GOVERNOR HOGAN: Good afternoon. There are now over 1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States. More Americans have died from the coronavirus since February than the total number who died in the Vietnam War. Maryland has 20,849 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 985 Marylanders have lost their lives to this deadly virus. 4,402 Marylanders have been hospitalized, 1,610 patients are currently hospitalized, including 586 who are in intensive care.
On Friday after weeks of consulting with leading scientists and public health experts, we introduced a well thought out, smart, safe, and effective roadmap for the recovery of Maryland. The key numbers, which remain our biggest focus and that we’re watching very closely on a day-to-day basis are the rate of hospitalizations and the number of patients admitted to the ICU. When we start seeing a plateauing of those metrics, then that can put us in a position to begin implementing the reopening and recovery.
Yesterday I convened a meeting of our coronavirus recovery team, which includes some of the most respected business, labor, and economic leaders in the state and in the nation. Our coronavirus recovery team is advising us and helping guide Maryland’s reopening process.
As part of this strategy, we are intensifying both containment and mitigation efforts by first targeting and isolating outbreaks and clusters; second, redoubling our attention and resources on hotspot areas, with the highest concentration of cases; and third, mitigation to stop the spread of the virus in other areas of the state.
We are no longer just playing defense. We are going on offense against this virus, attacking it from every angle with everything we’ve got. As a result of the acquisition of the half million tests from South Korea and some of our other progress with respect to increasing lab capacity and the supply of materials, we are exponentially expanding our testing capacity, enabling us to attack the most acute outbreaks, clusters, and hotspots, including nursing homes, and to provide additional testing for our healthcare workers and first responders. It also helps us expand and increase our community-based testing like the two additional drive through test sites at vehicle emission inspection stations. We now have seven of those open and operational across the state.
I just completed a call with the White House, Delaware Governor John Carney, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, and 15 other governors whose states are home to meat processing plants, in order to address the outbreaks of COVID-19 including at several poultry processing plants in the Delmarva region.
Currently we now have at least 262 lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 associated with poultry workers in Maryland, which is one reason why the case rate per hundred thousand in Wicomico County is now the fifth highest in the state, nearly equal to Baltimore City, and higher than Baltimore County. These outbreaks are not only a serious public health concern; they’re also a potential threat to Maryland’s leading agricultural industry and to our nation’s essential food supply chain.
The moment I learned of outbreaks at Mountainaire’s Selbyville processing plant and at a Allen Harim plant in Delaware, we knew it was going to be on issue not just for our neighbors but for Maryland as well, so we immediately got to work. I first raised this issue on a call with Vice President Pence on Friday, who agreed right away to have Dr. Robert Redfield of the CDC follow up with us immediately. We warned them that any disruption or interruption to processing at our poultry processing plants could lead to significant national supply chain issues. We dispatched state epidemiologists to the affected areas to focus on testing support, contact tracing, occupational health, communications, and outreach. In order to enhance our testing capability, we are opening a testing site at Perdue Stadium in Salisbury, specifically to test workers at the Perdue Salisbury and other processing plants. We quickly got our regional partners on board, and Governor Carney and Governor Northam joined me in sending a letter to the President detailing the urgency of the situation and requesting federal assistance.
I want to thank the Trump Administration, particularly Vice President Pence and Dr. Robert Redfield for responding swiftly to our request. We have deployed a Maryland incident management team to support this multiagency and multistate operation on the Delmarva peninsula. We anticipate that a CDC team will be on the ground later tonight providing assistance, and we also requested and have been granted a designated FEMA liaison to help expedite other federal assistance.
Chas Eby, the deputy executive director of the Maryland Emergency Management Agency, who is joining me here today, is spearheading this intensive effort on behalf of our state. We will continue to keep Wicomico County and Eastern Shore residents informed as this situation continues to develop.
