. We hope we see a decrease over time. Hospitalizations, we have seen this stable increase with some movement around this trendline that shows the last 14 days. Again, just to emphasize, while the trend is increasing over the last two weeks, that is a net of four hospitalizations. People are coming and going from the hospital, being admitted and discharge. On the whole, there has been an cases over four net the last two week period. For hospitalizations, net can be absorbed by the Health System in the greater monroe area. The same as 44 being