GOVERNOR HOGAN: Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today at the Baltimore City field hospital here at the convention center, which represents a critical part of our ongoing efforts to support Baltimore City and our hospitals across the state in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. This facility will be a place where coronavirus patients who no longer require hospitalization can complete their care and fully recover by providing an additional 250 beds here at this field hospital, expanding the capacity of Baltimore City healthcare facilities, reducing the time that patients have to remain in our hospitals, and, in turn, frees up critical capacity for other patients who need acute care more urgently.
We have already assembled the physical facilities here in a very short period of time. Other elements, including a 24/7 staffing plan are currently underway. We’re ahead of schedule, and we will be able to take care of patients here as needed.
This is a huge undertaking, involving many people. And I just want to take a moment to thank a few of them. First of all, I want to thank FEMA for delivering these hospital beds and other materials. I want to thank the Maryland National Guard and our Department of General Services team for working around the clock to basically build and stand up this site from scratch. I also want to thank Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland Medical System for their partnership on agreeing to staff and run this facility.
We’re also continuing to make rapid progress on our other hospital surge efforts across the state to increase our capacity by thousands of beds. We have received ventilators from FEMA, which are now available for use at some of our hospitals around the state, and I want to thank Vice President Pence for his commitment last night about sending 200 ventilators to Maryland.
The state of Maryland has, on an emergency basis, approved 27 newly licensed assisted living programs, 42 residential sites for individuals with developmental disabilities, 6 newly licensed residential service agencies to provide home-based services, and 14 newly licensed clinical laboratories to help handle surge capacity.
Nearly 12,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus. And this morning Maryland now has 4,371 cases of COVID-19, which have been confirmed.
This virus continues to spread in every jurisdiction in our state, but the concentration of Maryland cases has rapidly intensified, particularly in the Baltimore Washington corridor. There are 459 positive cases here in Baltimore City, and so far 103 Marylanders, including 9 Baltimore City residents, have lost their lives over the past 20 days to this deadly virus. There are now nearly 9,000 cases in Maryland, D.C., and Virginia, and 189 people have died in the national capital region in the past 24 days.
Over the past 2 weeks I have been sounding the alarm with the President, the vice president, members of the President’s task force, including Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, as well as Admiral Giroir, the NIH director, FEMA administrators, and many other top administration officials about the emerging hotspot of the Baltimore Washington corridor. It was a significant focus of the discussion yesterday with the vice president, top administration officials, and the nation’s governors.
I’m pleased to report that we have succeeded in convincing the Trump Administration to designate the greater Baltimore Washington corridor as a priority. This includes Maryland in general and 12 Maryland jurisdictions in particular, including Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Carroll, Prince George’s, Montgomery, Anne Arundel, Howard, Frederick, Harford, Queen Anne’s, Calvert, and Charles Counties as hotspots which demand urgent federal attention. In addition to being home to more than 5 million people and hundreds of thousands of federal workers and nearly all federal agencies, the Baltimore Washington corridor is also home to the NIH, the FDA, Fort Detrick, critical health agencies which are on the front lines of the battle against the coronavirus as well as Fort Meade, the NSA, the U.S. Cyber Command, and other federal installations that are critical to the security of the nation.
I want to sincerely thank the Trump Administration for listening to our concerns, for responding to us, and for designating the Baltimore Washington corridor and these 12 Maryland jurisdictions as priority areas. As the COVID-19 crisis continues to escalate here in Baltimore City, we are continuing to work closely with Mayor Young and city leaders to help them respond effectively, with 10 cases in the Baltimore City police force and 211 BPD officers currently in quarantine, Maryland State Police Superintendent Colonel Jerry Jones has been in communication with Commissioner Harrison to offer additional state assistance. Maryland State Troopers, Maryland Transportation Authority police, and other state law enforcement agencies are continuing their increased assignments and visibility patrols in Baltimore City. Troopers are working in areas of need as requested by BPD command staff, and enhanced state criminal enforcement work continues in and around the city.
We are also providing logistical support for the city’s efforts to stand up a new community-based COVID-19 screening site at the Pimlico race course. In addition, I have directed the Maryland Department of Health through its office of minority health and health disparities to immediately take all actions necessary in order to provide further demographic breakdowns on race of all Maryland case data, including testing, hospitalizations, and mortality rates. I have also directed them to be as proactive as anyone in the nation on this with respect to the private labs across the country that are not currently tracking or providing this data. Beginning this week on the Maryland Department of Health website, I have directed them to publish everything that is available to us with respect to racial and ethnic demographic breakdowns on coronavirus cases, with instructions to update as new data becomes available. However, I want to caution that 90% of the testing is being done by doctors and hospitals who are sending tests to private labs outside of the state which have not been keeping such data, so we do anticipate having significant gaps in the initial data that will be available to us.
Our top concern continues to be the fact that we now have cases and/or clusters of cases at 90 nursing homes and long-term care facilities across the state. We were one of the first states in the nation, nearly a month ago, to issue strong directives to state nursing home facilities to restrict visitor access, to update infection control protocols, and to limit all staff travel. Two days ago I enacted an additional executive order to further bolster mitigation and suppression efforts at Maryland nursing homes. All long-term care facilities are directed to have all staff who interact with residents to wear personal protective equipment. All nursing homes are required to create separate observation and isolation areas for residents and to expedite all testing through the Maryland State Public Health Laboratory in order to get results in 24 hours rather than waiting up to 7 days to get results from private labs.
In addition, today we are launching statewide strike teams composed of members of the National Guard, representatives of local and state Health Departments, the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems, and hospital systems to bring triage, emergency care, supplies, and equipment to overburdened nursing homes. We’re the first state in the nation to launch such a coordinated response effort.
We are activating three distinct types of strike teams. First, testing teams, which will identify those in close contact with a confirmed case, collect and send out specimens for the fastest test available, and provide expert instruction on how to keep confirmed and suspected cases of staff separated. Second, assistance teams made up of members of the National Guard who will quickly assess the situation on site, determine equipment and supply needs, and triage residents. And third, clinical teams, which will include doctors, nurse practitioners, and registered nurses from major hospital systems who will be tasked with providing on site medical triage and stabilizing residents in the nursing home in order to avoid unnecessary transport to hospitals.
The goal here is not to replace the nursing homes’ medical and clinical team, but to provide immediate support and assistance to help protect residents of these facilities. The state teams will provide assistance and care to patients immediately in order to slow the spread of this virus among our most vulnerable Marylanders. These strike teams will be activated in response to requests from nursing homes, local Health Departments, and Maryland Department of Health infectious disease experts.