The other major issue we continue to confront are outbreaks or clusters of cases at 278 different facilities across the state, including 4,011 confirmed cases at 143 different Maryland nursing homes, where we have highly vulnerable patients. Even when best practices and care is in place, this virus may still be transmitted by asymptomatic staff, meaning that every patient interaction comes with some risk. These outbreaks account for 19% of all the total positive cases in our state, but shockingly, 46% of the deaths in Maryland are patients from nursing homes. On day one of this crisis, we immediately took action and have consistently taken some of the earliest and most aggressive action in the nation in an effort to protect residents and staff of these long-term continuing care facilities. 50 days ago we met with the leaders of the long-term care community, including nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and retirement communities. We issued strict guidelines for state nursing home facilities to restrict access for visitors and staff and called on them to implement infection control protocols. 24 days ago we instituted an official series of safety measures directed expedited testing for every symptomatic resident. We required the use of personal protective equipment for staff and the creation of separate quarantine and observation areas for COVID-19 patients. 3 weeks ago we launched statewide strike teams composed of members of the National Guard, local and state Health Departments, and doctors and nurses to bring triage, emergency care, and supplies of PPE to overburdened nursing homes. We were the first state in the nation to launch such a coordinated response effort. These strike teams have already successfully responded to serious outbreaks and growing threats in 84 facilities.
Two weeks ago we augmented our Maryland strike teams with the addition of federal disaster medical assistance teams from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which are made up of physicians, nurses, paramedics, and safety officers. These elite teams bring many years of disaster response experience, and they’re tasked with conducting medical assessments of patients in skilled nursing facilities and assisting staff with testing and infection control practices.
Earlier this week I pushed for even more transparency by directing Maryland Department of Health to publish any and all available data related to nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Under normal circumstances, the Health Department does not publish this information because of patient privacy concerns, but we have taken this unprecedented step out of our commitment to fight these outbreaks and to provide the public with the most thorough and accurate data available in order to understand and defeat this deadly virus.
Today we are taking the following additional actions to continue our aggressive efforts to target and isolate these outbreaks and clusters of cases particularly in nursing homes. I’ve issued an executive order requiring universal testing of all residents and staff at all Maryland nursing homes, regardless of whether they are symptomatic or not. Nursing homes will be prioritized based on an imminent outbreak or a current rising threat of an outbreak. Under this executive order, it will now be mandatory for all facilities to fully comply and cooperate with the strike teams which are deployed by the state. In addition, the executive order requires nursing homes to have a physician, nurse practitioner, physician’s assistant, or registered nurse evaluate all residents on a daily basis. With our expanded universal testing, we should expect to see the number of positive cases significantly rise on both nursing home residents and staff. Any staff who test positive will be immediately discharged into isolation, and we are requiring all these facilities to develop emergency surge staffing plans to ensure continuity of care in the event of an outbreak. To aid them in this effort, today I am announcing that we are also supplementing our strike teams with newly created bridge teams, which will provide emergency clinical staffing to nursing homes that are experiencing crisis. Each bridge team is composed of a registered nurse and 5-7 aides sufficient to care for up to 100 nursing home residents per shift. These new bridge teams include 260 registered nurses and aides who have been contracted with the Maryland Department of Health through an arrangement with Allegis and the Maryland Hospital Association. These team members are all fully vetted and are ready to be immediately deployed statewide and are capable of providing 24-hour coverage for nursing homes in crisis. This executive order also requires nursing home facilities to provide regular informational updates to their residents, resident representatives, and staff regarding COVID-19 infections. It is heart wrenching enough that families can’t visit their loved ones, but it’s even worse when they can’t get information about what is happening inside these facilities. Nursing homes will be required to keep families informed on a regular basis.
While we know that the vast majority of nursing home operators are committed to providing quality care for their residents, we are increasingly concerned and quite frankly outraged that a few operators are not complying with directives from the state, and so today we are appointing Colonel Eric Allely, the state surgeon of the Maryland National Guard, who is up here with me today, to serve as an emergency safety and compliance officer for Maryland nursing homes. He will be charged with directing a multiagency team to ensure compliance with state law. We have been and will continue to take aggressive actions to address the spread of COVID-19 in Maryland nursing homes. Targeting and containing these outbreaks and clusters is critically important to our state’s recovery efforts.
