Guest today from the Interface Council who will be speaking directly after my comments. As of today, we have confirmed 676 cases of the coronavirus, sadly, 10 people have passed away as a result of this disease. This is clearly a challenging time for San Francisco. What we have done time and time again, especially during this press conference is to reiterate is importance of staying at home. We know that a couple weekends ago we had real challenges with that. Over the past two weekends people complied and have been wonderful. We also think that weather might have played a role in that because it was rain, it wasnt as nice as it will be this weekend. I want be to remind people. It is important to really maintain our physical distance when we are out in public. We may need to run errands and take walks and we are hearing about a lot of data that indicates the early signs that San Francisco is in a decent place. The fact is, we need to be mindful that this virus is out there. We cannot get comfortable. We cannot get complacent because as well as it may seem like we are doing, as you can see, those numbers are still going up. We anticipate that they would be even higher and the worst is yet to come. I just want us to be mindful of the need to continue to follow the stay at home order and place comply. It has been almost a month. I know people are anxious and frustrated and wondering when will we get back to normal as we know it . I just want to reiterate that unfortunately now is a time for sacrifice and the sacrifice is for all of us to follow the order so that when this is over we can look back and look at, you know, the number of lives we possibly were able to save as a result of following the order. I just want to reiterate and talk about a couple things that we have planned for the coming week as well as provide you with some important updates because we know that this is a very challenging time. Not only is it challenging for people physically because of our concerns about the virus, but it is also having an impact on the Mental Health of so many people. Our First Responders are folks that we want to make sure are welltaken care of. They are working long hours under an enormous amount of stress. What i reiterated to people especially out there on the front lines working for the city, it is important we are doing everything we can to take care of the public. We have to make sure we take care of ourselves and our Mental Health. One way we are supporting the health of First Responders and other front line workers is through efforts like city test sf, the new covid19 testing facility which opened this past monday. It is not just about physical health. We need to provide the necessary Mental Health support. Today we are announcing an expansion of Mental Health resources for First Responders and City Employees. We will now be providing 24 7 oneonone counseling for any First Responder or any City Employee who is in need. If employees require longterm Mental Health counseling, they will be connected to Mental Health professionals provided by their healthcare plan. Our firefighters, police, sheriffs and 911 operators will have access to customized app on their phone to easily connect to this program and other Mental Health resources. It is not just enough to provide that support to First Responders. Our healthcare workers are under an enormous amount of pressure during this global pandemic. We need to do everything we can to support them. Today we are launching a new program called heal San Francisco to support healthcare workers throughout San Francisco. Heal San Francisco will provide free Mental Health services for public, private, nonprivate Health Care Workers with the covid19 counseling project. Licensed clinicals are volunteering time to support front line healthcare workers. Healthcare staff interested in heal San Francisco should speak with their hr department. They can help you sign up for this program. I also would like to take this opportunity to just really encourage people to take a moment to make sure that you are taking care much yourselves, taking care of your families. We know that this is having a tremendous impact on peoples Public Health but also just in general Mental Health plays an Important Role in that. We need to think about ways to be positive, to be supportive, we can be encouraging during this time because we all are going through this and we are in this together. On monday, dr. Colfax spoke to our efforts to increase capacity in our hospitals. We have increased our capacity. In fact in our intensive care unit beds we have increased our beds by 91 in our i c. U. S to 530 beds. We started with two 00 citywide. Now we are a at 5 30. Acute beds increase to 1068 beds total. While we are preparing hospitals, we know that all of our communications and communities need to access care, including communities traditionally underserved. Because we know that we cant just neglect other healthcare needs that we know people are experiencing. Yesterday we opened our first field care clinic at the Southeast Center in the bayviewhunters point community. This location will serve the surrounding community. It can serve up to 100 patients per day providing primary care, urgent care and screening for covid19. I want to be clear screening, not necessarily testing. Screening can provide an opportunity for testing. Ultimately we want be to make sure if you are not feeling good to the point where you need to go to the hospital, this is an opportunity to go to the local clinic and get the help and support that you need. Depending on the urgent care