good morning everyone. We have several things to cover today so I'll get right to it. First this morning I signed an executive order extending the state of emergency for another month. As a reminder this is simply a vehicle to maintain measures that limit the spread of the virus. As we begin to vaccinate more Vermonters it's my hope we'll soon get to a place where we can begin lifting restrictions once again and then to the point where we no longer need this state of emergency at all. But until then we need everyone to continue working with us. Follow the guidance protect the most vulnerable save lives and protect our health care system from being overwhelmed. As I've said before and I'll say again now is not the time to let up and I'm hopeful Vermonters will continue to do their part. Moving to our next announcement after consultation with the Department of Health, Agency of Education and others effective January 18th we will move into phase two of our sports and recreation guidance. Several weeks ago as you might recall we entered phase one which allowed for the return of youth sports with only skills training and drills allowed. Since then we've seen no spread of the virus tied to these activities and spread within schools remains low. Phase two allows for teams to expand practices to include drills with limited contact and scrimmages. As a reminder games and scrimmages between other teams are still not allowed. Of course math will still be required at all times. This will also mean outdoor individual sports such as downhill or cross country skiing may begin in small groups. We know how important these activities are for our kids well being both for their physical and mental health. It's my hope will soon be able to allow for competitions but as we with every decision we make it will be based it will be based on the data and the advice of our experts. Today we'll also be discussing the next phase of our vaccination program and make the vaccine available to more of the general public. Again as a reminder the one a group included those who live and work in our long-term care facilities and health care workers who we need to keep for matters safe and healthy and I'm pleased to say we are nearing completion of this one a grouping. Secretary Smith will provide the details of phase two a beginning January 25th. We'll use age banding and start with those who are 75 and older. Dr. Levine will also talk about those with chronic conditions and how and when they'll be included. Again this approach is all about vaccinating those more likely to die from COVID so we can protect them as early as possible and that's why some chronic conditions will be included along with the elderly all with it with a goal of saving lives. As we've discussed many times the older you are the more vulnerable you are to severe complications and death due to the virus. This is the beginning of the pandemic about 92 percent of Vermont's COVID hospitalizations have been people over the age of 60 and over 80 percent of deaths have been those over 70. With an incredibly limited supply we must focus on these populations first. This will not only reduce the number of deaths but it will also ease the pressure on our hospitals and health care systems. We believe this is the simplest and easiest to understand as well as the most efficient and effective way to vaccinate for monitors more quickly. While this is a significant step forward it's so important for Vermonters to understand that our supply is limited so we'll take several weeks to get through each age band. We know many are anxiously waiting for their vaccines and rightfully so and we want to get every dose out just as quick as we possibly can but with so few doses available we need everyone to be patient. Finally before I turn it over to Secretary French for our weekly education update I want to talk about one of the many hardworking school employees who continued to work so hard over the past few months. Don Marabella is an icon in the South Burlington School District. He's been in public education for over 60 years and this weekend he celebrated his 90th birthday. After consulting with his doctor he still shows up to work every day serving as a student supervisor. South Burlington is celebrating Dom this week including putting up a cardboard cutout of him so that students can take pictures with him while keeping their distance. Dom understands how much our kids need school and he wanted to be there to support them. When he was asked if it was okay with being celebrated this week he said make sure to mention how appreciative I am of the students taking the COVID safety rules seriously and allowing me to feel safe coming to work even at my age. So I want to thank Dom for his incredible service to his community. I want to wish him as well a very very happy birthday. Dom is a yet another ray of kindness and true inspiration to us all. With that I'll turn it over to Secretary French. Each month we conduct a survey of our schools to measure the amount of in-person remote and hybrid learning offered to our students. We collect these data at the end of each month and today I'm going to report on the data that was collected at the end of December. The trends in these data have remained fairly stable since October. This reflects that schools continue to see low case counts among both students and staff relative to the number of cases in the general population over the same time period. In total for all grades K through 12 about 30% of our students have been in in-person. This means they're going to school every day which is our goal certainly for every student. 50% of our schools have been in hybrid which means they are in-person some days and remote on others and 20% have been fully remote. The trends are different when we break the data out by grade level. At the elementary level we see a lot more in-person instruction where 50% of our elementary schools have been operating in person. This has virtually remained unchanged each month from October through December. The trends have remained constant in the other grades as well but the amount of in-person is significantly lower. For example only about 20% of our middle school instruction has been provided through in-person each month in October through December and high school instruction is about half of that. So in summary I would observe our schools have been operating consistently over the last several months even as the cases cases of the virus have increased in all regions of the state. Also it's fair to say our elementary school students are receiving about twice the amount of in-person as our middle school students and our middle school students are receiving twice as much in-person as compared to our high school students. Our distancing requirements probably count for some of these differences. High schools for example not only have more students than our elementary schools but the distancing requirement for high schools is six feet as opposed to three feet for elementary schools. This means it's more difficult for high schools to have all their students in the building at the same time which might cause them to have to use more hybrid learning. Next I'm going to provide an update on our surveillance testing. Each week we conduct PCR surveillance testing and about 25% of our schools and each week the testing contains a geographic sample of our school so we have insight into trends statewide. Testing is voluntary for all school staff. The results of this week's surveillance testing continue to show that school staff have a much lower positivity rate than the general population. This week we tested about 2,200 staff or about 40% of our staff overall. For the 2,200 tests that we administered we only identified one positive case. This translates into a positivity rate of about 0.07% which is significantly lower than the state level positivity rate which has been hovering around 2.9%. The participation rate of 40% has also been consistent throughout the testing program which we started in mid-November. We've had some school districts with participation rates as high as 80% but some with much lower rates. For example it's not unusual to see a large group of districts with participation rates around 60% while also having one or two in the 20% range. In spite of that variability however I think we can conclude these test results are a good indicator that our schools are operating very safely. And our teachers and our school staff deserve a great deal of credit for doing their part to prevent the spread of the virus. In addition our epidemiological data continues to show little evidence of school level transmission of the virus. This means that when we do see the virus in the school it's because students and staff brought the school brought it to school from community interactions. It's still very rare that students and staff catch the virus or transmit the virus in the school itself although we have seen a small number of cases where that has occurred. This is a very remarkable achievement considering the circumstances we've been through in the last several months and these data are what give us confidence that we'll be able to return to more in-person instruction in the coming months ahead when the benefits of vaccine distributions start to take hold. That concludes my update I'll now turn it over to Secretary Smith. Thank you Secretary French and good morning. I'll start today with the progress we've made to date on vaccines then the plan going forward and then talk about what we will be what will be happening next week with the limited doses we have received. First keep in mind that Vermont is focused on using all available doses as quickly as we can and as effectively as we can to protect those most at risk of death and those who care for them. Vaccine distribution is our highest priority project the governor has been clear that our mission is to do everything that we can to vaccinate for monitors as quickly as the receipt of the vaccine doses will allow and that is our focus and we are going to meet the goals the governor set out in his inaugural address as long as as long as the supply is steady which is currently about 8,800 doses each week we will have vulnerable Vermonters vaccinated by the end of the winter and if the supply of doses increases we'll get to them faster. Since March we have designed implemented and calibrated several large-scale public facing efforts to address COVID-19 including mass testing, contact tracing, PPE and food distribution but it's important to note that vaccine distribution is the most complex one yet because it involves so many moving pieces from changing information about the number of doses the federal government is shipping each week to implementing an easy and reliable system to schedule tens hundreds of thousands of Vermonters and coordinating distribution of a highly temperature sensitive sensitive medicine that is this is a complex undertaking. We are making good progress as I said and we are appreciative of the public's patience and cooperation as we move forward like with all large rollouts there will be some bumps but we'll learn from those bumps and if we make mistakes we'll own them and every step of the way we will be focused on making the process easier smoother and faster for Vermonters but I want to stress again the major limiting factor in the speed of vaccinations is that number of doses being manufactured and shipped to the states the more doses we get the faster we can end this pandemic here's what we've accomplished so far we have administered our first dose doses of vaccine on December 15th just about a month ago and launched our program to vaccinate Vermonters in nursing home and long-term care facilities as well as our front line health workers to date we've administered nearly 35 000 doses nearly 30 000 people and all skilled nursing facilities have completed their first dose of the vaccine as you recall and I've said this before skilled nursing facilities are where our most frail and vulnerable seniors are in many cases and we're on track to these facilities are on track to receive their second dose by the end of this month 84 out of 103 residential care and 12 out of 18 assisted living will be completed facilities will be completed with their first dose by the end of next week with the plan to have all assisted living and residential living facilities getting their first dose by the end of the month our hospitals have vaccinated significant numbers of patient care staff and community-based providers including EMS and home health and hospice workers and are currently working on home health care support staff as well this work has taken tremendous effort and I want to extend my appreciation to our hospitals who have led the clinics statewide as well as the community-based providers home and health and hospice agencies EMS fire and police for all that you have done to get us to where we are today we are near nearly finished with phase 1a and we can be proud of this accomplishment even though we know there's much more work to do and our work is far from over now we are ready to transition to the next phase which is called phase two