I want to take just a moment to personally address every Marylander who has had difficulty dealing with the serious problems on the state unemployment insurance website. With all of the economic struggles that people are already going through, they should not have to worry about getting the resources that they need and that they deserve. Since the launch of this new website five days ago, more than 245,000 accounts have been activated, and over 100,000 new claims have been filed. We have handled more claims in Maryland just in a short period of time than we did all during the entire year of 2019. This surge in claims is unprecedented, and every single state in America is struggling to keep up with this volume. The good news is that Maryland is now successfully handling an average of 33 new accounts every single minute, and an average of 780 claims are successfully filed every hour. But while we have been able to handle this volume better than many other states in the country, it is simply not good enough. The IT contractor who developed this site and the Department of Labor have fallen short of the high standard that we have set, and the people of Maryland deserve better and the buck stops with me. So I am going to make sure that they do and that we do whatever it takes to get this straight so that every single Marylander gets every single penny of financial assistance that they deserve.
Lastly, today during this pandemic, our healthcare workers, including our doctors, nurses, EMTs, and first responders have proven themselves to be not just essential workers but front-line heroes, from managing a virus that can spread without symptoms to dealing with shortages in protective equipment, while saving people’s lives, and often while being forced to isolate themselves from their loved ones. The challenges that these heroes face are immense, unprecedented, and truly inspiring. As a way for all of us to show them our appreciation, to honor them for their incredible service to our state, I am issuing a proclamation declaring this Saturday, May 2, as Healthcare Heroes’ Day in the state of Maryland. On Saturday night, we will light up this State House dome blue. We will be lighting up Camden Yards blue and the M and T Bank Stadium blue, and we are going to have a flyover of the Navy’s Blue Angels and Army’s Thunderbirds and we’re going to be asking all Marylanders to join us in lighting up the state of Maryland blue to show our immense gratitude for these men and women who truly are the definition of Maryland strong. May God bless each and every one of these American heroes.
With that, I’ll be happy to take questions.
(Question off mic).
The issue with the website, like I said, it’s frustrating to me that any one person ever has to wait. The system is not able to handle it. The federal system is not able to handle it. No state is able to handle it. A number of states have stopped processing. Ours is still running; it’s just running at 33 per minute or whatever numbers I gave you. It’s not fast enough to handle the process. Waiting on the phone. They just came you. With this a week ago. They didn’t used to have these benefits. There never was a website in America to support this. We were one of the first states in the country to create a new one. It’s not good enough, but it is better than waiting for days on the phone and never getting an answer. Some people have been helped but some are not getting the help fast enough, which is why we’re working around the clock. We’ve hired hundreds of people to try to get it fixed. It’s working better than most.
(Question off mic).
So as soon as I heard that you were being denied, we worked to get it up in a day, 24 hours. But as I understand it, there were logical reasons why. It’s out of privacy concerns. Some of these nursing homes, some of them are smaller. It’s patient privacy information. If you say there’s an outbreak here, people will find out who is there and there are concerns of legal issues and privacy concerns of the patients.
I overrode all of that and said because of the patients and the family members who have a right to know. There is some argument internally of whether that is right or not.
(Question off mic).
So the plan that we laid out last week did not talk about a 14-day straight decline. That’s what the President’s claim called for. Most people are opening up anyway.
Our plan calls for 14 days of a flattening or plateauing. We were starting to see that. We’ve seen a couple days go up. When it comes back down, we won’t restart the clock. If we don’t continue to see a spike up, we’ll be in a good position to continue to make progress. It doesn’t have to be 14 consecutive days of going down, and again, it’s not cases. It’s hospitalizations and ICUs. We had some slight upticks for a day or two, but it’s not soon enough. We’re still hopeful we can level off and still move forward.
(Question off mic).