15 days ago I issued an executive order which closed all nonessential businesses, organizations, and facilities in Maryland. 8 days ago I issued a stay-at home directive. I want to thank the overwhelming majority of our citizens who have remained at home, avoided crowds, and practiced much-needed social distancing, which is the single most important thing that each and every citizen can do right now to help save lives. And we have already seen these actions and sacrifices are making a huge difference. I also want to thank all the businesses that have complied with these orders and those who have found ways to provide much-needed services while also observing social distancing guidelines.
However, there are reports of a few businesses that are failing to comply with the law and who are potentially putting their customers and their staff at risk. As a result, I issued an additional executive order which directs that any local Health Department which determines that any business, organization, establishment, facility, or construction site in their jurisdiction that is unable or unwilling to cooperate in a manner consistent with social distancing protocols and that in their judgment poses an unreasonable risk of exacerbating the spread of COVID-19, then that jurisdiction shall have the power to require that unsafe facility to, A, immediately modify its operations; B, severely limit any movement to or from that facility; or C, they can shut them down altogether.
This new order also empowers state and local law enforcement agencies to assist local health officers in the enforcement of this order. Failure to obey the order may be punishable by up to a year in jail or up to a $5,000 fine or both.
While social distancing is keeping us physically isolated from one another, there are so many examples and so many ways that this crisis is actually bringing Marylanders closer together with compassion and generosity. Stories like Cavanaugh Bell, a 7-year-old boy in Gaithersburg who used his savings to buy care packs for the elderly and to start a community pantry. There’s a group of more than 100 crafters who came together through Facebook with a mission of sewing masks for healthcare workers and first responders. Or the thousands of meals that local restaurants have made and volunteers have delivered to the doctors, nurses, and staff at Howard County General Hospital. Places like Sailing Specialties , Inc., a marine parts factory in Hollywood — that’s Hollywood St. Mary’s County Maryland, not Hollywood, California — which has converted its operations to produce 500,000 face shields for medical workers treating coronavirus patients, and Hardwire, Inc., which is an armor manufacturer on the Eastern Shore, which in the span of one week went from building armor to protect soldiers to making face shields to protect healthcare workers on the front lines of a different kind of battle.
There are everyday heroes just like this stepping up all across our state. Since we launched our Maryland Unites initiative 3 weeks ago, we’ve had an overwhelming response of volunteers and donations, but we still need a lot more help. We need more people volunteering to step up while the doctors, nurses, and others are out there risking their lives on the front lines fighting this virus for us. You can sign up to volunteer in all kinds of ways that are safe and effective, like helping the Maryland Food Bank or giving blood through the Red Cross, by going to Governor.maryland.gov/marylandunites.
Each of the hundreds of unprecedented actions that we have taken over the past 32 days since I declared a state of emergency have been to protect the health, the safety, and the lives of Marylanders. And they have all been guided by a coronavirus response team. And we are proud to have a new member join our team just this morning, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who most recently served as the U.S. FDA commissioner. We have an incredible coronavirus team that is made up of some of the smartest leading doctors and public health experts not just in the state of Maryland, but, in my opinion frankly, in the world. And I’ve asked a few of them to join us here today to talk directly with Marylanders about where we are in this fight right now, what we are doing, and what we must continue doing in order to stop the spread of this deadly virus.
So I’m going to start by turning it over to Dr. Tom Inglesby, the Director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Thanks.
TOM INGLESBY: Well, thank you, Governor Hogan. It’s good to be with you and your team and to see the truly impressive work that has gone on here in this facility.
I have a few comments that are about the importance of social distancing that have been put in place in Maryland. This COVID virus has the ability to spread rapidly and widely in society and in our state. Without social distancing measures in place, on average one person can infect 2-3 others, and each of those 2-3 can infect 2-3 more and so on. New generations of cases can occur every 5-7 days without social distancing measures. Without a vaccine or therapy to stop the disease, the only way to slow the virus down is through social distancing as put in place by the Governor in Maryland.
If this virus were left to spread without social distancing, on this scale, the number of sick people, especially the critically ill, could overwhelm our health system. This pattern is the same around the world. The health systems of the major city of Wuhan in China were driven into complete crisis by this virus. But social distancing measures put in place reduced the spread to now a very low level in that city and other areas of China.
Other places in the world like Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea have also used social distancing to keep their epidemics under relatively better control than we’re seeing in most places in the world.
If our health systems were to become overwhelmed, the mortality of this virus would go sharply up, and hospitals would have a difficult time providing medical care, the usual lifesaving medical care that they do on a daily basis.
We are hopeful that the peak day of our epidemic in Maryland is sometime soon, given how early and aggressive the social distancing measures were put in place. One model that the White House uses has our peak occurring about 10 days from now, and other models have the peak coming a bit later. The models are only best estimates, and models don’t necessarily take into account how seriously Maryland has put social distancing measures in place, so we do hope our peak day will be sooner, and there are some encouraging signs.
Elsewhere in the world, in Italy, where the epidemic has been quite serious and grave for that country, we have seen daily case counts begin to gradually come down in recent days, believed to be the result of social distancing efforts. In Washington State and in New York and California, the numbers of new cases daily seems to be leveling off. It’s too soon to say, but it may be a trend, again, driven by social distancing.
In Maryland in the last 24 hours — we’ll hear more about this in a moment — we have seen lower numbers of new cases and lower numbers of hospitalization. It’s only one day of data, but if confirmed over time, it would be a very good move in the right direction.
Once we’re able to bring cases down to smaller numbers in our state, it will be time to consider how to begin to ease social distancing. We’ll need to have expanded diagnostics to the point where even the mildest possible COVID cases can be diagnosed on the same day, if possible. We’re going to need to be sure our healthcare workers have all the masks and equipment that they need to take care of future potential surges of COVID patients should they occur. And we’re going to need to make sure our Health Departments have hired the people and gotten the technology to closely track and isolate all cases and their close contacts.
Meantime, in the short term, the kind of medical surge capacity that has been built in this conference center is an important way to expand our state’s capacity to provide medical care for COVID patients in the time ahead.
Thanks very much.
FRAN PHILLIPS: Thank you. And just to introduce two more members of the Governor’s task force, the coronavirus strike team, we’ll start with Dr. David Marcozzi, who is associate professor — associate dean, associate director at University of Maryland Department of Emergency Management, followed by Dr. Mitch Schwartz. Dr. Schwartz is the President and Chief Medical Officer at Luminis Health System.