phase two is the beginning of the distribution of vaccines by age we will begin this phase the week of january 25th and we will start with those aged 75 and older again it's critical that vermoners know that we are very limited in the number of doses we receive each week and i want to show this next slide here and the reason why we are choosing 75 and above and in essence 65 and above in this in this second phase as we've shown previously the data shows that the older you are the greater you are the greater risk you are of serious illness and death from coronavirus in fact above the red line on the right you will see that the that the risk increases significantly after the age of 65 and it increases even more significantly after the age of 75 there are about 49 000 vermoners in the 75 plus age group and given our current allocation of approximately 8 to 9 000 doses per week this age group should take about six weeks to complete of course what we really need is greater quantities of vaccine in the weeks ahead so that we can speed up our efforts but we want to set appropriate expectations and communicate clearly where we are and what we expect to avoid the frustration and disappointment we've seen in other states so here's how the plan will work starting with the 75 plus age group beginning on January 25th you will be able to register online or by calling we will share the website and phone number when we get closer to the 25th along with the guidance for ensuring that we have an orderly process to take calls and get eligible vermoners their appointments as efficiently as possible i want to be i want to be very clear about this we expect that there will probably be more calls than online registration at first so we are going to need children grandchildren or other relatives to help their older loved ones use the online tool as much as possible to keep our call centers from being overwhelmed once you have an appointment it will be very important that you make every effort to keep it cancellations and unplanned no shows would cost doses to be spoiled so again when you make an appointment it is very important that you keep it please do not make an appointment if you aren't sure you will be able to keep it clinics will begin on January 27th some of these will be regional clinics set up by the state and some will be through partner hospitals providers and pharmacies our goal will be to administer every available dose each week here's what we expect regarding second doses we expect individuals to make their appointment for their second dose at the time and place you are administered your first dose we continue to follow closely how the federal government is handling allocations and we'll do everything we can to ensure we have a supply for the for the second vaccine dose while we move through the initial vaccination dose process for those who are homebound and not able to travel to a vaccine clinic the local EMS and home health agencies will partner to provide vaccines to those individuals more information on this will be available in the coming days so remember registration will not begin until the 25th it will be for Vermonters over age 75 only and you will need to use the online tool or the call center to register our preference as i said before is that everybody used the online tool Vermonters should not call their own health care providers or hospitals directly to try to get appointments again we will provide the online registration information and call in number before registration begins on the 25th before i move on i want to say again that the vaccine is in limited supply we are trying to get through this age grouping as quick as possible so that we can move on to the next group if there is more vaccine we will add capacity in vex and vaccinate quicker we have designed the system where is scalable depending on the vaccine and we can scale up fast if we get other doses of vaccine along the way we will communicate with Vermonters about the opportunities but given our current supply it will take us weeks to get through as i said about six weeks to get through the 75 plus group between now and when the next phase starts on january 25th that's today and before the 25th we must ensure we maximize the usage of available doses for next week we will grant permission to hospitals to administer any vaccines available in their inventory and not needed for phase 1a to begin vaccination of patients 75 or older who are in a hospital inpatient unit that means in the hospital and are able to return for a second vaccination and have medical clearance this will not include patients who are in the ed the emergency departments this will be a very limited number of doses but will allow us to maximize the utilization of doses for the most vulnerable and help us begin the transition to phase 2 as soon as possible again you should not call your doctor or local hospital or visit the emergency department for this doses will be in short supply and allocated to inpatients who are eligible only and it's only for this week of transition and the hospital will manage that along with the second dosage planning for these individuals finally with these plans we're working towards a less chaotic safer and ultimately faster way to administer this vaccine than what we've seen in other states after 75 we'll begin vaccinating the next age group which we expect will be vermoner's age 70 plus using the same system with adjustments based upon lessons learned from the first age grouping and then 65 plus and so on modifying the pacing of the age bands based upon dosages available given current project projections we can expect to be finished with the 65 group as i said in the beginning by the end of the winter i know this is a lot to cover believe me i know it is a lot to cover but i also know the public is very eager to learn how vaccines will roll out for them please be patient as we stand up and implement this system teams are working day and night to get this in place with the goal of creating a rapid efficient workable process that will help save more lives as i said we'll have more information in the days and weeks ahead including information about vaccine locations around the state and how to register when your age band is called now i'll turn it over to dr levine thank you secretary smith the beginning part of my comments i'll be also dwelling on vaccination and repeat a little of what you've heard provide some new information but first i'd like to just step back for a moment i know many people across the state are anxious to know when they or their loved ones will be able to get vaccinated whether it be an older parent or a grandparent someone living with a condition that means they could get very sick from covid a person who's around other people because of the nature of their work or someone at risk simply because they're black or indigenous or a person of color and believe me we've heard from many of you and we do understand your concerns i want to say that whoever you are in whatever your circumstances we want to get the vaccine to you as soon as we can and we're glad to hear from so many people that they actually do want the vaccine to protect themselves and help protect other vermoners we wish we had enough vaccine right now to give to everyone who wants it we're working on getting people the vaccines we do have as carefully and efficiently as possible as you've heard from the secretary it is a complicated process that's changing quickly and we still have a long way to go but i know that with the same patience and understanding vermoners have had throughout this pandemic this vaccine will ultimately ultimately get us all closer to life as it once was with our family friends and communities now now let you know a lot more about our plans we're anticipating there'll be lots of interest and questions this will be good news for many people but i again need to ask for your patience and help as we finalize some of the systems you've heard about so they can be rolled out as smoothly as possible so i want to reiterate the next phase of vaccination will only be open to those age 75 or older and you will not be able to make an appointment until january 25th we're not sharing the phone number to make an appointment because we're not yet scheduling appointments you'll not be able to make one by calling any other health department phone number so please hold off on calling or emailing until we provide you with this information and as i've mentioned previously please don't call your own health care provider or hospital for vaccine appointments either by waiting until we have more details to share you'll be helping our staff focus on the difficult and complex work to prepare for this next phase which of course is age 75 and older could be nearly 50 000 people alone so this process will take time it depends on any changes in our allocation of vaccine from the federal government when the allocation uh shows there's enough available will announce when the next age group will become eligible carefully making sure that we overlap the phases so we do not waste vaccine at the end of one phase that could go to individuals in the next now we've mentioned previously we're going to prioritize people with certain medical conditions for this vaccine under our current plan once we finish the group that's age 65 or older people ages 18 to 65 with medical conditions that put them at increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19 as identified by the CDC will be eligible next now the definition of severe illness is hospitalization admission to an ICU intubation or mechanical ventilation or death the conditions that put one at higher risk are current cancer chronic kidney disease COPD also known as emphysema a variety of heart conditions such as heart failure coronary artery disease or problems with the heart muscle called cardiomyopathies an immunocompromised state meaning a weakened immune system often related to an organ transplant or other immune disorders severe obesity pregnancy type two diabetes down syndrome and sickle cell disease we are also as i've told you previously very committed to addressing the historical and current factors that contribute to health disparities equity is what we term a cross-cutting consideration throughout our vaccination efforts there's no question that members of certain demographic groups have been disproportionately overrepresented in vermont's COVID-19 infection hospitalization and death rates this means we must prioritize these groups to reach our goal of preserving life and protecting those most at risk because of these increased risks and because of historical harms and the resulting mistrust of health care and public health we will ensure that black indigenous and people of color in vermont are provided not only the information but also the access they need as part of our vaccination efforts we've been working with community leaders we have listened to them and we are committed to continuing to right past wrongs we will ensure that this community gets the support they need in the language they need in the locations they need to make informed choices and to get scheduled for vaccinations and while we wait and work for the time when every vermoner has the opportunity to be vaccinated so that we're all protected and the virus is at bay we must stay committed every day to taking the actions that can keep the virus from spreading masks on faces six foot spaces uncrowded places and i urge you to take advantage of the many daily testing opportunities if you think you've been exposed if you've slipped up in one way or another if you're just worried get a test it's free it's easy and it's readily available at our test sites throughout the state go to healthvermont.gov slash covid-19 for ways to register for that now to just give a brief health update after 197 cases two days ago yesterday we reported 142 cases our positivity rate stands at 2.7 percent as we've stated previously we're watching the hospitalization rate very closely currently we have 44 people in the hospital six in an icu sadly the total number of deaths has now risen to 163 many of us never thought we would see this but i strongly suspect the next time we meet with you we will have surpassed 10 000 cases in vermont now we're following 42 outbreaks and 396 situations let's take a little deeper look at our outbreak data i want you to note first off that only 11 percent of cases currently are associated with an outbreak so either many are not part of one or we haven't found out that they are as you know driving the outbreaks for a longest period of time has been the long-term care facilities they are in light blue and as i've alluded to in previous press conferences recently they are playing a more diminishing role over the last week or two there are still plenty of outbreaks in those facilities but they are not growing either numbers within a facility or numbers of facilities which means many of the outbreak cases are related to household transmission and in the community i have seen in this more magenta or a purplish color i would call it now the county that has the highest positivity rate is adison