We said on Friday when we launched our plan, I said I was hopeful that we could start to take a look at this in early May. Hopefully we’ll come back and talk with you in early May after we’ve had a chance to look at those numbers.
(Question off mic).
I just addressed all of that in my remarks. They’re going to prioritize first on the outbreaks and clusters in nursing homes, and those things like in Salisbury, there are clusters and outbreaks, and on first responders and healthcare workers. And then the hotspots of the communities where we have the most cases. We’re going to work through all of those in a prioritization just like I described.
(Question off mic).
I’m sorry. I didn’t follow that question.
(Question off mic).
So we’re taking the lead and we’re working with our partners in Delaware and Virginia, because these poultry workers, while there was an outbreak in a Delaware plant, many of those workers live in Maryland. We also have the potential of infecting and having problems at our two plants in Maryland and there are also plants in Virginia. That whole Delmarva peninsula is interconnected. We’re all working together, all the states are working together, and CDC really is jumping in to help us with whatever assistance they possibly can. They’ve been extremely helpful. It’s not so much money but providing boots on the ground, assistance to help us with just getting control of the situation.
(Question off mic).
I’m sure we will be looking for federal assistance, and that’s why we now have FEMA representative and CDC representative on the ground with us.
(Question off mic).
Our first concern was the health and safety of all the workers that are in Maryland, and then our second concern was about all of our poultry farmers across the Eastern Shore and all the health and livelihood of this major industry in Maryland, which is our number one agricultural product, and then the broader issue, we had discussion amongst the governors with the Vice President and the agriculture secretary, labor secretary, and CDC director before I came out to see you about the meat industry in general. There are pork, beef, and poultry workers on the call talking about the breakdown in the food chain, serious outbreaks. The President yesterday issued a directive about trying to make sure we keep these plants open, but we’ve got to feed people in America. So our priority is to make sure we keep these workers safe and keep those plants open so we can keep people fed.
(Question off mic).
We do have the approval of the FDA, who signed off on the states making their own decisions. I thanked on the call last week with the Vice President, I thanked him for the FDA administrator for signing off on our flight from Korea and thanked him directly and he thanked us for thanking him. The President of the FDA made a decision that states could use their own approvals instead of going through a long cumbersome FDA approval process, so we do have that. It was an inaccurate and false story that came out yesterday. There are no other approvals needed from FDA. So that’s not factual. The government has actually purchased also 750,000 tests from Korea too now by the way. So there isn’t an issue with the Korean tests. But with respect to the website, I know that there are — no one has ever created one of these before. We’re very frustrated it hasn’t been fixed but they’re working around to get it fixed. Whether it’s a new contractor starting from scratch. Other states shut theirs down. Ours is processing a couple hundred thousand people, even though it’s slow. I’m not sure shutting it down and starting over is a better solution.
(Question off mic).
We laid out a very detailed plan on Friday about how we’re going to go through that.
(Question off mic).
I’m not very good at math. They give me the facts.
(Question off mic).
That’s what I announced today, that we have had a strategy that’s been focused on nursing homes. 50 days ago, I laid out all the actions we’ve taken over the last 50 days. I think I laid out about 20 other things that we’re going to do as of today in nursing homes but that doesn’t mean we don’t have issues across the rest of the state.
SPEAKER: Last question.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I had two conversations with the County Executive last week, once at Laurel Hospital, where we talked about the deaths. Once was on a call with the rest of the county leaders, and as soon as we got the tests, everybody was like, hey, could we have 100,000 of those tests? I explained, it’s not that simple. The state is going to maintain them, not just send them off. There’s about a nine-step process that requires swabs and reagents and the lab capacity. We’re going to prioritize the use of them as I just laid out about how we’re going to use them, but we are going to be using them at testing centers. We’re doing more testing in PG County than anywhere else. It is a hotspot. It will be on that list after we go through the nursing homes where we’re testing everybody in every nursing home, where we go through the outbreaks, the clusters, and some of these other issues and deal with healthcare workers and first responders. PG County will be at the top of the list where some of the community testing is going to be done and has been done and will continue to be done. Even with those tests and the other tests.