Dr. Marcozzi.
DAVID MARCOZZI: Thank you, Fran.
Governor, thank you very much for allowing us to speak here today. I think under your leadership, Maryland is a safer state as a result of the significant actions you put in place, the early actions you put in place to protect our state from this virus. I’m here to talk to you about how the healthcare delivery system is working aggressively to ready ourselves for this virus and the potential surge of patients that we may be seeing.
Governor, you asked us to build 6,000 beds. We’re working and we’re standing in one of those several medical facilities that Johns Hopkins and University of Maryland Medical System worked together in partnership with the Maryland Department of Health, the National Guard, the Baltimore City Emergency Medical Services, to stand this up to make sure it’s ready when and if we do have the surge of patients.
Other healthcare systems across our state continue to have readiness built in to what they’re doing on a daily basis. Lumeris, MedStar, all of us working in collaborative efforts to address the potential capacity limitations that we may feel as a result of the burden of disease and the illness that may be presenting to us over the course of the next few weeks. Now is the time for readiness, and I think, Governor, as a result of your leadership, you’ve demonstrated to us the actions that we need to put in place now to make sure our state, our healthcare system, responds optimally to this event and to this crisis.
Three specific things we’re putting in place. One of them is building surge capacity within our hospitals. The second is sites like this, which are external to hospitals but allow us to decant our hospitals so that the lower acuity patients can be moved to facilities like this so that we as hospitals can make sure we have the capacity to meet the demands of those who are severely ill. And lastly, Governor, you asked us to make these strike teams, and we are building right now efforts to make sure a doctor, a nurse, a team can go out when you request them to make sure that we can stabilize patients right at location to make sure, one, we can test, we can do the right assessments, and we can provide the right medical care on site to the folks who may need it in long-term care facilities.
So thank you very much, Governor, for your leadership, and we look forward to partnering with you throughout the rest of this response to this crisis.
MITCH SCHWARTZ: Thank you, everyone, and specifically thank you, Governor, for allowing us to stand by you as you manage this pandemic across the state of Maryland.
My name is Mitch Schwartz. I’m the President of Luminis Health Enterprise, and I come here to speak about a pandemic based on a virus that is cruel, that impacts all of us, whether you’re working at a hospital, you’re staying at home, or you’re an essential worker in our workforce. It is times like this when we need to coordinate care with our government, local, state, and federal partners.
At Luminis, we have a critical priority, and that is to safely staff, supply, and equip our hospitals to provide care to our communities. We were formed last July, the merger of two hospitals, Doctors Community Hospital in PG County and AA Medical Center in southern Anne Arundel County. We have 9,000 employees and hundreds of physician offices throughout the area.
We would like to actually give you three specific ways we’re managing care in the community during this pandemic. First, we have scaled our telehealth abilities dramatically. All of our patients were told to stay at home, and it is our priority to provide access to them during this pandemic. We still have access when face-to-face interactions are required, but we have scaled telehealth, now doing thousands of visits a day.
Secondly, we are closely working with local, state, and federal government and partners to prepare for what we believe to be a massive surge in volume over the next weeks. We have looked throughout our hospital facilities to develop space typically not used for patient care, and redefine care process to enable our staff to care for all of those patients safely.
And third, we have developed a massive plan of redeployment for our medical staff, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and nurses retraining them to provide care for that patient population that we believe has come.
So in summary, we have a plan. We are executed that plan. We want to safely provide patient care with appropriate supplies and equipment at our hospitals.
So I want to thank you, Governor, for allowing us to support you, and I also want to thank all the healthcare workers throughout the state, all those workers who care for patients, and more importantly, care about them as well. Thank you very much.
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I just want to again thank you all and your healthcare system, as well as others who also care about our response. There may be others not represented here today, but they’ve been incredible. We have Deputy Secretary Fran Phillips, who has been a leader. You’ve seen her at every one of these press conferences. And we have Major General Timothy Gowen with the National Guard here as well.
Our team at the state level has done an incredible job, and I talk to our state leaders every day. I talk with these smart doctors from the hospitals. We talk to a bunch of other folks, but you don’t see all the stuff going on behind the scenes, but let me tell you, every one of these folks is a superstar. They’ve been stepping up, and all of the people who work for them are incredible. We appreciate their teams and all the folks at the hospitals, the doctors, the nurses, the technicians, all the people on the front line, but there’s an awful lot of other folks too who are citizen soldiers, Health Department, National Guard, every one of our agencies, the DGS and all the people who put up this facility and everything else. With that, I’ll take a few questions.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Maybe I’ll let one of our experts like Tom answer that question, but that’s going to be the hardest question of all. What we’ve got to do is a lot more testing, and we’re going to have to really study the numbers day-to-day. The last thing — look, we’re anxious to get everybody back to their normal lives as quickly as we can. But the last thing we want to do is bring them back too fast where we just ramp this thing back up and have the virus spread. So we’re going to rely on the experts.
Tom, do you want to touch on this? There’s a lot of smart guys who can probably give you a better answer, but it’s going to be a hard decision based on the data and we can’t really give you a specific time yet. We have these smart doctors. We might as well get a smart answer out of them. Even though they don’t want to give you the answer.
SPEAKER: Well, I certainly agree with what the Governor just said. In other countries, they’re beginning to experiment with easing social distancing where they’ve had measures in place. For example, China, where they’re now beginning to reopen public transportation, and have people travel around more than they were allowed to before.
I think one of the preconditions is getting numbers down quite low. Never to zero probably, but to a very low, manageable number, so that public Health Departments can be aware of all the cases in the state and can try to manage them, can isolate them, track their contacts. So it depends on the capacity that we’re able to build in the state, try to get control of that.
We’ll also have to have really available diagnostic testing so that people even with mild symptoms can be diagnosed quickly and put into isolation. That’s not quite possible yet, but that is being ramped up in the state.
And finally, we need to prepare our healthcare system so that if there is a surge in the future, that they’re never in this position to be short on masks, space, and ventilators. So we have to be ready for that.
(Question off mic.)