county which is related to an outbreak but in the rest of the state the main driver of the positivity rate is really unknown or contact with a known case suggesting community transmission of infection so you can see the marked increase in the color purple as we come closer to current times i also want you to note that if we look at the very top of the curve bars here in that orange brown color that is schools and child cares so please note that there's almost no impact of schools and child cares on this outbreak data at the present time nor by and large are workplaces represented in green responsible for a large amount of the outbreak activity either so by far the largest outbreak that's going on at this point in time which now stands at 115 cases is the victory baptist church in adison county the majority of those cases though are primary cases and in multiple households who attended some of the three services or all of the three services over christmas they're not appear to be any significant secondary outbreaks i will add that church staff have been very cooperative and forthcoming and we continue to work with all communities of faith to aid them in understanding and implementation of the operating requirements as set out in our executive order the health department calls on vermonas to respond to the many illnesses in this particular faith community and in all our communities with empathy and concern knowing that this virus could impact any of our own families or neighbors we should also let this outbreak provide a teachable moment for us all showing the power of the virus to create a community health risk simply by a number of people who are asymptomatic but potentially infectious being present together engaging in joyful activities such as singing now i also get a lot of questions about ski areas most of the situations that we see at our many ski resorts are related to sporadic cases among employees in a range of positions some in ski operations others in ski schools restaurants or retail the same type of mix that we can find in other businesses besides the ski industry we are not seeing cases of transmission from skiing itself or from social activities related to skiing and finally to pick up on the theme that opened this conference today from the governor regarding youth sports since we did allow them to resume team-based skills and drills while we have a very few instances of a youth attending a practice while infectious there are no known instances of spread to teammates or even teammates being close contacts due to what i would call strong adherence to our current guidelines that's it for the opening comments and i'll turn it back to the governor thank you dr. Levine we'll now open it up to questions we have a record 31 reporters in the queue so i'm asking folks to listen to each other don't ask repeat questions keep your questions to one or two and i may have to move us along if we get stuck on somebody too long start in the room with Cali thank you governor so this is probably for secretary smith so you mentioned that we've been given about 69,800 doses and we've administered about 35,000 so that's about 50 percent i guess my first question is the cdc says that we are reporting or that we've administered 42 percent so i guess where where's that disconnect i don't know what the disconnect i mean i looked at the cdc website today we're seventh in the nation in terms of distribution i will say this i i looked at the the warehouse we have only a hundred doses in the warehouse so it means it's out for distribution the federal pharmacy program has had issues with recording what they have what they have administered for example two days ago i checked and there were 2000 that they hadn't put into the system yet in terms of registration and some of it is second dose that and you got to realize when you have second dose you can only administer that second dose on a time period so you can get the second dose and have to sit on it until that second dose is ready to be administered on the date that it is i think it's a combination of those those several things but i if you look at the cdc website in terms of how this state is doing in terms of putting vaccination that we're getting into people you can see we're some of the top we're one of the top in the nation and dr. Levine earlier you mentioned you know we've been talking about for the past couple weeks amongst even but you know getting the vaccine to marginalized communities by pop communities you know you can talk about outreach in the community leaders and that sort of thing i guess physically i mean what what does that look like i guess if you could just provide a concrete example of you know how the state plans to reach out to a lot of these communities absolutely so we have a lot of strong community ties right now through a variety of networks we have an entire health equity team at the health department the health department is part of community meetings that have community leaders both from the community of color themselves as well as from the municipal leadership we have a racial equity task force and an advisory group as well that is engaged so all of that is part of the background and part of the setting the foundation for the effort that we're going to talk about there's tremendous amount of work that's been done and it will continue to be done in an educational and messaging framework also paying careful attention to interpretation but our biggest focus now is really on making sure that the communities are comfortable with the concept and notion of vaccination that they are eager to be vaccinated and then as we get into these large groupings that we've just talked about make sure that we're engaging the members of their community who are eligible in that way and if it even requires providing vaccination opportunities within walking distance within neighborhoods as opposed to having to go to a more central facility making sure that that community has that opportunity right up front so that they can take advantage of that there's also an opportunity because we're investing a bunch of resources and will be interacting with family members because congregate living is somewhat common and there are large households being able to make sure that we can educate and involve and if necessary and because people want to vaccinate the contingent in the entire household this may be for you governor commissioner herrington but we haven't heard an update yet on how things are going with the new ppp program and how that's rolling out i believe small business can now go ahead and register and or put their applications in or am i wrong i may refer to secretary curly on this but as i think i reported on tuesday there were some entities that were allowed to move forward some banks there were select few that were allowed to move forward and this is the federal government steering the way the sba so by the end of this week we had hoped that there would be more that would be put online and now i don't know how many have have been given the go-ahead but maybe maybe secretary curly or commissioner goldstein might have that answer yeah governor you know i don't exactly how many of the smaller lenders there they're by definition lenders who have one billion or less in assets we're able to accept applications as of today so i don't know exactly how many of those are in brahmat but by tuesday all of our ppp eligible lenders will be able to accept applications and really the message we want to get out to from our businesses is that we want to make sure that you get into get your application in early so even if your particular banks may not accept applications until tuesday it's important for you to be in touch with them and be ready to get in early because it's the first come first serve and also just want to mention if some of our small businesses don't already have relationships with a lender vita is ready to help so there's a variety of ways that you can can get in there and get in there early and we really want to make sure that they they do so because we're really uncertain what if any other relief will be coming down the pipe so this is a really good chance to to jump on that today and finally governor just as we roll into the next week your advice to vermonters as far as the the weekend possible activities as well as the the activities in washington next week yeah hopefully that we have a very peaceful week we have we've been preparing here in vermont as well as sending guard troops to washington dc has been requested but my hope my sincere hope is that we're over prepared and that we won't have to use any of the resources that we have available and ready to go but but i feel good about again the briefings i receive on a daily basis about our preparedness and and hopefully again that we'll all do our part to make sure that we have a very peaceful peaceful transition of power in dc but also if there are any protests or rallies of any sort and and i'm discouraging them but if there are that they're done in a peaceful manner thank you stewart nbc five thank you um i just want to clarify given what hhs said on tuesday and what you've outlined today uh hhs and the biden people were talking about 65 plus and releasing all second dose inventories you're sticking with 75 and there are now reports that there is no second dose inventory that is now forthcoming from the federal government so is that the reason you're sticking with 75 plus well again and i may have secretary smith uh clean this up a bit but from our standpoint we just want a simple easily distinguishable procedure so that everybody understands what we're doing this is something that we planned in the beginning it's going to take us a few weeks to get through even the 75 plus and over range just due to the supply so uh if we get more supply we'll get through that band much quicker and then we'll move on to the next band so i i don't believe that that opening this up in any way we've seen what's happened in other states when they've opened it up and it's been chaotic at times uh there's a lot of over promising a lot of high expectations and we just want to make sure that we're realistic uh about what we're getting again if we get more supply if there's more vaccine that's sent to vermont we'll scale up we'll we'll put it in the arms of vermonters we're able to do that very easily so that's the beauty of the plan that we put together it's simplistic and effective steward mike smith here i just wanted to um we've based this plan on our current allocation um there you know i've seen other states that have sort of opened up on a wing and a prayer uh that there'll be more allocation coming in but we've based this plan on an allocation on both the first dose that we you know currently are having which is our current allocations about 8800 a month and uh and based on a second dose uh coming in on that so that's what our plan is based on okay um and governor do you have any initial thought about the incoming president's nearly two trillion dollar relief package unveiled last night yeah i was on a call yesterday afternoon with the national governor's association and we were briefed on some of the particulars of of the speech that governor or president elect biden had given last night all seems i mean there there are some areas of concern but but we'll see how it plays out they'll be submitted to congress and i know our congressional delegation led by senator lehi will always have have our backs in vermont so we're hopeful this would be a great news for vermont if it came to fruition and and it's much needed in a lot of different sectors the the economic need in particular for those the hospitality industry would be very beneficial for vermont new court daily express here good day i have about two questions the first one is for daycare operators and teachers i was called and asked asked this question today where did they sit in are they in phase one or are they regulated to the age bands yeah they everyone is in the age band at this point other than those with the chronic chronic conditions that we've talked about or dr louis and he talked about for another phase but right now everyone is in the age banding taking care of those who are greatest risk of dying if they contract the covid virus so that's where we're focusing okay and the second question is uh while i understand that you will have like home health care agencies and so on um being part of an outreach program to get people who are at home is also large populations of vulnerable people who do not have access or do not have a home health care agents or other people working with them uh how do you uh reach out to them proactively to make sure they know about the uh vaccine and that they're eligible yeah and we're hoping to have your help uh ed and the help of the media in describing what's available but uh but i'll let secretary smith answer the rest of it you know we have a plan uh where we can get to those in the most rural areas as well yeah ed as i said in my remarks will have um we will have clinics in every part of the state um and one of the things and those that cannot travel or are homebound we will reach