Thank you.
On Friday after weeks of consulting with leading scientists and public health experts, we introduced a well thought out, smart, safe, and effective roadmap for the recovery of Maryland. The key numbers, which remain our biggest focus and that we’re watching very closely on a day-to-day basis are the rate of hospitalizations and the number of patients admitted to the ICU. When we start seeing a plateauing of those metrics, then that can put us in a position to begin implementing the reopening and recovery.
Yesterday I convened a meeting of our coronavirus recovery team, which includes some of the most respected business, labor, and economic leaders in the state and in the nation. Our coronavirus recovery team is advising us and helping guide Maryland’s reopening process.
As part of this strategy, we are intensifying both containment and mitigation efforts by first targeting and isolating outbreaks and clusters; second, redoubling our attention and resources on hotspot areas, with the highest concentration of cases; and third, mitigation to stop the spread of the virus in other areas of the state.
We are no longer just playing defense. We are going on offense against this virus, attacking it from every angle with everything we’ve got. As a result of the acquisition of the half million tests from South Korea and some of our other progress with respect to increasing lab capacity and the supply of materials, we are exponentially expanding our testing capacity, enabling us to attack the most acute outbreaks, clusters, and hotspots, including nursing homes, and to provide additional testing for our healthcare workers and first responders. It also helps us expand and increase our community-based testing like the two additional drive through test sites at vehicle emission inspection stations. We now have seven of those open and operational across the state.
I just completed a call with the White House, Delaware Governor John Carney, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, and 15 other governors whose states are home to meat processing plants, in order to address the outbreaks of COVID-19 including at several poultry processing plants in the Delmarva region.
Currently we now have at least 262 lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19 associated with poultry workers in Maryland, which is one reason why the case rate per hundred thousand in Wicomico County is now the fifth highest in the state, nearly equal to Baltimore City, and higher than Baltimore County. These outbreaks are not only a serious public health concern; they’re also a potential threat to Maryland’s leading agricultural industry and to our nation’s essential food supply chain.
The moment I learned of outbreaks at Mountainaire’s Selbyville processing plant and at a Allen Harim plant in Delaware, we knew it was going to be on issue not just for our neighbors but for Maryland as well, so we immediately got to work. I first raised this issue on a call with Vice President Pence on Friday, who agreed right away to have Dr. Robert Redfield of the CDC follow up with us immediately. We warned them that any disruption or interruption to processing at our poultry processing plants could lead to significant national supply chain issues. We dispatched state epidemiologists to the affected areas to focus on testing support, contact tracing, occupational health, communications, and outreach. In order to enhance our testing capability, we are opening a testing site at Perdue Stadium in Salisbury, specifically to test workers at the Perdue Salisbury and other processing plants. We quickly got our regional partners on board, and Governor Carney and Governor Northam joined me in sending a letter to the President detailing the urgency of the situation and requesting federal assistance.
I want to thank the Trump Administration, particularly Vice President Pence and Dr. Robert Redfield for responding swiftly to our request. We have deployed a Maryland incident management team to support this multiagency and multistate operation on the Delmarva peninsula. We anticipate that a CDC team will be on the ground later tonight providing assistance, and we also requested and have been granted a designated FEMA liaison to help expedite other federal assistance.
Chas Eby, the deputy executive director of the Maryland Emergency Management Agency, who is joining me here today, is spearheading this intensive effort on behalf of our state. We will continue to keep Wicomico County and Eastern Shore residents informed as this situation continues to develop.