SPEAKER: Thank you for the easy question. So I think it’s all of those. I think that we have a limitation with regard to how our nation has the ability to get personal protective equipment. We’re looking at whether or not we have the national capacity to be able to have that, as far as being able to produce it and/or import it into our nation. There are many steps. In addition to that, the healthcare delivery system has to respond to a surge of patients. Obviously the burn rate is higher. All of those factors cascade into making sure we have enough personal protective equipment for our nurses, our respiratory therapists, our doctors, our front-line EMS providers, to make sure they are the people who have the right personal protective equipment when they do need to respond. So it’s all of those pieces going in to factoring in to make sure that the responder has what they need to respond to the threat.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: It’s a really difficult question. The question is how bad is it going to get, are we going to need all of those things. So FEMA put in those requests based on I believe what they felt like was a worst-case scenario, and they’re taking steps. Had we not instituted all of the dramatic and unprecedented actions we’ve taken over the past 32 days, based on the models that we’re hearing about from smart people like Dr. Fauci and all of the modeling, if we just let this run its course and have the spike and overload the healthcare system, then we would see those kinds of numbers and the death rates and the infection rates would be astronomical. We believe, and I think these smart doctors would agree, although we don’t have exact numbers, that we have dramatically lowered the potential for that. But hopefully in America, but particularly here in Maryland, so that that worst-case scenario is not going to happen. We don’t know exactly how many people are going to be infected. We don’t know how many people are going to be hospitalized or how many deaths. But at least my hope is that we’re not going to get near the worst-case scenario, that it’s going to be hopefully a lot closer to a best-case scenario. I don’t know if any of you want to add to that.
SPEAKER: It’s your turn.
SPEAKER: One, two, three.
SPEAKER: Thank you, Governor. So I think all the actions taken by the Governor have depressed the peak of case volume, and that saves lives, particularly when hospitals could have been overwhelmed in a way and hopefully won’t. But I think we have to recognize that when the peak is lower, the spread of time is still significant and the bazillions of hospital workers, healthcare workers is going to be called to the table.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I’m not sure of the validity of that report. There are no leases on ice rinks. I know that’s a possibility of one but that’s not happened yet. But that has happened in other places around the world. So it’s just something that is being considered, but it was a false report to say that two ice rinks had been.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Let me follow up on what the doctor just said. It’s important. Had we spiked and had this all right away, it would have been faster. People are saying how fast can we get over this. The fact that we’ve flattened this curve means it’s a longer period of time with a longer plateau. So while we won’t have an overload of the system, it also means it will take a longer period of time to get back but not be as bad.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: The testing continues to be the primary frustration. Our state lab turns around the testing within 24 hours. Many of the other labs have had a backlog and they were taking up to a week. I think they’re now catching up to speed. Fran can address that. But the rapid testing you keep hearing about, about 45-minute testing or 15-minute testing is coming but has not come to either Maryland or anywhere else.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: So the mask that I was wearing was made by prisoners at the Maryland Correctional Facility, and they’re very happy to be doing this and part of the solution and in some way helping their fellow Marylanders. So this is something announced at our last press conference. They made these masks and I wore it today. I just took it off today so I could talk because you wouldn’t hear very well. It’s just a cloth mask. It’s not N95. It doesn’t take away from healthcare workers. But it does offer some protection.
Beginning about almost two weeks ago, I started placing calls to everyone in Washington and ringing every alarm bell I could about what all of us were talking about and the numbers we were starting to see and while they were focused on New York and New Orleans and other places, that folks forget about this right here. And my argument was that we were so critical to the nation’s defense that it was not just the fact that we had numbers but that they had to pay attention to the fact that I included Maryland, D.C., and Virginia together because it’s 400,000 some federal workers, surrounding all of them.
But in calls with the President, the vice president, admirals, head of NIH, I talked to Fauci, I talked to Dr. Birx. I mean, I was calling all weekend late into the night almost every day for a solid week, and in our last call, the vice president started talking about it. He called me this last weekend and said, we’re going to make Maryland and D.C. a priority. He started the meeting with the governors yesterday saying, Maryland is a priority. Dr. Birx then went into a 10-minute discussion with all the governors about each of our counties and what they were going to do. So I think they were looking at the numbers, and the numbers justified what I was telling them, but there’s no question that Dr. Fauci, I had a conversation with him and he said, I’m in the parking lot at the White House, about to walk in to my coronavirus thing, I promise you I’m going to raise this again. And he hung up the phone, parked his car, and went in. I must have made 30-40 phone calls about this.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: We’re going to be talking with our budget folks. I don’t anticipate, I’m hoping we’re going to avoid major layoffs, but there’s going to be massive budget problem. I mean, I imagine we’re going to — I think we’re already at the point where we’ve spent probably somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion to $2 billion, which is a pretty big number. So yeah. There’s going to be massive budget problems for us, for every state in America, just like there are for individuals, small businesses, large businesses, and for the federal government.
(Question off mic.)
SPEAKER: I can verify that all of us have limited elective surgery in a dramatic way. We are not doing purely elective surgery. I can also tell you, as I described, that we are planning and redeploying and retraining all employees to provide care during that surge.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: You’ve got a lot of questions, Erin.
I mean, we’ve spent money everywhere, in every single agency, but I can’t tell you exactly where it went. We could probably follow up at a later date. Right now the idea is to keep hundreds of thousands of people from getting infected to stop people dying. So every dollar that’s being spent.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Well, no, most — the federal government that’s not doing, the CDC doesn’t do it, none of the national testing labs do it, and just in the last day or two a couple of cities said they would do it but they haven’t really. D.C. said yesterday they would do it and have done a tiny portion of their numbers. We would be happy to do it. We do about 500 of our tests, we can do that easily, but the other 25,000 tests, doctors send them to national labs that aren’t in the state of Maryland and don’t keep that kind of information, that aren’t required in their state to keep the information, that aren’t required by the CDC to keep the information, so it’s hard for us to gather the information. We’re going to try to do that, but the last thing I would want to do is to have, you know, all these tests, people say we’re not going to go to Maryland because they make us do something we don’t do anywhere else, and then people would start dying. So we’re going to do our best to keep track of the information without killing people.
SPEAKER: Last question, please.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I think you’re done.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: That’s a good question. We talked with the doctors today about that. Look, I think if you notice the way we did it over 32 or 33 days, we ratcheted it up. We took this step and then that step and then the next step and then the next step. I think we’ll ease back into things. It won’t be like flip a switch and back to normal. We’ll have to slowly start to make decisions based on the facts. But it’s not going to be like everything is back to normal tomorrow. When we get back, we’re going to be careful, limiting, still having social distancing, people still wearing masks. And so but we want to make sure we don’t go back to a big problem again, so we’re going to be really cautious. The decisions on reopening and getting back are going to be even more difficult than the ones that we made to close things down, which were extremely difficult.