out through uh either ems or in partnership with uh home health so the individuals you described i think we will be able to get through through ems thank you very much hi i have a question on the timeline for the vaccination strategy if it takes six weeks to vaccinate the 75 plus group that takes us into early march if we're going to finish everyone 65 plus before the end of winter that really only gives us a couple weeks after that to get to everyone else between 65 and 74 uh is that time frame realistic and will those age bands then overlap enough to allow that timeline to be possible secretary smith yeah cat um one of the things that we're hoping as we move forward here is that first of all you got to take some off the top in terms of uh who's been vaccinated already through long-term care facilities so that will help speed up the process second of all not everybody although we're planning for everybody but not everybody will take the vaccine we know that a high percentage of this age group takes the vaccine but not everybody takes the vaccine so we think that um you know end of uh end of winter beginning of spring is a realistic sort of time frame as we as we move forward and if another covid vaccine is approved this winter because we know there are a couple more that are in you know in stages of trials would that significantly change your planning and your timeline absolutely and and frankly cat if we've got we've designed this system to be scalable hoping that um there'll be more vaccine that will be coming either through a new vaccine that's approved or um more vaccine coming through the existing pipeline if we have um we have the ability to scale this significantly this is all based upon available back vaccine right now that's that's the game plan um you can't you you know you can't I personally can't produce vaccine we have to wait for it from the federal government so as soon as we get it and if it can scale up uh on production and delivery we can scale up here to deliver it faster are you hearing that production is going like pretty well on from these companies like they're able to keep up in terms of what we we based it as I as I told Stuart we based it upon what we're getting now in 8800 doses we based it on 8800 doses and what we're getting now so is it um you know if we get more than 8800 doses we'll speed it up and I can just add to that that the government has boldly stated that by the summertime 400 million doses of the current two vaccines will be out there available which means 200 million Americans so that if we take that as a positive indicator means allocations will rev up as these months go by got it appreciate it and again I just want to remind everyone in the beginning I think we were promised about 11 or 12 000 doses and that we would not go any lower than that and here we are at 888-8900 so we just are going to administer this and distribute this just as fast as we can get it in hi thank you just for clarification so um you're thinking Secretary Smith and by early March is when the 65 and up might start getting vaccine I think um by you know the early March is not spring but I think it's like the 15th or so but the I was uh I was thinking around between the 15th and the end of March as as what we're looking at beginning of April okay all right thank you can I just clarify that I mean with the uh that would be from 65 up right okay okay thank you Aaron are you concerned about lifting the restrictions on um you know increased school contact sports with the case rates throughout the state rising I mean I understand that there haven't been any cases traced to those sports so far but health experts say that uh you know incorporating more contact into school sports will significantly increase the risk of transmission um I don't yeah Aaron I don't know uh which health experts you've been talking to but the ones I consult with um have felt comfortable going to this next phase that's why we did it if there was any discomfort amongst our health experts we wouldn't have gone to the second phase I might ask Dr. Levine to comment further on that we don't actually know that cases are rising in the state right now I mean kind of are plateauing but we'll see which direction things go but regarding move to phase two of what it's called for the school sports um that does allow you're right a little more contact but it's not a dramatic change compared to where the students have been thus far and it's certainly a place to see how things go for several weeks before we would advance things any further using our kind of policy of making sure we at least go through one if not two incubation periods of the virus between any moves that we would make um if we hadn't seen such exemplary safety and what's going on right now obviously that would give us pause okay um also just a quick clarification I when you were listing the uh conditions that might qualify for priority for the vaccine I didn't hear smoking which I know is on the CPC list is that intended to be one of the conditions that would qualify you in Vermont for a higher priority so in Vermont we've chosen to not include smoking on the list um not not that and it's not really a condition um we've chosen to go mostly with the conditions that predispose one to a more serious outcome okay thank you what should people in border areas like the upper valley or southern Vermont do about a vaccine should they if their doctor is in New Hampshire per se should they be trying to attend a Vermont vaccination clinic or a pharmacy in Vermont and do you have to prove residency to get a vaccine in Vermont Secretary Smith you will have to prove residency in Vermont to get a vaccine in Vermont there are special special instances it's if your provider is in Vermont then we will allow that to happen but in most cases and there are there you know that would be an exception but in most cases you will have to be a Vermont resident to get vaccinated in Vermont so if someone lives in the upper valley but there are doctors in New Hampshire they should still seek to get a vaccine in Vermont I would okay yeah and by the way unless they can get it in New Hampshire go ahead okay thank you scene reports of businesses boarding up storefronts as a cautionary measure um for the week ahead i'm wondering if you guys have heard any of the sorts in Vermont and if you feel that's necessary necessary action to take yeah i'm i'm not aware of any in Vermont obviously we're going to be watching and monitoring the situation uh particularly uh next week when the inauguration takes place but uh but this point in time we're not seeing anything that I know of commissioner shirling anything you want to add to that yeah commissioner shirling is shaking his head no he has heard nothing of that sword either okay thank you hi there so I had a couple of quick questions um with is there any concern about call volume uh in any sort of bottlenecks once the phone number is released um and plans to address that and also I um couldn't help but notice uh on the list it didn't sound like asthma was one of the conditions and I was just curious uh why that would be um I'll let Secretary Smith answer the first one Dr. Levine the second one but uh but again from our perspective we are concerned about call volume that's why we would we would like everyone uh to uh go online if possible if they're not capable of doing it themselves uh to maybe have a family member assist them uh that would be the most expeditious way to do it and cut down on the number of calls that we expect will be flooding in uh that's part of uh we want to ramp up we do have an outside entity that is helping us monitor the phones and and to uh to administer the registration program but but again um we have advocate for people to go uh to go online uh that's the best way to do this if you possibly can Secretary Smith okay uh second question so the second question had to do with asthma so to be very clear chronic obstructive pulmonary disease COPD emphysema is on the list of conditions that will put you at increased risk of a more serious outcome if you have COVID I'm really actually pleased to say that asthma is not on that list it is on a list of conditions that could possibly put you at increased risk and the reason it's framed that way is the scientific evidence and database it's very supportive of COPD it really doesn't support currently asthma we want asthmatics to be careful obviously we want them to maintain their maintenance therapy that they would always use to prevent any exacerbations of asthma during a time of getting a viral infection of any sort but it's not on the list of conditions that is evidence-based at this point Hi I had just a quick clarification um from I wanted to ask Dr. Levine about what you were talking when you Calvin asked you about prioritizing communities of color you mentioned sort of um the congregate situations that that some folks are living in and that you know someone at household getting vaccinated I just I just wanted to clarify were you saying that people in the congregate living situations like that would also be able to get vaccinated in addition to the people in the age band or just wondering if you could clarify that comment from earlier yes we think that that could be most efficient uh at that time so um that's that's a definite possibility for people in those households um I think I got to just have your question you broke up a little in the beginning but the answer yeah the answer is yes if that's what your question was yeah I guess I'm wondering if someone 75 in one of those households and they're living with 10 other people if those other people in the household would be able to be vaccinated at that time as well yeah and that's one of the strategies that we're exploring to see if we can make that happen because again uh all of the community resources will be going to that interaction at that time anyways and then I think this would be for every secretary Smith um you mentioned you really want people to keep the appointment so the vaccines don't spoil um what is the sort of backup plan if uh people don't make those appointments because inevitably I think that is going to happen do you have a plan to make sure the vaccines get used sure we're working on what is called a callback system that if somebody's work if we're we're gonna make sure we're gonna have a list of people that are within 30 minutes and if there is a vacant spot that we would call that person or call off that list to bring in people in in case there's a vacancy you know most of this vaccine can wait to the end of the day can't wait forever but it can wait for the end of the day we can we can perhaps do something at that point okay and do you sort of have a do you have a I guess I would call like an acceptable loss percentage like a number of vaccines that that you'd be willing to let spoil before reassessing the plan no we we we're we're trying to make sure that there's no spoilage along the way um that's why we have this sort of a backup plan to the backup plan uh in case there's no shows along the way um the that is um what we're looking at we're also looking at if if we if EMS has a list of people that it has available and if we can move up a scheduled visit on a homebound person that's probably what we would do okay thank you uh thank you uh can you hear me we can okay thank you uh governor I just have one question uh you referenced uh earlier in responding to uh question about president elect biden's uh proposed package that he announced last evening you referenced the state hospitality and lodging sector as having been particularly hard hit I'm wondering what your thoughts are about any funding that may flow from the second stimulus package that was passed by congress uh in uh in december in terms of what your situation might do to collaborate with the legislature to get more immediate emergency funding to the lodging sector yeah unfortunately there wasn't any direct payments that we can make through that economic package most of that money for businesses will be through the ppp we're trying to engage trying to make sure that all these businesses are prepared to to use that that venue to satisfy their needs so that's why we focus so much on that and want people to be prepared we want them to make sure they get to the front of the line because it is first come first serve and fill out their applications now even if they can't submit them to the bank fill them out now in anticipation of their their bank being approved or we'll find them another institution that will uh secretary curly is there anything that I missed on that no governor you're right I mean as as you said we don't have to the discretionary money to spend at the state level like we did in the in the last federal relief package so just getting in the end the the nake code 72 which is which is food and accommodations definitely has the ability I can't say it off the top of my head but they have the ability to get a little bit more a larger loan I believe so hopefully that will really address some of the pain that they continue to feel okay thank you very much governor and secretary currently appreciate it thank