The other major issue we continue to confront are outbreaks or clusters of cases at 278 different facilities across the state, including 4,011 confirmed cases at 143 different Maryland nursing homes, where we have highly vulnerable patients. Even when best practices and care is in place, this virus may still be transmitted by asymptomatic staff, meaning that every patient interaction comes with some risk. These outbreaks account for 19% of all the total positive cases in our state, but shockingly, 46% of the deaths in Maryland are patients from nursing homes. On day one of this crisis, we immediately took action and have consistently taken some of the earliest and most aggressive action in the nation in an effort to protect residents and staff of these long-term continuing care facilities. 50 days ago we met with the leaders of the long-term care community, including nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and retirement communities. We issued strict guidelines for state nursing home facilities to restrict access for visitors and staff and called on them to implement infection control protocols. 24 days ago we instituted an official series of safety measures directed expedited testing for every symptomatic resident. We required the use of personal protective equipment for staff and the creation of separate quarantine and observation areas for COVID-19 patients. 3 weeks ago we launched statewide strike teams composed of members of the National Guard, local and state Health Departments, and doctors and nurses to bring triage, emergency care, and supplies of PPE to overburdened nursing homes. We were the first state in the nation to launch such a coordinated response effort. These strike teams have already successfully responded to serious outbreaks and growing threats in 84 facilities.
Two weeks ago we augmented our Maryland strike teams with the addition of federal disaster medical assistance teams from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which are made up of physicians, nurses, paramedics, and safety officers. These elite teams bring many years of disaster response experience, and they’re tasked with conducting medical assessments of patients in skilled nursing facilities and assisting staff with testing and infection control practices.
Earlier this week I pushed for even more transparency by directing Maryland Department of Health to publish any and all available data related to nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Under normal circumstances, the Health Department does not publish this information because of patient privacy concerns, but we have taken this unprecedented step out of our commitment to fight these outbreaks and to provide the public with the most thorough and accurate data available in order to understand and defeat this deadly virus.
Today we are taking the following additional actions to continue our aggressive efforts to target and isolate these outbreaks and clusters of cases particularly in nursing homes. I’ve issued an executive order requiring universal testing of all residents and staff at all Maryland nursing homes, regardless of whether they are symptomatic or not. Nursing homes will be prioritized based on an imminent outbreak or a current rising threat of an outbreak. Under this executive order, it will now be mandatory for all facilities to fully comply and cooperate with the strike teams which are deployed by the state. In addition, the executive order requires nursing homes to have a physician, nurse practitioner, physician’s assistant, or registered nurse evaluate all residents on a daily basis. With our expanded universal testing, we should expect to see the number of positive cases significantly rise on both nursing home residents and staff. Any staff who test positive will be immediately discharged into isolation, and we are requiring all these facilities to develop emergency surge staffing plans to ensure continuity of care in the event of an outbreak. To aid them in this effort, today I am announcing that we are also supplementing our strike teams with newly created bridge teams, which will provide emergency clinical staffing to nursing homes that are experiencing crisis. Each bridge team is composed of a registered nurse and 5-7 aides sufficient to care for up to 100 nursing home residents per shift. These new bridge teams include 260 registered nurses and aides who have been contracted with the Maryland Department of Health through an arrangement with Allegis and the Maryland Hospital Association. These team members are all fully vetted and are ready to be immediately deployed statewide and are capable of providing 24-hour coverage for nursing homes in crisis. This executive order also requires nursing home facilities to provide regular informational updates to their residents, resident representatives, and staff regarding COVID-19 infections. It is heart wrenching enough that families can’t visit their loved ones, but it’s even worse when they can’t get information about what is happening inside these facilities. Nursing homes will be required to keep families informed on a regular basis.
While we know that the vast majority of nursing home operators are committed to providing quality care for their residents, we are increasingly concerned and quite frankly outraged that a few operators are not complying with directives from the state, and so today we are appointing Colonel Eric Allely, the state surgeon of the Maryland National Guard, who is up here with me today, to serve as an emergency safety and compliance officer for Maryland nursing homes. He will be charged with directing a multiagency team to ensure compliance with state law. We have been and will continue to take aggressive actions to address the spread of COVID-19 in Maryland nursing homes. Targeting and containing these outbreaks and clusters is critically important to our state’s recovery efforts.