Thank you all.
We have already assembled the physical facilities here in a very short period of time. Other elements, including a 24/7 staffing plan are currently underway. We’re ahead of schedule, and we will be able to take care of patients here as needed.
This is a huge undertaking, involving many people. And I just want to take a moment to thank a few of them. First of all, I want to thank FEMA for delivering these hospital beds and other materials. I want to thank the Maryland National Guard and our Department of General Services team for working around the clock to basically build and stand up this site from scratch. I also want to thank Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland Medical System for their partnership on agreeing to staff and run this facility.
We’re also continuing to make rapid progress on our other hospital surge efforts across the state to increase our capacity by thousands of beds. We have received ventilators from FEMA, which are now available for use at some of our hospitals around the state, and I want to thank Vice President Pence for his commitment last night about sending 200 ventilators to Maryland.
The state of Maryland has, on an emergency basis, approved 27 newly licensed assisted living programs, 42 residential sites for individuals with developmental disabilities, 6 newly licensed residential service agencies to provide home-based services, and 14 newly licensed clinical laboratories to help handle surge capacity.
Nearly 12,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus. And this morning Maryland now has 4,371 cases of COVID-19, which have been confirmed.
This virus continues to spread in every jurisdiction in our state, but the concentration of Maryland cases has rapidly intensified, particularly in the Baltimore Washington corridor. There are 459 positive cases here in Baltimore City, and so far 103 Marylanders, including 9 Baltimore City residents, have lost their lives over the past 20 days to this deadly virus. There are now nearly 9,000 cases in Maryland, D.C., and Virginia, and 189 people have died in the national capital region in the past 24 days.
Over the past 2 weeks I have been sounding the alarm with the President, the vice president, members of the President’s task force, including Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, as well as Admiral Giroir, the NIH director, FEMA administrators, and many other top administration officials about the emerging hotspot of the Baltimore Washington corridor. It was a significant focus of the discussion yesterday with the vice president, top administration officials, and the nation’s governors.
I’m pleased to report that we have succeeded in convincing the Trump Administration to designate the greater Baltimore Washington corridor as a priority. This includes Maryland in general and 12 Maryland jurisdictions in particular, including Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Carroll, Prince George’s, Montgomery, Anne Arundel, Howard, Frederick, Harford, Queen Anne’s, Calvert, and Charles Counties as hotspots which demand urgent federal attention. In addition to being home to more than 5 million people and hundreds of thousands of federal workers and nearly all federal agencies, the Baltimore Washington corridor is also home to the NIH, the FDA, Fort Detrick, critical health agencies which are on the front lines of the battle against the coronavirus as well as Fort Meade, the NSA, the U.S. Cyber Command, and other federal installations that are critical to the security of the nation.
I want to sincerely thank the Trump Administration for listening to our concerns, for responding to us, and for designating the Baltimore Washington corridor and these 12 Maryland jurisdictions as priority areas. As the COVID-19 crisis continues to escalate here in Baltimore City, we are continuing to work closely with Mayor Young and city leaders to help them respond effectively, with 10 cases in the Baltimore City police force and 211 BPD officers currently in quarantine, Maryland State Police Superintendent Colonel Jerry Jones has been in communication with Commissioner Harrison to offer additional state assistance. Maryland State Troopers, Maryland Transportation Authority police, and other state law enforcement agencies are continuing their increased assignments and visibility patrols in Baltimore City. Troopers are working in areas of need as requested by BPD command staff, and enhanced state criminal enforcement work continues in and around the city.
We are also providing logistical support for the city’s efforts to stand up a new community-based COVID-19 screening site at the Pimlico race course. In addition, I have directed the Maryland Department of Health through its office of minority health and health disparities to immediately take all actions necessary in order to provide further demographic breakdowns on race of all Maryland case data, including testing, hospitalizations, and mortality rates. I have also directed them to be as proactive as anyone in the nation on this with respect to the private labs across the country that are not currently tracking or providing this data. Beginning this week on the Maryland Department of Health website, I have directed them to publish everything that is available to us with respect to racial and ethnic demographic breakdowns on coronavirus cases, with instructions to update as new data becomes available. However, I want to caution that 90% of the testing is being done by doctors and hospitals who are sending tests to private labs outside of the state which have not been keeping such data, so we do anticipate having significant gaps in the initial data that will be available to us.
Our top concern continues to be the fact that we now have cases and/or clusters of cases at 90 nursing homes and long-term care facilities across the state. We were one of the first states in the nation, nearly a month ago, to issue strong directives to state nursing home facilities to restrict visitor access, to update infection control protocols, and to limit all staff travel. Two days ago I enacted an additional executive order to further bolster mitigation and suppression efforts at Maryland nursing homes. All long-term care facilities are directed to have all staff who interact with residents to wear personal protective equipment. All nursing homes are required to create separate observation and isolation areas for residents and to expedite all testing through the Maryland State Public Health Laboratory in order to get results in 24 hours rather than waiting up to 7 days to get results from private labs.
In addition, today we are launching statewide strike teams composed of members of the National Guard, representatives of local and state Health Departments, the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems, and hospital systems to bring triage, emergency care, supplies, and equipment to overburdened nursing homes. We’re the first state in the nation to launch such a coordinated response effort.
We are activating three distinct types of strike teams. First, testing teams, which will identify those in close contact with a confirmed case, collect and send out specimens for the fastest test available, and provide expert instruction on how to keep confirmed and suspected cases of staff separated. Second, assistance teams made up of members of the National Guard who will quickly assess the situation on site, determine equipment and supply needs, and triage residents. And third, clinical teams, which will include doctors, nurse practitioners, and registered nurses from major hospital systems who will be tasked with providing on site medical triage and stabilizing residents in the nursing home in order to avoid unnecessary transport to hospitals.
The goal here is not to replace the nursing homes’ medical and clinical team, but to provide immediate support and assistance to help protect residents of these facilities. The state teams will provide assistance and care to patients immediately in order to slow the spread of this virus among our most vulnerable Marylanders. These strike teams will be activated in response to requests from nursing homes, local Health Departments, and Maryland Department of Health infectious disease experts.
