good morning everyone and thank you for being here today as usual i'm joined by dr joe cantor from the louisiana department of health office of public health he will walk you through some updates to the covid dashboard that are being made today and then answer whatever questions you might have yesterday i returned from washington dc where i was able to attend the inauguration of president biden biden and vice president harris and certainly was an honor to represent louisiana at that inaugural inauguration and i will tell you it was a surreal experience because the number of police officers and soldiers outnumbered the number of spectators and i do hope and pray that that never has to happen in our country again but he did speak at length about bringing the country together and achieving more unity as we face together and overcome the many serious challenges that are facing our country and and obviously i look forward to working with him and with the vice president and their administration in order to do that just as i have worked in good faith with the two previous administrations since i've been governor both president obama and president trump's president biden has already taken several key actions on the covet 19 response i and my team have been busy reviewing uh these actions they've all happened over the last day or so and and so we're still gathering information and and there may be additional guidance coming from the federal agencies as to how these things are going to be implemented but there are a couple of key aspects that i did want to highlight first the president's waived the local match requirement for much of the critical work related to our co-vid response here in louisiana and around the country you may remember that last august as soon as our state reached the monetary threshold for asking for relief from what is under the stafford act a 7525 cost share 75 percent federal government 25 state we met the threshold to go to 9010 and and we made that request and and that's the most that we can request however the president is able to go to 100 cents on the dollar he has elected to do that that is very helpful to us and we're still trying to figure out all of the categories of of assistance that are available with that enhanced match but we do know that it covers title 32 which is the national guard uh having those on on active duty and so that's that's been going to be very very helpful to us and we're we're going to continue to work to see all the other areas where 100 cents on the dollar will be paid by the federal government obviously i'm very pleased with the with the news that we got in this respect second the president established the health equity task force to address many of the inequities that the pandemic has brought to the forefront as a result of the disparate impacts of covid19 on individuals and and you can see that here in louisiana as well and you may remember that in april last year uh here in louisiana we we saw what was happening in in terms of the people who were being infected having serious cases of kobit 19 and the impact on deaths and knew that those deaths were not representative of the population as a whole and so we created our own health equity task force and so i'm glad that he did that at the federal level and i'm going to be working to make sure that whatever they do at the federal level benefits us but also the fact that we've got a head start on them we need to share our information with the federal government as well so it can inform their work product and we'll be making sure that we're interacting uh with them at the federal level it is very apparent both here in louisiana and nationally that we may remain at a very critical point in our co-vid response nationally you can see the number of deaths that are accumulating every day the number of people in the hospitals cases that are that are developing percent positivity all extremely high today we reported one thousand nine hundred thirty seven new cases on twenty nine thousand seventy seven tests sadly we're also reporting 41 additional deaths today that's a total of 8483 since the beginning of the pandemic 1747 individuals are hospitalized across the state for covid 19. that is a decrease of 53 from yesterday 216 of those patients are on ventilators and that is a decrease of 17. we have now surpassed 5 million tests administered in louisiana over the last last 10 months or so since we since we started testing obviously we are starting to see some positive signs that we've plateaued on this most recent surge that is gratifying but we remain at a very precarious place because the percent positivity remains in excess of 10 percent across the state the number of new cases every day is extremely high all 64 parishes that are a high incidence meaning the number of new cases as relative to the overall population it's in the highest category that the cdc measures we also were at a very high level of hospitalizations and and while we're no longer at that 2100 level where we were knocking on the door just about a week ago i will tell you that we remain with too many people with covet 19 in the hospital it continues to stress our health care delivery system but we are beginning to see what we hope is the formation of a trend the development of a trend where we can continue to come down but that's only going to happen if people embrace the mitigation measures that we know work to slow the spread flatten the curve the reason we had the surge is because of all the holiday related activities especially travel and and and social gatherings uh where individuals did not do what was necessary to limit the