you hi this is Colin planter filling in for Andrea I was wondering if you could give us a better picture of what these vaccines clinics will clinics will look like as far as how many there might be and where they might be located I know you gave some broad examples but are they going to be distributed throughout the state just a little more info on that here Colin this is Mike Smith you'll you'll probably see him along the district the health district line so about 14 of them uh distributed around the state in terms of what they what they will look like it's pretty much what you will see in a testing you'll have a receptionist you'll have somebody that will check you in you'll have somebody that will make sure it's you and then you'll have somebody that administers your shot and then you'll have somebody that visually observes you for 15 minutes or more before you leave so it won't be in the district offices we are we are making sure we are getting places where there's plenty of parking and plenty of space thanks and then my only other question is as far as the software phone appointment system I mean how confident are you that this is not going to be a mess that we've seen in these other states I know you're stressing that people should use the online system but I will say that we have heard complaints about the usability of even the testing appointment system and so I just like to get a little more on that how confident are you that we're not going to be back here in a few weeks talking about bottlenecks that we've seen for example with the unemployment system yeah I mean one of the things that we have done is that we've taking just remember we we roll through about 30 35,000 tests a week on average it was way up over 35,000 last week on a seven day period so we're fairly familiar of large amounts of people coming through one of our one of our platforms in terms of testing this is based on the testing it should be simpler than the testing platform that we have but we're fairly familiar with this platform in terms of its base capability and we've used it before with our testing as you know testing is centralized you come into one database to register for all 19 clinics around the state or a pop-up if the health department is having a pop-up so we're fairly familiar with this platform and as it does in testing it tells you the location it tells you the time it gives you the slot so we're fairly familiar with this we think we're we have a high degree of confidence in this. Colin I just want to add to that I think we need to reset the expectations here from my perspective we are concerned about every time we open up a new band there will be a run on the system there will be because everyone's anxious to sign up so we expect that there will be a bit of a bottleneck in the beginning but that's why we're advocating for people to go to the online system first and not call in it's the call ins that's going to be the issue even though we've utilizing an outside entity to do the reservations I don't know if we're you know we have how many callers from the call center 200 reservationists so to speak now and we're hoping to ramp that up further we think to 400 I believe is the number but but again you know we are concerned about that initial run on on the number of people who want to get in and get their reservations made. Thank you Governor. Secretary French, Commissioner Levine said today he was unaware of any problem with the COVID issues with high school sports just wondering what the education agency knows about a possible outbreak or problem in Chittenden County that resulted in when high school is stopping basketball practices for two weeks. Yeah thanks Mike I'm not aware of the specific situation in our guidance you know we put a hold on practice per se schools have been confined to doing sort of low-level skill drills and so forth so I you know to echo on the Governor's previous comment Dr Levine's observation I feel comfortable with this next step our schools have demonstrated the capacity you know to manage their operations in spite of the challenging context in which they're they're operating but I'm unfamiliar with the specific case that you're describing. I may call on practices but skills thrilled but basically that's multi-side line. My other question for the Governor maybe you've always sided with transparency get the health department last month for first course and no longer makes a list of COVID outbreaks readily available and now the public has to go through formal public records requests and the law is pretty clear that it's supposed to be a proper response yet we've been waiting two weeks for the list of outbreaks told Tuesday the list was forthcoming still haven't gotten it and the health department does pose specific restaurant inspection scores and the problems and everything so is there anything you can do as governor to restore transparency and help for monitors learn about outbreaks in their areas especially in light of numbers that are skyrocketing? Yeah I wouldn't use the term skyrocketing in some respects I mean we're getting to this new normal that we've seen across the region but from my standpoint we're trying to give all the information we can within the letter of the law we want to make sure that but I but I share your frustration and not getting the information as quick as as possible so that's something that I can I can look into and be happy to to make sure that when you make the requests that we we expedite that as as quickly as we possibly can so I I will look into that. Okay thank you I just I was just wondering because it's supposed to be promptly as you know the response and they haven't been prompt do you get a list yourself ever have you seen any lists at any point or do they just give you numbers and you have you're unaware that what places have had them as governor? No I I see a list it's confidential but I see it so it's a matter of redacting for them um well it'd be heavy redacting I mean that'd be back to numbers again. That's all we're looking for. We're going to we still have more than half our list left so we're going to move we're going to move to Andrew. No thank you very much. Thank you Mike. Thank you. Andrew Keever, G-NAT TV. Hello. Go ahead Andrew. I had a question about PCR testing. I've been hearing from a couple of our viewers that getting a PCR test down here in the in the Bennington County area has been not as automatic as they would have liked and I guess I was just wondering if there were any plans in place to expand the number of testing sites for PCR tests and and also sort of the follow-up was one one person told me that they had they were asked to pay two hundred dollars for a test at a local private clinic and I just wondered if that was like a typical price or or was that yeah unusual. Again I would I would say I don't want to speak for the entity but if you sign up on our website on the health department website they're free so I would advocate go there first. We have anywhere from 17 to 19 fixed sites on a daily basis. So what I've heard from people is that it's fairly easy to get in line get get a test scheduled. So please if you can get your viewers or your readers to go to the the health department website and sign up there because they're free and and you should be able to get in fairly quick. So Dr. Levine anything you can add to that? Yeah so everything the governor said is completely true. In addition you know with our partnership with Southwest Vermont Medical Center that's actually a gem if I could call it that and things have gone very smoothly so I'd wonder what went on with the particular person you were mentioning because that's definitely not been the rule by any means. Okay already well thank you I appreciate your time and your help thank you very much. Good afternoon. Hi there I think my first question is for Secretary French regarding schools. You came really close in your report Secretary French when you were talking about the percentages of students in the different grade levels attending in person right now and when you started mentioning the distancing I was hoping you were going to mention this detail as well but in our school district we're one of those where students from grade seven and up are only in school in person two days a week because they say that the distancing requirements and the space available doesn't allow for them to have everybody there at the same time. People were pretty excited to hear about the goal to try to get students in school close to full time later this spring but we're wondering just what what is going to have to give in order to make that happen how do we get there from here will the distancing guidance get tweaked will the state look at tense or something to have more outside classes how do we how do we bridge that? Yeah that's a great question you know my first observation as you mentioned your schools of seven to twelve school which is one of many configurations that we have across the state so you know most people are familiar with the traditional nine through twelve high school we have several k through twelve high schools I was the principal of one and then we have schools like seven through twelve so you can imagine the pretty diverse landscape in terms of we start thinking about things like distancing so I would I would make the observation that our guidance has always been reflective of our specific context in the state so arguably we achieved Vermonters working together some of the best conditions for operating schools back in September through the sacrifice and hard work of all Vermonters and at the same time however we built very restrictive guidance so we we implemented mass and so forth and distancing requirements so we were very aggressive in all those regards and I think the other element of that is that districts have learned how to execute on those plans because all the time so you know I think you know our guidance has always been a reflection of the conditions that we operate in so I think you're right and this is kind of where I was going with my comments our our our guidance will continue to evolve as the conditions evolve we certainly expect the conditions to improve feeling more confident about that every day as we see the trend in the data from the holiday period so certainly with the advent of vaccine with the warmer weather coming our way our our conditions will most likely improve and therefore our guidance will will adapt to that and we just want to signal at this point that that sort of starts to come together sometime after April vacation and it's not as simple as pivoting the system overnight we have to prepare for that so that's why we're sort of signaling that now so we can start making the preparations okay thank you we'll be we'll be watching for that I suppose we have a one school at five to eight with two different sets of requirements and kids attending different numbers of days a week so it's it's confusing but that's good to hear I think the other question that I have regarding case data it might be for Secretary Smith or Dr. Levine I noticed today the town by town map that gets released on Fridays was revised so that it's now the table that's with it is now sorted in alphabetical order instead of by case number order and it makes me wonder if there's a possibility of sorting the data in a way that reveals that 911 addresses not that addresses but sort of sorted by the towns that people have their 911 address rather than their mailing address I'm starting to hear just frustration from communities near waterbury that don't have their own post offices or zip codes and people who live in nearby communities aren't getting their cases logged based on their town they're basically getting logged based on the town where their zip code is so there's several communities for example in our school district that have zero cases even though people know that there are people with cases there and they get sort of logged with other towns and it seems like they're falling through the cracks because I talked to one select board member who said this is really frustrating it's hard to tell people that they need to be minding the guidance if they look at the map and they say well there's we don't have any cases in our town I'm just wondering if that's a data a data manipulation glitch or or possibility where it could be sorted more specifically if you look at the map there's a lot of towns with zeros and I wonder if it's really reflecting of what the reality is Lisa my agency holds her breath every time I come to the podium because they're so afraid I'm going to make policy at the podium I really let me do this let me delve into that issue I don't know what the complications are and before I promise anything that that the that will get me and you into hot water let me find out what's what's going on thank you because I have had numerous emails from various people from the towns that are zeros and they are frustrated because they they don't feel like they're getting an accurate picture of what the situation is in their community and that that would be helpful information for people to have and I also want to just go