needs and extent of the hospital surge, we can mobilize up to three additional field care clinic nears existing Healthcare Centers as stand alone site. We will not just stop at bayviewhunters point, we want clinics all over the city to reduce other services in our hospitals. Field care clinics will help reduce the number of patients needing to go to the hospital, urgent care and Emergency Rooms which will help keep our hospitals focused on covid19 patients that we all know need to be served. Another need we have in some of our communities are more public toilets. A lot of people are struggling on our streets. We have fewer places to use the bathroom especially since so many locations are now closed. Starting today, our Public Works Department will be deploying the first five of 15 portable bathrooms and hand washing stations in the city. Public works with the department of homeless necessary to identify the high needs area in the tenderloin, castro andnition neighborhoods. Mission neighborhoods. These will be open 24 7 so everyone has access to a bathroom to keep hands clean to prevent the spread of this disease. I want to thank urban who will staff these for continuing the work to support public spaces. It is an incredible program. They are the folks monitoring all of our public restrooms. They e extended capacity to help us. These bathrooms are critical for making sure people have a bathroom to access and helping keep streets clean. Public works street cleaners are out there ever every day. I want to thank them for cleaning the streets, emptying the trash, thanking them to continuing to respond to 311 calls where there is illegal dumping, Power Washing sidewalks and the work they are doing every day. The hardworking men of the Public Works Department are doing everything to keep our streets as clean as possible. Thank you for your service. Yesterday we launched a new covid19 data tracker that greatly expands the amount of information we are able to provide to the public. As we said from the beginning, the decisions we are making are based off the recommendations of Public Health data and science. It is important that we try to be as transparent as we can with the information we are using to make the decisions that we are making. And that the public can see the effects of those decisions. This information is hosted by data sf website. Find it by going to data sf. Org. Dr. Colfax will provide an overview of this information and we will continue to add to this platform so that we can provide as much information as possible. I do know that people want to know what is going on, who has been impacted . People want to see the data. They want to know what is happening. Many of you know the challenges we have the Public Health have a lot to do, the ability to provide information has a lot to do with privacy lots around someones personal healthcare. As much information as we are able to share we will share that information with you. In the meantime, there are a lot of tools created out there, and one of the tools i personally started using is how we feel. It is an app that i uploaded on my phone. It tracks data and i basically log in every day. It asks how i feel and asks about my activities and locks in my zip code. This could help. John Hopkins University is facilitating this tool. It helps potentially predict based on zip code the hotspots related to the coronavirus. The more people we track and we know what is going on the better we can identify locations and figure out where there might be challenges in the future. That is just something i think will be a great tool to help us track this. I also want to just say as i mentioned in the beginning of this press conference. We know the early data has been very encouraging so far, i want to just again reiterate we are not out of the woods. We are not in a place where we can get comfortable. San francisco is, as you know, receiving praise from all over the country. People, governors, mayors and other leaders throughout the country have reached out to me personally to ask a number of questions about some of the programs and things we are implementing because we were one of the first cities in the country to move forward with the stay at home order. While i am proud of what we have done, we cant let up. We cant get comfortable or complacent. We have a long way to go, and i want to reiterate how physical distancing ourselves from people as hard as it has been is necessary. It is necessary to deal with this pandemic, and i know that a lot of time has gone by, and i know that people are starting to feel again anxious and uncertain and frustrated. I just want to remind you that this will pay off, and this too shall pass. We also know this upcoming weekend is easter sunday. Tonight we celebrate passover. For people who are religious and spiritual like myself, every year since i was a kid, easter was the holiday i looked forward to the most. It signified the end of the rainy season and it also signified a new beginning, spring, sun was coming out. We would go outside to play, get new dresses for church, and so many great things. It brings back happy memories of Easter Basket fun and family and food and tradition. I know how hard it is for people who are religious, spiritual as they celebrate this very significant time, how hard it is going to be for many of you to basically stay at home and not go to church on sunday. It is hard for me not to do that as well. I want to impress upon you this is the first time this has ever happened to any of us during this time, and there are other weighs in which we can