15 days ago I issued an executive order which closed all nonessential businesses, organizations, and facilities in Maryland. 8 days ago I issued a stay-at home directive. I want to thank the overwhelming majority of our citizens who have remained at home, avoided crowds, and practiced much-needed social distancing, which is the single most important thing that each and every citizen can do right now to help save lives. And we have already seen these actions and sacrifices are making a huge difference. I also want to thank all the businesses that have complied with these orders and those who have found ways to provide much-needed services while also observing social distancing guidelines.
However, there are reports of a few businesses that are failing to comply with the law and who are potentially putting their customers and their staff at risk. As a result, I issued an additional executive order which directs that any local Health Department which determines that any business, organization, establishment, facility, or construction site in their jurisdiction that is unable or unwilling to cooperate in a manner consistent with social distancing protocols and that in their judgment poses an unreasonable risk of exacerbating the spread of COVID-19, then that jurisdiction shall have the power to require that unsafe facility to, A, immediately modify its operations; B, severely limit any movement to or from that facility; or C, they can shut them down altogether.
This new order also empowers state and local law enforcement agencies to assist local health officers in the enforcement of this order. Failure to obey the order may be punishable by up to a year in jail or up to a $5,000 fine or both.
While social distancing is keeping us physically isolated from one another, there are so many examples and so many ways that this crisis is actually bringing Marylanders closer together with compassion and generosity. Stories like Cavanaugh Bell, a 7-year-old boy in Gaithersburg who used his savings to buy care packs for the elderly and to start a community pantry. There’s a group of more than 100 crafters who came together through Facebook with a mission of sewing masks for healthcare workers and first responders. Or the thousands of meals that local restaurants have made and volunteers have delivered to the doctors, nurses, and staff at Howard County General Hospital. Places like Sailing Specialties , Inc., a marine parts factory in Hollywood — that’s Hollywood St. Mary’s County Maryland, not Hollywood, California — which has converted its operations to produce 500,000 face shields for medical workers treating coronavirus patients, and Hardwire, Inc., which is an armor manufacturer on the Eastern Shore, which in the span of one week went from building armor to protect soldiers to making face shields to protect healthcare workers on the front lines of a different kind of battle.
There are everyday heroes just like this stepping up all across our state. Since we launched our Maryland Unites initiative 3 weeks ago, we’ve had an overwhelming response of volunteers and donations, but we still need a lot more help. We need more people volunteering to step up while the doctors, nurses, and others are out there risking their lives on the front lines fighting this virus for us. You can sign up to volunteer in all kinds of ways that are safe and effective, like helping the Maryland Food Bank or giving blood through the Red Cross, by going to Governor.maryland.gov/marylandunites.
Each of the hundreds of unprecedented actions that we have taken over the past 32 days since I declared a state of emergency have been to protect the health, the safety, and the lives of Marylanders. And they have all been guided by a coronavirus response team. And we are proud to have a new member join our team just this morning, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who most recently served as the U.S. FDA commissioner. We have an incredible coronavirus team that is made up of some of the smartest leading doctors and public health experts not just in the state of Maryland, but, in my opinion frankly, in the world. And I’ve asked a few of them to join us here today to talk directly with Marylanders about where we are in this fight right now, what we are doing, and what we must continue doing in order to stop the spread of this deadly virus.
So I’m going to start by turning it over to Dr. Tom Inglesby, the Director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Thanks.
TOM INGLESBY: Well, thank you, Governor Hogan. It’s good to be with you and your team and to see the truly impressive work that has gone on here in this facility.
I have a few comments that are about the importance of social distancing that have been put in place in Maryland. This COVID virus has the ability to spread rapidly and widely in society and in our state. Without social distancing measures in place, on average one person can infect 2-3 others, and each of those 2-3 can infect 2-3 more and so on. New generations of cases can occur every 5-7 days without social distancing measures. Without a vaccine or therapy to stop the disease, the only way to slow the virus down is through social distancing as put in place by the Governor in Maryland.
If this virus were left to spread without social distancing, on this scale, the number of sick people, especially the critically ill, could overwhelm our health system. This pattern is the same around the world. The health systems of the major city of Wuhan in China were driven into complete crisis by this virus. But social distancing measures put in place reduced the spread to now a very low level in that city and other areas of China.
Other places in the world like Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea have also used social distancing to keep their epidemics under relatively better control than we’re seeing in most places in the world.
If our health systems were to become overwhelmed, the mortality of this virus would go sharply up, and hospitals would have a difficult time providing medical care, the usual lifesaving medical care that they do on a daily basis.
We are hopeful that the peak day of our epidemic in Maryland is sometime soon, given how early and aggressive the social distancing measures were put in place. One model that the White House uses has our peak occurring about 10 days from now, and other models have the peak coming a bit later. The models are only best estimates, and models don’t necessarily take into account how seriously Maryland has put social distancing measures in place, so we do hope our peak day will be sooner, and there are some encouraging signs.
Elsewhere in the world, in Italy, where the epidemic has been quite serious and grave for that country, we have seen daily case counts begin to gradually come down in recent days, believed to be the result of social distancing efforts. In Washington State and in New York and California, the numbers of new cases daily seems to be leveling off. It’s too soon to say, but it may be a trend, again, driven by social distancing.
In Maryland in the last 24 hours — we’ll hear more about this in a moment — we have seen lower numbers of new cases and lower numbers of hospitalization. It’s only one day of data, but if confirmed over time, it would be a very good move in the right direction.
Once we’re able to bring cases down to smaller numbers in our state, it will be time to consider how to begin to ease social distancing. We’ll need to have expanded diagnostics to the point where even the mildest possible COVID cases can be diagnosed on the same day, if possible. We’re going to need to be sure our healthcare workers have all the masks and equipment that they need to take care of future potential surges of COVID patients should they occur. And we’re going to need to make sure our Health Departments have hired the people and gotten the technology to closely track and isolate all cases and their close contacts.
Meantime, in the short term, the kind of medical surge capacity that has been built in this conference center is an important way to expand our state’s capacity to provide medical care for COVID patients in the time ahead.
Thanks very much.
FRAN PHILLIPS: Thank you. And just to introduce two more members of the Governor’s task force, the coronavirus strike team, we’ll start with Dr. David Marcozzi, who is associate professor — associate dean, associate director at University of Maryland Department of Emergency Management, followed by Dr. Mitch Schwartz. Dr. Schwartz is the President and Chief Medical Officer at Luminis Health System.
Dr. Marcozzi.
DAVID MARCOZZI: Thank you, Fran.