I want to take just a moment to personally address every Marylander who has had difficulty dealing with the serious problems on the state unemployment insurance website. With all of the economic struggles that people are already going through, they should not have to worry about getting the resources that they need and that they deserve. Since the launch of this new website five days ago, more than 245,000 accounts have been activated, and over 100,000 new claims have been filed. We have handled more claims in Maryland just in a short period of time than we did all during the entire year of 2019. This surge in claims is unprecedented, and every single state in America is struggling to keep up with this volume. The good news is that Maryland is now successfully handling an average of 33 new accounts every single minute, and an average of 780 claims are successfully filed every hour. But while we have been able to handle this volume better than many other states in the country, it is simply not good enough. The IT contractor who developed this site and the Department of Labor have fallen short of the high standard that we have set, and the people of Maryland deserve better and the buck stops with me. So I am going to make sure that they do and that we do whatever it takes to get this straight so that every single Marylander gets every single penny of financial assistance that they deserve.
Lastly, today during this pandemic, our healthcare workers, including our doctors, nurses, EMTs, and first responders have proven themselves to be not just essential workers but front-line heroes, from managing a virus that can spread without symptoms to dealing with shortages in protective equipment, while saving people’s lives, and often while being forced to isolate themselves from their loved ones. The challenges that these heroes face are immense, unprecedented, and truly inspiring. As a way for all of us to show them our appreciation, to honor them for their incredible service to our state, I am issuing a proclamation declaring this Saturday, May 2, as Healthcare Heroes’ Day in the state of Maryland. On Saturday night, we will light up this State House dome blue. We will be lighting up Camden Yards blue and the M and T Bank Stadium blue, and we are going to have a flyover of the Navy’s Blue Angels and Army’s Thunderbirds and we’re going to be asking all Marylanders to join us in lighting up the state of Maryland blue to show our immense gratitude for these men and women who truly are the definition of Maryland strong. May God bless each and every one of these American heroes.
With that, I’ll be happy to take questions.
(Question off mic).
The issue with the website, like I said, it’s frustrating to me that any one person ever has to wait. The system is not able to handle it. The federal system is not able to handle it. No state is able to handle it. A number of states have stopped processing. Ours is still running; it’s just running at 33 per minute or whatever numbers I gave you. It’s not fast enough to handle the process. Waiting on the phone. They just came you. With this a week ago. They didn’t used to have these benefits. There never was a website in America to support this. We were one of the first states in the country to create a new one. It’s not good enough, but it is better than waiting for days on the phone and never getting an answer. Some people have been helped but some are not getting the help fast enough, which is why we’re working around the clock. We’ve hired hundreds of people to try to get it fixed. It’s working better than most.
(Question off mic).
So as soon as I heard that you were being denied, we worked to get it up in a day, 24 hours. But as I understand it, there were logical reasons why. It’s out of privacy concerns. Some of these nursing homes, some of them are smaller. It’s patient privacy information. If you say there’s an outbreak here, people will find out who is there and there are concerns of legal issues and privacy concerns of the patients.
I overrode all of that and said because of the patients and the family members who have a right to know. There is some argument internally of whether that is right or not.
(Question off mic).
So the plan that we laid out last week did not talk about a 14-day straight decline. That’s what the President’s claim called for. Most people are opening up anyway.
Our plan calls for 14 days of a flattening or plateauing. We were starting to see that. We’ve seen a couple days go up. When it comes back down, we won’t restart the clock. If we don’t continue to see a spike up, we’ll be in a good position to continue to make progress. It doesn’t have to be 14 consecutive days of going down, and again, it’s not cases. It’s hospitalizations and ICUs. We had some slight upticks for a day or two, but it’s not soon enough. We’re still hopeful we can level off and still move forward.
(Question off mic).
We said on Friday when we launched our plan, I said I was hopeful that we could start to take a look at this in early May. Hopefully we’ll come back and talk with you in early May after we’ve had a chance to look at those numbers.
(Question off mic).