back to Colin at seven days so I don't get in trouble with my boss I thought he was referring to the online system not the total system I am worried about Collins we have we will have Collins as the governor said you know we are trying to get people to register online but we understand that some people can't and we do we will have a call center up and running but you know if everybody calls at once that will be problematic so as I said in my remarks please if you're a child grandchild or friend of somebody that maybe that may have difficulty registering online please help them please help them register online it will make things a lot easier and Dr. Levine did you have anything more to say about the question I just wanted to make a quick point first of all our health surveillance and statistics will have heard what you just said and we'll have a much better insight into why that is or is not possible and how to make it effective but the point I really want to make is what you said about looking at zero and saying why do we have to do all this I don't want anybody to look at numbers at all if there's a message that needs to get across today it is this is a every day of the year exercise right now for all of us to do everything that we can do to prevent transmitting virus from one of us to another especially to another who may be more susceptible for a severe and more serious outcome so whether you have no cases recorded in your zip code or in your town or whether you have 10 cases recorded in your zip code in your town you still need to do the same exact behaviors it's not like we rev it up a little because we see a number go one way or the other we have to be constantly vigilant and that's why when the governor says we can't drop our guard that's what he means thank you thank you very much can you hear me oh sorry can you hear me but sorry about that go ahead um I was wondering oh thank you governor I was wondering if a commissioner shirling could just give an update I know we've you know been hearing throughout the week in regard to what could happen in the coming days potentially on sunday and on wednesday we've heard that there are possibly no known threats at this time didn't know if you can just give a brief update um for Vermonters about you know if there are any new developments if we if we can expect any on protest at the state house or anything in general to that effect sure happy to give a brief update Mike shirling commissioner public safety no again no known threats here in Vermont certainly extra vigilance today through at least the 20th as we continue to monitor national threat streams as I mentioned on a couple of different calls yesterday you'll see an altered presence in Montpelier in particular but also in some other areas of Vermont with some more high visibility I think if you look next door to the state house right now that is on display and we continue to ask that Vermonters engage in the the see something say something campaign if you see anything that looks like a threat or looks like it's off please let your local law enforcement know or hit our tip line and continue to call for folks to to really think hard about whether any kind of demonstration over the next few days is is prudent under the circumstances and going off that my next question are you there is a facebook event that appears to be for a demonstration or a rally on sunday I don't know if you're aware of that and if you have a message to those organizers who may still be going through with having this event yes we are aware of a couple of facebook posts around potential gatherings and you know the message stays consistent since since tuesday you know we we certainly recognize folks rights to to exercise their first amendment rights on a variety of topics just what urged them to take into account everything that's going on now the heightened anxiety on the part of the nation and certainly here in Vermont and think about whether this is the right timing for those demonstrations protests events or gatherings great thank you very much as well if i could go a little bit further with that there was a request to use the state house lawn by a group this sunday and more of a family atmosphere and and having food and so forth and bring your families we have reached out to them buildings and general services has reached back out to them and to convince them to pick another day that this isn't the time we we don't we aren't encouraging anyone to come to the state house lawn on sunday we understand that you're right to do so but we believe in the in the to keep everyone safe that that this isn't the day to do it so we'd advocate for another day okay we'll move to Joe at the Barton Chronicle Governor a while back you faced some criticism um or at least questions in this forum about your use of executive orders to implement the measures you thought proper for uh protecting from others against covid and one of the things that you said at the time was that the alternative was having to go to the legislature all the time and it was impossible to see things done in a timely fashion i see now though that you have issued an executive order reorganizing the natural resources board um a measure that in large part was uh in a bill that was defeated in the 2020 session of the legislature um i see that the legislature has the option of refusing to allow you to do it but given that the measure would go into effect on july 1st isn't there enough time to take the normal route of asking the legislature for the changes that you want yeah let me clear a couple things up first of all at the start of any biennium this is the opportunity this is what's in is is our ability to time to restructure government so this is done frequently we did it with the liquor lottery board before we did it developing the agency of digital services in 2017 so this is common place and this was not part of a previous bill that the that the legislature didn't move forward or didn't uh that turned down in fact the nrb was in a house version and they actually moved it forward so we think there's there's um there's some common interest here amongst the legislature we're going to work with them because we think this is a strategic move it isn't it isn't the answer for modernization the total answer for modernization of act 250 we have a lot of other things we want to do within act 250 and we'll move through the regular process to do so there be there will be a bill introduced or many bills introduced along those lines but this is a restructuring of government so this is in in the realm of of our ability to do so but we only have a short window to do it we had to do it by today as a matter of fact so this is this is something that's commonplace so this is now the ordinary it might even take some of the burden off from the legislature in some respects uh because as you might recall they have said they want to focus rightfully so on covet uh covet related issues and uh and I agree with that but again this is a a short window we have the ability to do it we think this makes a lot of sense and we'll we'll ask for their approval if they don't then we'll we'll take a different route cool and thank you I think this question might be for secretary smith I actually have a question from a reader in real time someone who's going to be eligible to register for the vaccine on the 25th and wanted to know is if they go through the website will they be able to schedule for um for husband and wife to get their appointment at the same time uh so it's kind of a practical question about what our family members can we'll be allowed for that let me just ask a clarifying question is the is the spouse over 75 yes yes i believe so yes they will um if they weren't we'll we'll we'll take that to the next step then if they weren't both over 75 then what is that does that necessarily have to be or we are are we being very strict about that can you just sort of repeat it i mean the way that it would work is it the way that it would work is similar to the testing is that you would put in two names into that registration process but you could register at at the same time am i making myself clear on that yes yes okay that's it um definitely did you want to clear something up just want to excuse me just wanted to clear up when we were talking about uh health equity and the BIPOC population um individuals in the same household so when you look at what we call a community vulnerability index it really advances the cause of health equity right up front because it shows a lot of the factors that put certain populations at higher risk than others for more adverse outcomes from COVID-19 in particular and congregate living is certainly one of those that factors in with abundant other factors that affect the BIPOC population and make their risk elevated so that when i was referring to making sure that we could attend to the vaccine needs of individuals living in a perhaps a multi-generational household it was specifically referring to that population due to data coming from a community vulnerability index frame of reference if you will all about health equity thank you thank you very much i'm done thank you right i think greg was referring to if one spouse was under 75 yeah i think we are going to adhere to the to the 75 and over so we want you to stay within the the age banding okay um and sort of along those those lines in real-time responses to this press conference um there's concern that you know people in their 60s who don't have any co-morbidities would seem to be pretty low risk of death which is the the standard here we're talking about and people are concerned about why why people who are unhealthy with maybe the severe conditions you're talking about wouldn't be pushed up instead of going into the the 60s age band the 65 plus age band why not why why are they getting preferences when they um as i understand it there are very few uh deaths in that group who don't have a co-morbidity so why not push the co-morbidity people or the or the really unhealthy people up that would describe previously again i'll let uh commissioner levin answer that but from our standpoint we looked at the data um it seemed 65 and over uh where we're the most deaths um we experienced um and um more in that category than in those who have chronic conditions so again the the graph that secretary smith oh my gosh there it is uh clearly shows why the ages are where the risks are and it's below age um 65 where the risk drops off tremendously that's the risk of death and that is our primary goals to preserve life but having said that these other conditions for which there's a broader age span beginning below age 65 are still viewed as conditions that uh can lead to a more serious consequence if you have the virus so obviously the most serious consequence is death no no argument there but other serious consequences hospitalizations hospitalizations that require critical care hospitalizations that require mechanical ventilation these are all associated with those other conditions and that's why they're listed next but not as high as the first three age bands that we mentioned does that answer your question uh uh yes thank you and just to just to clarify because i'm uncertain about the bifoc population but they are they in that next band then with the um with the under 65 group so they're in every band obviously all along um although we tend to skew younger in the bifoc population uh in vermont so majority of them will probably come after those initial higher age bands you're correct good morning governor i'm excited to hear the secretary Smith is going to look into the zip code issue that Lisa mentioned as you know i brought that up in may and i was told unequivocally that the counts were accurate and they did go town by town and not by zip code so i'm glad it's being taken seriously and i'd be interested in that data when it's available that being said um i'd like to ask about sports with phase two uh beginning next week if outdoor sports are allowed does this mean that you know two hockey teams from two different schools can compete if they're competing in an outdoor rink and uh secondary part to the sports question uh with it restarting next week is it really practical that that we're going to see indoor sports beginning before february and and obviously uh typical playoffs would be coming soon yeah in regards to your first question no competition at this point in time we are saying inter school inter team scrimmages only so that's the phase two and the answer to your next question i don't know when exactly that's going to be but but we'll just have to see what the date in science tells us and then we'll make determinations along the way as to when we will go to the next phase in terms of sports incorrectly that outdoor sports like downhill skiing would be allowed yes i adore hockey well no i mean you can still scrimmage and you can still have inter school inter team scrimmages but not not teams from you know from another another school uh there's governor i'm happy this is duly more i'm happy to help clarify a little if you'd like sure so that uh there is an allowance within the the guidance