Governor, thank you very much for allowing us to speak here today. I think under your leadership, Maryland is a safer state as a result of the significant actions you put in place, the early actions you put in place to protect our state from this virus. I’m here to talk to you about how the healthcare delivery system is working aggressively to ready ourselves for this virus and the potential surge of patients that we may be seeing.
Governor, you asked us to build 6,000 beds. We’re working and we’re standing in one of those several medical facilities that Johns Hopkins and University of Maryland Medical System worked together in partnership with the Maryland Department of Health, the National Guard, the Baltimore City Emergency Medical Services, to stand this up to make sure it’s ready when and if we do have the surge of patients.
Other healthcare systems across our state continue to have readiness built in to what they’re doing on a daily basis. Lumeris, MedStar, all of us working in collaborative efforts to address the potential capacity limitations that we may feel as a result of the burden of disease and the illness that may be presenting to us over the course of the next few weeks. Now is the time for readiness, and I think, Governor, as a result of your leadership, you’ve demonstrated to us the actions that we need to put in place now to make sure our state, our healthcare system, responds optimally to this event and to this crisis.
Three specific things we’re putting in place. One of them is building surge capacity within our hospitals. The second is sites like this, which are external to hospitals but allow us to decant our hospitals so that the lower acuity patients can be moved to facilities like this so that we as hospitals can make sure we have the capacity to meet the demands of those who are severely ill. And lastly, Governor, you asked us to make these strike teams, and we are building right now efforts to make sure a doctor, a nurse, a team can go out when you request them to make sure that we can stabilize patients right at location to make sure, one, we can test, we can do the right assessments, and we can provide the right medical care on site to the folks who may need it in long-term care facilities.
So thank you very much, Governor, for your leadership, and we look forward to partnering with you throughout the rest of this response to this crisis.
MITCH SCHWARTZ: Thank you, everyone, and specifically thank you, Governor, for allowing us to stand by you as you manage this pandemic across the state of Maryland.
My name is Mitch Schwartz. I’m the President of Luminis Health Enterprise, and I come here to speak about a pandemic based on a virus that is cruel, that impacts all of us, whether you’re working at a hospital, you’re staying at home, or you’re an essential worker in our workforce. It is times like this when we need to coordinate care with our government, local, state, and federal partners.
At Luminis, we have a critical priority, and that is to safely staff, supply, and equip our hospitals to provide care to our communities. We were formed last July, the merger of two hospitals, Doctors Community Hospital in PG County and AA Medical Center in southern Anne Arundel County. We have 9,000 employees and hundreds of physician offices throughout the area.
We would like to actually give you three specific ways we’re managing care in the community during this pandemic. First, we have scaled our telehealth abilities dramatically. All of our patients were told to stay at home, and it is our priority to provide access to them during this pandemic. We still have access when face-to-face interactions are required, but we have scaled telehealth, now doing thousands of visits a day.
Secondly, we are closely working with local, state, and federal government and partners to prepare for what we believe to be a massive surge in volume over the next weeks. We have looked throughout our hospital facilities to develop space typically not used for patient care, and redefine care process to enable our staff to care for all of those patients safely.
And third, we have developed a massive plan of redeployment for our medical staff, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and nurses retraining them to provide care for that patient population that we believe has come.
So in summary, we have a plan. We are executed that plan. We want to safely provide patient care with appropriate supplies and equipment at our hospitals.
So I want to thank you, Governor, for allowing us to support you, and I also want to thank all the healthcare workers throughout the state, all those workers who care for patients, and more importantly, care about them as well. Thank you very much.
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I just want to again thank you all and your healthcare system, as well as others who also care about our response. There may be others not represented here today, but they’ve been incredible. We have Deputy Secretary Fran Phillips, who has been a leader. You’ve seen her at every one of these press conferences. And we have Major General Timothy Gowen with the National Guard here as well.
Our team at the state level has done an incredible job, and I talk to our state leaders every day. I talk with these smart doctors from the hospitals. We talk to a bunch of other folks, but you don’t see all the stuff going on behind the scenes, but let me tell you, every one of these folks is a superstar. They’ve been stepping up, and all of the people who work for them are incredible. We appreciate their teams and all the folks at the hospitals, the doctors, the nurses, the technicians, all the people on the front line, but there’s an awful lot of other folks too who are citizen soldiers, Health Department, National Guard, every one of our agencies, the DGS and all the people who put up this facility and everything else. With that, I’ll take a few questions.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Maybe I’ll let one of our experts like Tom answer that question, but that’s going to be the hardest question of all. What we’ve got to do is a lot more testing, and we’re going to have to really study the numbers day-to-day. The last thing — look, we’re anxious to get everybody back to their normal lives as quickly as we can. But the last thing we want to do is bring them back too fast where we just ramp this thing back up and have the virus spread. So we’re going to rely on the experts.
Tom, do you want to touch on this? There’s a lot of smart guys who can probably give you a better answer, but it’s going to be a hard decision based on the data and we can’t really give you a specific time yet. We have these smart doctors. We might as well get a smart answer out of them. Even though they don’t want to give you the answer.
SPEAKER: Well, I certainly agree with what the Governor just said. In other countries, they’re beginning to experiment with easing social distancing where they’ve had measures in place. For example, China, where they’re now beginning to reopen public transportation, and have people travel around more than they were allowed to before.
I think one of the preconditions is getting numbers down quite low. Never to zero probably, but to a very low, manageable number, so that public Health Departments can be aware of all the cases in the state and can try to manage them, can isolate them, track their contacts. So it depends on the capacity that we’re able to build in the state, try to get control of that.
We’ll also have to have really available diagnostic testing so that people even with mild symptoms can be diagnosed quickly and put into isolation. That’s not quite possible yet, but that is being ramped up in the state.
And finally, we need to prepare our healthcare system so that if there is a surge in the future, that they’re never in this position to be short on masks, space, and ventilators. So we have to be ready for that.
(Question off mic.)