celebrate. Many services are doing online service. I know that many pastors and a number of priests and folks in the religious community are reaching out to congregations and connecting members with other members of the congregations who may not have access to social media so they can check on their members of their congregation to make sure they get the support and conversation and prayers tha tht they need. I want to reiterate how important it is as hard as it will be to stay at home on sunday, it is necessary. It is necessary for not only your own personal health but also the health of the people that you love. Especially when you think about many members of our elderly community, those who are the most vulnerable. We want to make sure we do everything we can to protect them. The way we protect the people we love and care about is to stay home and follow this order and to continue to uplift one another with our prayers, with our good thoughts, with our phone calls, with the things that can really help get us through this very, very challenging time. We are in this together, as i said. Part of being in this together means that we take the responsibility for one another to support and uplift and look out for one another. I am just really asking so many of the leaders of our religious community to continue to do your very best to communicate to your members how important this is. I also want to just go back to something that just happened a couple weeks ago that i read in the paper about a church in Washington State where 45 members of the choir came together, they had aquir a choir rehearsal and sadly not only did the 45 members get diagnosed with covid19, two people from the choir passed away. We want you to understand that this is really why it is important that you stay at home and that you look for religious services on television and reach out to your congregation and try to make sure people who would want to and would definitely be at church this sunday during this very holy time for so many of us that that is not the case. We are here to uplift you. We are here to continue to pray for you and to support you, and we just ask that you follow the stay at home order because this is going to be so critical to the Public Health of not only you and your family members but the rest of the city. Here to talk a little bit more about the religious community and someone who has been an incredible leader and who has brought together different faiths because regardless of what faith we are part of, we are still part of religious community that puts love and puts support ahead of everything else, and we come together to offer prayers and to offer support during this very difficult time for each and every one of us. I have heard so many pastors and priests say this is the most important time as we go through this pandemic, this is when we need each other and need prayers more than anything else. There is a way to continue to do that. The Inter Faith Council has played a vital role in reaching out and pushing for that message and to make sure that people get the help and support they need. Here to speak on behalf of the inner Faith Council is the executive director, michael poppus. Thank you very much, mayor breed, for this invitation to address San Francisco today. I want to thank the mayor on behalf of the 800 religious institutions for her leadership in very early on addressing and responding to this covid virus. There is no doubt that numerous lives have been saved. We are a model for the nation as a result. I have been thinking deep in the heart about services in each of our services it is an ageold tradition. We pray for our civil authorities and those who protect us. Those words have never had more meaning than they have now. I want to thank the mayor for her leadership and, you know, we are not only just praying, but since the declaration of emergency wasnt acted and the Community Branch was activated, the San Francisco inner Faith Council works arm and arm with the city to make sure that our leadership in all of our different houses of worship are appraised of uptodate information, aggressive recommendations and public orders from the department of Public Health on what needs to happen. I want to just commend the faith leaders of San Francisco for very quickly pivoting and closing their church doors, closing their mosques and synagogues and temples and using the best that technology has to Foster Community in the midst of isolation. In addition to this, they have been reaching out personally by telephone to their congregants. This is significant because they are some of the most vulnerable citizens in our city and county. We are ambassadors of the city to help in this emergency and this Public Health crisis. I would like to say, also, that and to reiterate the importance of staying home. We are entering into the most holy days for the christian and Jewish Community but also in short time the Muslim Community which will enter raum don. The importance of worshiping virtually is something that we need to stress. The San Francisco inner Faith Council has been harvesting, compiling and making available to our greater communities a particular link where all can access online worship. That would be at sf inner Faith Council. Org. We would encourage you to go there. We would encourage you to join your communities at worship during this season. We know that this season will always be remembered in the years to come, and i just want to express my gratitude to the many faith leaders on the front lines with some of our most vulnerable residents in San Francisco.