that's published today for small competitions for outdoor sports nordic skiing downhill skiing or yeah downhill skiing and snowboarding uh school-based hockey isn't is an indoor sport um and so they are are limited to practices only at this point in time um there's separate guidance that pertains to outdoor recreation so folks are having informal family-based games outside that's a different set of standards than the the school-based and youth recreational sports these are these are looking at formal organized sports uh certainly i was just curious because i i think uh snow high school and i'm pretty sure i saw that south berlington now has an outdoor rink i didn't know if those would be utilized or be allowed to be utilized uh for teams certainly they would be encouraged to practice there and the the guidance documents have specific statements prioritizing outdoor activity as opposed to indoor activity but it doesn't change whether or not competitions would be allowed at this point in time for that for hopefully okay thank you have a great weekend governor and staff thank you and galloway vt digger hi i think this is an galloway governor um i have a question about recent events um senator lisa mackowski recently said that if the republican party has become nothing more than the party of trump i sincerely question whether this party is for me have you also been questioning your continued affiliation with the republican party given the events the past two weeks yeah uh first of all you know over the last four years as you know um i have not been a supporter of the president uh didn't vote for him in the primary nor in the first election nor in the second election so from my standpoint i'm a republican uh who doesn't support um president trump now i think the republican party is going to have to do some soul searching and figure out what our values are what we can agree upon um and whether indeed they believe this is a party of of trump um whether they're if they're going to continue with some of what i perceive as white supremacy dominating racial inequity and so forth then we'll all have to make some decisions but i'm hopeful that the republican party will get back to its roots and be the party that i perceive them to be and so based on you know smaller government economic opportunity capitalism and so forth but but time will tell i mean i don't think that's going to be decided this week from my standpoint i think it's time for us all to reflect and for those who are in control of the parties at this point in time to reflect as well uh governor leaders of the republican party have been spreading conspiracy theories about a free and fair election and last week helped incite a violent assault on the u.s capital if that doesn't cause you to question your role in the party what would well i think i've been very vocal and as you have probably written about about what i believe this was a fair election that there was no evidence whatsoever nothing that had come forward nobody presented evidence to the contrary it was more about the president trying to manipulate the system to continue to be president so that isn't my belief i i don't believe i you know as we saw there was a strong vote in in the vermont state house both in the house in the senate saying just that so again condemning the actions of the of what happened last week and again i know there are republicans in the house and senate who believe as i do that uh that was a fair election and that we need to to move on from there and to condemn the actions taken by the president that wouldn't cause you to leave the party well again i mean it is going to be time enough to to do some soul searching figure out what the what the party wants to represent who they want to be and we'll all have to make decisions at that point do you think that debilado should resign as chair of vermont militant party and i'm sorry can you what was the question again yeah sure do you agree with senator parent represented back and represented down here that debilado should resign as chair of the vermont republican party i think uh i think the republican party again some of the officials in the party have to do some soul searching as to what the party represents and and having more of reflect the values that the elected officials have so again we'll we'll have those conversations over the next few months and determine where what direction of the party goes thank you governor can you hear me i can uh this is a uh this is a question for uh i think mike smith um whether it was sort of the rate limiting variable on the on the whole vaccine uh landscape is the availability of the doses themselves and so far i think they've been they've been distributed on the basis of population but there's been two kinds of discussions that could affect that one is that the president elect has suggested that we drop back from two shots to one and thereby vastly increase the number of doses that are available secondly there's been some talk i'm not sure how serious it is that the uh that we uh that the federal government might shift its basis of distribution to the level up to the rate at which a given state is is inoculating its people now our number now as high as mike smith said at seven okay but if but if many states begin to switch from two shots to one shot okay then they uh the rate at which other states of distributing will go up way higher it seems that you assessed my question is have you assessed this this possibility and if so have you thought about whether you you'd shift your current policy to go from one shot to two thank you again we have our reservations in terms of just giving the one one shot one inoculation because it's most effective with two two shots the second booster shot i might ask dr levine to comment on that first and then secretary smith with anything else that might be added yeah there are a lot of conversations happening uh and some of them are ending up in the newspaper but clearly there's no federal guidance or cdc or science driven guidance to indicate that we should be giving one shot to a large population and then hit or miss on the second shot depending if there's still vaccine left over at a later time and god knows when that later time will be so we are subscribing currently to continuing to honor the promise we made which is if you get a first shot we'll have a dose reserved for you for the second shot i've also had a chance to review some recent data very preliminary data looking at Pfizer that indicates that after the first shot within a two week period the vaccine of efficacy rate is in the 50 percent but quickly after the second shot it shoots up into the 90 percent that's pretty convincing to me to say that we're doing the right thing but we need a lot more of that kind of data to help support uh science driven decision making at this time and mike smith i'm very aware of the federal government trying to performance base the the vaccine allegation i would be worried if they did it performance based based upon the one-shot theory that you talked about obviously we are doing very well right now and we would expect on a performance-based basis that we would get more vaccine but we would be very it would be unfortunate if they went to that sort of system and we would vigorously argue against that system we know we would think it's unfair and we would think it's as dr levine had talked about has a lot of pitfalls to it thank you i might add as well we have high hopes for a couple of more manufacturers to come through johnson johnson which is a single dose strategy as well as astro zenica who's doing trials here in vermont so hopefully we'll have some good news there which will increase the supply thank you lisa at the valley reporter can you hear me we can good afternoon um i've received a report to the effect that teachers and staff of windham southwest school district have already received their first dose of vaccine i reached out to the school district for verification and the person i spoke to said she was not at liberty to discuss that i did not receive a call back from the superintendent can probably secretary smith or dan french can you confirm or deny that the school district has received vaccine um this would be news uh to us lisa but um but i'd ask the secretary french if he has any knowledge of this yes the secretary french i have no knowledge of this information first thank you thanks for running down rumors secondly i just need a quick clarification from secretary smith i asked you a couple of weeks ago about whether second homeowners who were sheltering in place in vermont since last spring could we keep the vaccine in vermont rather than return to their home state and you said they could and today i heard you in response to a question about residency states that people would need to provide proof of residency to clarify yeah i'm not i'm not certain i remember the first one about vaccines in particular i'm uh but nonetheless i the fact is that second homeowners will not be eligible they will have to return back to their home state now if you have moved to this state and have a job and you know within the last six months and have the intention to become a resident because you have to wait six months um then uh that would be you would be eligible at that point but a second homeowner would not be eligible for a vaccine under the vermont vaccination program and can i just return sorry go ahead no if i was unclear a few weeks ago then i apologize i just don't remember saying that but maybe i did thank you secretary smith could i just ask secretary french quickly will you double check on that school district i just received a text from somebody who suggested that that had in fact occurred and that was south west okay i'm going to put myself on mute because the dogs are about to bark yeah yeah lisa we're we're interested in running that down as well um governor or hi governor or commissioner levine uh last week you didn't have any data about vaccine acceptance rates can you now tell us more about the rate at which vermonters offered the vaccine are refusing to take it and also do you have any information on cases of side effects from receiving the first dose thanks for the question so we do know that um and then i don't want you to hang your hat on numbers because this is a moving target right now we're still within 1a so it's even hard to say somebody who's in a nursing home who didn't get the vaccine refused it because it may have been a problem with the informed consent process through a relative in a timely manner likewise in a health care worker we're finding frequent reports actually of people who did not step to the front of the line but now several weeks later said i'm willing to take the vaccine today uh so it's a very hard answer to give you we're hearing over 80 percent in the nursing homes for the residents i don't have a rate within the staff at the nursing homes so that's very promising and again i've used this number before for the health care facilities um when the hospitals have surveyed the rates have progressively increased over time of who would take the vaccine um and that has gone from 60 to 70 to 80 percent but i can't give you a number that's a final number yet for the health care workforce with regard to adverse events these are reported through what's called the vaccine adverse events reporting system and anything can be reported we've had a total of 25 adverse events listed so far and i believe that only brings us up to january because there's a lag in that system into getting the data back to us it's a federal system but the bottom line is out of those 25 there were two individuals we're aware of that had shortness of breath as part of the symptoms that they reported though not frank anaphylaxis so those obviously required more attention um there are a number of events that are just listed as local reactions as opposed to systemic reactions um think about 25 in the context of 25-ish thousand you know doses administered um i also promised to bring back some data regarding wastage of the vaccine and at this point in time we're aware of about 63 doses total that are wasted and that's again in the context of 70 000 doses particularly so it's about a 0.1 percent rate of wastage so very very low number when you look at it in comparison to the total number of doses coming in the state i would still say it's unacceptable because obviously any dose wasted is unfortunate and that's what we will certainly keep a very close eye on and make sure we can minimize throughout the next uh months and months of vaccination either secretary smith or for dr levine i'm wondering and i think the system kind of touched on but um is vermont's decision to focus this next round of vaccinations on older vermonters as well as those who have chronic health conditions does that mean that the state's main goal is to vaccinate people who are most at risk of dying from covid as opposed to those who are most at risk of contracting the disease like essential workers and if that's the case is the state at all concerned that this roll out of the next phase could come at the expense of mitigating community spread in