SPEAKER: Thank you for the easy question. So I think it’s all of those. I think that we have a limitation with regard to how our nation has the ability to get personal protective equipment. We’re looking at whether or not we have the national capacity to be able to have that, as far as being able to produce it and/or import it into our nation. There are many steps. In addition to that, the healthcare delivery system has to respond to a surge of patients. Obviously the burn rate is higher. All of those factors cascade into making sure we have enough personal protective equipment for our nurses, our respiratory therapists, our doctors, our front-line EMS providers, to make sure they are the people who have the right personal protective equipment when they do need to respond. So it’s all of those pieces going in to factoring in to make sure that the responder has what they need to respond to the threat.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: It’s a really difficult question. The question is how bad is it going to get, are we going to need all of those things. So FEMA put in those requests based on I believe what they felt like was a worst-case scenario, and they’re taking steps. Had we not instituted all of the dramatic and unprecedented actions we’ve taken over the past 32 days, based on the models that we’re hearing about from smart people like Dr. Fauci and all of the modeling, if we just let this run its course and have the spike and overload the healthcare system, then we would see those kinds of numbers and the death rates and the infection rates would be astronomical. We believe, and I think these smart doctors would agree, although we don’t have exact numbers, that we have dramatically lowered the potential for that. But hopefully in America, but particularly here in Maryland, so that that worst-case scenario is not going to happen. We don’t know exactly how many people are going to be infected. We don’t know how many people are going to be hospitalized or how many deaths. But at least my hope is that we’re not going to get near the worst-case scenario, that it’s going to be hopefully a lot closer to a best-case scenario. I don’t know if any of you want to add to that.
SPEAKER: It’s your turn.
SPEAKER: One, two, three.
SPEAKER: Thank you, Governor. So I think all the actions taken by the Governor have depressed the peak of case volume, and that saves lives, particularly when hospitals could have been overwhelmed in a way and hopefully won’t. But I think we have to recognize that when the peak is lower, the spread of time is still significant and the bazillions of hospital workers, healthcare workers is going to be called to the table.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I’m not sure of the validity of that report. There are no leases on ice rinks. I know that’s a possibility of one but that’s not happened yet. But that has happened in other places around the world. So it’s just something that is being considered, but it was a false report to say that two ice rinks had been.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Let me follow up on what the doctor just said. It’s important. Had we spiked and had this all right away, it would have been faster. People are saying how fast can we get over this. The fact that we’ve flattened this curve means it’s a longer period of time with a longer plateau. So while we won’t have an overload of the system, it also means it will take a longer period of time to get back but not be as bad.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: The testing continues to be the primary frustration. Our state lab turns around the testing within 24 hours. Many of the other labs have had a backlog and they were taking up to a week. I think they’re now catching up to speed. Fran can address that. But the rapid testing you keep hearing about, about 45-minute testing or 15-minute testing is coming but has not come to either Maryland or anywhere else.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: So the mask that I was wearing was made by prisoners at the Maryland Correctional Facility, and they’re very happy to be doing this and part of the solution and in some way helping their fellow Marylanders. So this is something announced at our last press conference. They made these masks and I wore it today. I just took it off today so I could talk because you wouldn’t hear very well. It’s just a cloth mask. It’s not N95. It doesn’t take away from healthcare workers. But it does offer some protection.
Beginning about almost two weeks ago, I started placing calls to everyone in Washington and ringing every alarm bell I could about what all of us were talking about and the numbers we were starting to see and while they were focused on New York and New Orleans and other places, that folks forget about this right here. And my argument was that we were so critical to the nation’s defense that it was not just the fact that we had numbers but that they had to pay attention to the fact that I included Maryland, D.C., and Virginia together because it’s 400,000 some federal workers, surrounding all of them.
But in calls with the President, the vice president, admirals, head of NIH, I talked to Fauci, I talked to Dr. Birx. I mean, I was calling all weekend late into the night almost every day for a solid week, and in our last call, the vice president started talking about it. He called me this last weekend and said, we’re going to make Maryland and D.C. a priority. He started the meeting with the governors yesterday saying, Maryland is a priority. Dr. Birx then went into a 10-minute discussion with all the governors about each of our counties and what they were going to do. So I think they were looking at the numbers, and the numbers justified what I was telling them, but there’s no question that Dr. Fauci, I had a conversation with him and he said, I’m in the parking lot at the White House, about to walk in to my coronavirus thing, I promise you I’m going to raise this again. And he hung up the phone, parked his car, and went in. I must have made 30-40 phone calls about this.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: We’re going to be talking with our budget folks. I don’t anticipate, I’m hoping we’re going to avoid major layoffs, but there’s going to be massive budget problem. I mean, I imagine we’re going to — I think we’re already at the point where we’ve spent probably somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion to $2 billion, which is a pretty big number. So yeah. There’s going to be massive budget problems for us, for every state in America, just like there are for individuals, small businesses, large businesses, and for the federal government.
(Question off mic.)
SPEAKER: I can verify that all of us have limited elective surgery in a dramatic way. We are not doing purely elective surgery. I can also tell you, as I described, that we are planning and redeploying and retraining all employees to provide care during that surge.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: You’ve got a lot of questions, Erin.
I mean, we’ve spent money everywhere, in every single agency, but I can’t tell you exactly where it went. We could probably follow up at a later date. Right now the idea is to keep hundreds of thousands of people from getting infected to stop people dying. So every dollar that’s being spent.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: Well, no, most — the federal government that’s not doing, the CDC doesn’t do it, none of the national testing labs do it, and just in the last day or two a couple of cities said they would do it but they haven’t really. D.C. said yesterday they would do it and have done a tiny portion of their numbers. We would be happy to do it. We do about 500 of our tests, we can do that easily, but the other 25,000 tests, doctors send them to national labs that aren’t in the state of Maryland and don’t keep that kind of information, that aren’t required in their state to keep the information, that aren’t required by the CDC to keep the information, so it’s hard for us to gather the information. We’re going to try to do that, but the last thing I would want to do is to have, you know, all these tests, people say we’re not going to go to Maryland because they make us do something we don’t do anywhere else, and then people would start dying. So we’re going to do our best to keep track of the information without killing people.
SPEAKER: Last question, please.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I think you’re done.
(Question off mic.)
GOVERNOR HOGAN: That’s a good question. We talked with the doctors today about that. Look, I think if you notice the way we did it over 32 or 33 days, we ratcheted it up. We took this step and then that step and then the next step and then the next step. I think we’ll ease back into things. It won’t be like flip a switch and back to normal. We’ll have to slowly start to make decisions based on the facts. But it’s not going to be like everything is back to normal tomorrow. When we get back, we’re going to be careful, limiting, still having social distancing, people still wearing masks. And so but we want to make sure we don’t go back to a big problem again, so we’re going to be really cautious. The decisions on reopening and getting back are going to be even more difficult than the ones that we made to close things down, which were extremely difficult.
Thank you all.