I just addressed all of that in my remarks. They’re going to prioritize first on the outbreaks and clusters in nursing homes, and those things like in Salisbury, there are clusters and outbreaks, and on first responders and healthcare workers. And then the hotspots of the communities where we have the most cases. We’re going to work through all of those in a prioritization just like I described.
(Question off mic).
I’m sorry. I didn’t follow that question.
(Question off mic).
So we’re taking the lead and we’re working with our partners in Delaware and Virginia, because these poultry workers, while there was an outbreak in a Delaware plant, many of those workers live in Maryland. We also have the potential of infecting and having problems at our two plants in Maryland and there are also plants in Virginia. That whole Delmarva peninsula is interconnected. We’re all working together, all the states are working together, and CDC really is jumping in to help us with whatever assistance they possibly can. They’ve been extremely helpful. It’s not so much money but providing boots on the ground, assistance to help us with just getting control of the situation.
(Question off mic).
I’m sure we will be looking for federal assistance, and that’s why we now have FEMA representative and CDC representative on the ground with us.
(Question off mic).
Our first concern was the health and safety of all the workers that are in Maryland, and then our second concern was about all of our poultry farmers across the Eastern Shore and all the health and livelihood of this major industry in Maryland, which is our number one agricultural product, and then the broader issue, we had discussion amongst the governors with the Vice President and the agriculture secretary, labor secretary, and CDC director before I came out to see you about the meat industry in general. There are pork, beef, and poultry workers on the call talking about the breakdown in the food chain, serious outbreaks. The President yesterday issued a directive about trying to make sure we keep these plants open, but we’ve got to feed people in America. So our priority is to make sure we keep these workers safe and keep those plants open so we can keep people fed.
(Question off mic).
We do have the approval of the FDA, who signed off on the states making their own decisions. I thanked on the call last week with the Vice President, I thanked him for the FDA administrator for signing off on our flight from Korea and thanked him directly and he thanked us for thanking him. The President of the FDA made a decision that states could use their own approvals instead of going through a long cumbersome FDA approval process, so we do have that. It was an inaccurate and false story that came out yesterday. There are no other approvals needed from FDA. So that’s not factual. The government has actually purchased also 750,000 tests from Korea too now by the way. So there isn’t an issue with the Korean tests. But with respect to the website, I know that there are — no one has ever created one of these before. We’re very frustrated it hasn’t been fixed but they’re working around to get it fixed. Whether it’s a new contractor starting from scratch. Other states shut theirs down. Ours is processing a couple hundred thousand people, even though it’s slow. I’m not sure shutting it down and starting over is a better solution.
(Question off mic).
We laid out a very detailed plan on Friday about how we’re going to go through that.
(Question off mic).
I’m not very good at math. They give me the facts.
(Question off mic).
That’s what I announced today, that we have had a strategy that’s been focused on nursing homes. 50 days ago, I laid out all the actions we’ve taken over the last 50 days. I think I laid out about 20 other things that we’re going to do as of today in nursing homes but that doesn’t mean we don’t have issues across the rest of the state.
SPEAKER: Last question.
(Question off mic).
GOVERNOR HOGAN: I had two conversations with the County Executive last week, once at Laurel Hospital, where we talked about the deaths. Once was on a call with the rest of the county leaders, and as soon as we got the tests, everybody was like, hey, could we have 100,000 of those tests? I explained, it’s not that simple. The state is going to maintain them, not just send them off. There’s about a nine-step process that requires swabs and reagents and the lab capacity. We’re going to prioritize the use of them as I just laid out about how we’re going to use them, but we are going to be using them at testing centers. We’re doing more testing in PG County than anywhere else. It is a hotspot. It will be on that list after we go through the nursing homes where we’re testing everybody in every nursing home, where we go through the outbreaks, the clusters, and some of these other issues and deal with healthcare workers and first responders. PG County will be at the top of the list where some of the community testing is going to be done and has been done and will continue to be done. Even with those tests and the other tests.
Thank you.