vermont again i think we've been very clear uh this is about keeping people alive those at greatest risk of dying we're trying to go to first and have them vaccinated to prevent that from happening so i think we've been very very clear on that and hopefully there's no daylight there whatsoever um in terms of whether there's going to be community spread that's still up to us you know individually we've said from the very beginning and look what we went through last summer when we were able to reduce that by wearing a mask keeping physically distance washing our hands a lot just taking all the guidance all the protocols that we put into place we're able to bring that number down to almost nothing i contend we still have that ability today and it's up to us to make sure that we do that until we're able to vaccinate the vast majority of the population which is going to take some time based on the limited number of vaccine that we have coming into the state now if that increases then we'll get to it quicker but but meanwhile we have to we're at the mercy in some respects of the federal government and how much of the vaccine we're going to receive but we'll distribute it just as fast as we get it great thank you i want to follow up on greg's question about winter sports and i do understand that you need to continue to watch the data before you decide to move to phase three in winter sports my question is do you have a deadline to make that decision if there is going to be a winter sport season specifically high school basketball and i asked that question because we're the clock's ticking we're about two months before the season typically ends yeah um steve good question i might prefer to secretary more on this but we have spoken to some of the i think the vpa about extending the season maybe going into a different different time than we normally have some of these sports secretary more governor secretary curly secretary more had to jump off i'm happy to try to tackle this one um yeah the the vpa has worked for the schools and there's a broad agreement to extend the season to the end of march i believe um so honestly that's you know maybe just two to three weeks longer than for you know later than what we would normally stop at in the state we know we certainly do understand the clock ticking and we know that our window is short but as the governor has said we really don't want to make a move until we're comfortable that that we can safely do so and just a quick follow-up if i could on that you know what we've been hearing was that the season was going to be about 15 to 16 games total compared to 25 to 30 do you have a limit of the number of games that you're willing to get down to to continue to have some sort of a season this year well that really would be up to the to the vpa but um we really are trying not to put a hard number on that because everything is so fluid right now folks are trying to just do the best they can getting the kids back into a situation where they can practice as a full team with incidental contact right now is is a is a good good move for us to see how things are going to go and again we're just asking um you know there's there's ice arena and other folks who sometimes pull the ice out uh in in late February so just asking people to keep an open mind on on some of that and it's it's going to be a challenge but we don't have sort of this drop dead date you know we can't do it you know that we i think in the back of people's minds it's there but we're trying not to to um overwhelm the decision making with that great thank you for your time the three colors in the queue steve the any any k tv can you hear me we can hi can you hear me we can great um uh thanks i uh something happened at the at the last uh at the last conference and i was cut off before i could thank you guys for answering the question uh i it was a sin when i was growing up to be impolite so i just wanted to get that out first oh we never think you're impolite steve oh well thank you may not agree with you but uh not impolite well that's the vermont way thank goodness um the um governor uh one for the governor one for the doctor if i may uh governor the cdc just approved a rapid andicine test for travel into the us and i had a question from a viewer why don't we use these uh these uh cheap tests they're as low as uh five bucks and they take five minutes to uh to maybe help uh end the lockdowns and uh open up businesses yeah i from my standpoint i think they are going to be part of the future uh actually but um i don't know if we have the supply or the inventory uh and and that they're accessible at this point but i might ask uh dr levine this might be part of his question as well thanks you get two at me today steve uh so the antigen test thank you you know the antigen test has a lot of utility in a lot of settings but i would submit that if you were creating sort of a point where a traveler could come in or not come in contingent on the result of that specific test i don't think that would be very wise because the thing you fear the most is somebody coming in who has no symptoms but might be infectious and the antigen test is more vulnerable to producing a false negative result at that time obviously if the person comes off the plane and they're coughing and sneezing and febrile um probably going to rely on the antigen test to show that they have covid because that's when it's most reliable so it again depends on how they're planning on actually implementing something like that and would it have any real basis in science to make a decision that is so critical if the decision was you still were going to quarantine no matter what it's less of a significant point but my sense is when you start using tests you've automatically eliminated quarantine and you're just saying it's either you're in or out that's it is that clear sure and a couple of a couple of conferences ago i'd asked you about adjuvants and you said you get back to me from what i understand the adjuvants that are currently used to provoke an immune response when somebody gets the vaccine is aluminum and magnesium hydroxide uh some kind of emulsion adjuvant uh and a tl l uh tl r agonist and uh others um do you know what kind of adjuvants they're using this being uh an m r n a new vaccine and i think that the real take home point is certain platforms require an adjuvant to actually do what you said i'm not sure if the m r n a even integrates that into it so i will write that down right now and make sure that i get back to you on on that with the m r n a because that is of interest because i know that some of the other vaccine platforms will have adjuvants as part of their mode of action if you will so let let me get back to you great thank you uh thank you very much as i can't seem to find it uh and uh thanks to everybody i appreciate it hello can you hear me we can okay uh now we can't have two questions uh john we're only hearing part of that can you start over sure thank you um two questions regarding churches one are um churches being monitored to see if they're following the guidelines um there's you know a lot of churches out there i'm not sure who'd do it um so if there's any plan to do that or or have there been i'm sorry oh okay um yeah maybe this is a secretary curly question probably sure um yeah we don't specifically monitor churches or other businesses um certainly if there's an outbreak as you've heard earlier in the in the press conference that we will uh the epi team follows up and and we learn um from the outbreaks that happen there and so uh you know we don't have any plans at the moment to specifically monitor churches or again any other business in particular um but we we have our portal so we do receive um a variety of of inputs from the community um you know i'm things like the areas and convenience stores and churches and we generally follow up we either pick up the phone and call them for um a conversation to help them uh better adhere to the guidelines or um sometimes even make a visit to see how they're doing and and help them get into better compliance excuse me secretary you know curly do you know how many um uh tips you followed up on is it like the dozens or the hundreds are you talking about just for churches uh which if you know that certainly if you don't just in general yeah i i don't know that for sure to be honest um the portal goes into the vermont state police and um some also go come to us through the um the contract contract tracing team for follow-up based on what they're learning in their investigation so it's a variety i don't know the number um but you know i would say that it's fair to say that there's been at least a hundred since um back in march uh but i i don't know that for certain that gets in contact i appreciate that my second question um was just uh the state when it tries to make um enforce regulations it generally takes a care domestic approach when it comes to enforcing uh guidelines for uh covid with businesses and churches and other places um the care it seems to be that hey you don't get sick and the is there a stick for the state to enforce uh um compliance with guidelines yeah there's always the ability to enforce in a much stricter way we have just not chosen that path we have received i think a lot of compliance through education and by conferring with them but take for instance the the gym in rottland uh their enforcement was necessary in that case and the attorney general moved forward with that and uh in fact um deserves a lot of credit for moving in that manner and coming to resolution but the vast majority of them the complaints we received were able to again contact them have a conversation and uh and make sure that they're adhering and understand the rules and regulations and for for the most part i think they've had been adhering to that and it's been helpful that's helpful thank you very much governor i'll set thank you for circling back can you hear me we can yes uh excellent uh this is from a reader um asking about uh the perception that the Pfizer vaccine might cause more reaction than Moderna um as you ramp up this registration um process uh is there going to be an opportunity for people to choose one over the other or is there any actual reason that one might want to that would that would be complicated i'm afraid but uh i'll let dr levine answer that yeah at the present time that's not being entertained it would be far too complex also that perception about the side effects i i assume that's a perception based on sort of reading nationally as opposed to perhaps in vermont right now you know we don't really have enough data and enough sample size to really say anything regarding one having more or less side effects than the other um again you know there are side effects that are common and that are expected and that uh a modest percentage of people might get that may inconvenience them for a 24 hour period or less and then there's the far end of the spectrum anaphylaxis which is a rare side effect and uh again could be with either vaccine as we've seen uh from national experience thus far okay thank you uh and dr levine while you're at the podium uh um you've you've mentioned uh don't call your healthcare providers or hospitals to book appointments but what if people you know as as the age banding approaches have questions about whether if or when they should get a dosage should they turn those questions to their healthcare providers or will your call center staff have any capacity to answer some of the more general questions like that yeah so there's a little of both but i think getting the gist of your question has much more to do with that individual and who they are what they what they have for diseases what they may or may not perceive as risk of getting the vaccine versus not getting the vaccine those certainly would be questions much more appropriate for their healthcare provider during the context of a visit hopefully for other reasons or as a phone call into their office but i i do want to reiterate a point from earlier in the press conference because i've already received a text and i already understand that there are phone calls coming into the health department regarding vaccination as we speak so i'd like to get both secretary smiths and my messages of earlier on a couple hours ago now that the systems are not in place yet if you call now it's not going to get you any further ahead in line and there is no list you're going to be put on so we'd appreciate it if you hold those calls and hopefully these conferences and other information you can find on our website will be very helpful to answer your questions and do you know yet will the clinics the vaccination clinics have the same type of availability as the testing centers that have been ramped up recently in terms of seven days a week evening hours or are they going to be more limited in their operation this is mike smith they'll be more limited in their operation primarily because we won't have the vaccine the vaccine limits the hours of operation okay well again thank you very much for tuning in i hope you have a very safe weekend and we'll talk to you again on tuesday