spread um and and now that we've passed that period and and certainly that's what we're that's what we're seeing uh develop um across the state is is that stabilization on our numbers and and starting to come down the lagging indicators deaths um that's why we've reported 100 deaths over two days 159 deaths over three days just unacceptably high but hopefully if we can keep all of our numbers moving in the right direction those deaths will start to come down as well i also wanted to take a moment just to talk about the variants of the virus that are beginning to emerge around the country as you know just i think it was the last week we disclosed that we had verified here in louisiana the presence of the uk variant of the virus i think there are about 20 states across the country now that that have this variant it appears that this variant is more transmissible meaning people are more contagious and it's not more virulent meaning it doesn't cause a more severe outcome on average um and and as best we know it will respond to the vaccines uh as we would want it to the problem is if it's more easily transmissible then we know that more people will get covid19 and therefore more people will be in the hospital more people will die than would otherwise be the case and it is more important than ever then especially with the modeling that shows that by march this particular variant of the b117 variant of the coronavirus could be the predominant strain in the united states of america and here in louisiana so between now and then we have to do everything we can to get our baseline numbers down to create as much capacity in our hospitals as possible to minimize the number of new cases that we have between now and then so that so that we will be uh in the best possible position to weather that storm uh that is being predicted right now there are also variants uh that uh are um have been found in brazil and in south america that could be potentially problematic and i don't believe they have been discovered here in the united states yet you know because of the way this pandemic travels across the the world i think it's probably a matter of time before that happens i can tell you that um the number of samples of the virus that that are being genetically genetically sequenced is increasing but it still remains inadequate for us to do the surveillance that we really need to do in our country in order to know um what strains we're dealing with on a day-to-day basis but the number of samples that are being genetically sequenced is at least doubling and we're looking at ways to have more of that done in the state of louisiana as well so so there should be some more information about that coming up soon on the vaccine front uh we continue to see progress um the information that i have right now is that louisiana has administered 301 316 doses and of course that obviously changed since the time that got ridden um and and in fact that was yesterday's update so that doesn't account for any uh vaccines that have been administered today the cdc currently ranks louisiana's 10th among all states for vaccine administered per 100 000 residents so vaccine utilization they have louisiana at number 10 in the country we're certainly not satisfied with where we are we're going to continue to improve uh and become more efficient in the way that we distribute administer the vaccine but the limiting factor for us as it is for every state is simply the number of doses of vaccine being allocated to us on a weekly basis you're going to get some information from dr cantor in just a few minutes but we've basically been flat on vaccine allocations over the last four weeks and and our plan as a country and as a state is premised upon increasing allocations over time obviously i still believe that's going to happen but it's but it's been a little bit slower than obviously we would like i we wouldn't be where we are without an awful lot of people working extremely hard to include not only the people at the department of health but we have pharmacies and hospitals and clinics and community organizations we have the national guard we have so many different organizations and individuals working very very hard and i want to just thank them on behalf of all of the people of louisiana i'm encouraged by the progress that we're making and i know that we have a long way to go and as i mentioned the biggest hurdle we have is that the demand clearly greatly exceeds the supply that's actually in some ways a good thing because it tells us we have a lot of people in louisiana who desire to be vaccinated and and i can tell you there's still too much hesitancy around the vaccine in louisiana and elsewhere in the country but the number of people the percentage of people who are vaccine has hesitant appears to be diminishing over time as it should because we know the vaccine is safe and i'm talking about pfizer i'm talking about moderna because they have been granted euh but i will tell you in the future any vaccine that is granted an emergency use authorization is safe and effective otherwise it wouldn't be given that eua by the food and drug administration so they're safe and the effective but are also the only way that we're going to put this pandemic behind us so it is good to see more people wanting to be vaccinated so we're anxiously awaiting uh increasing allocations um and we're gearing up now to prepare for those increasing allocations so that while we're not doing mass vaccination events currently we are planning and preparing for those in fact that's not anything new to the way louisiana operates and by the way we hope and and this is something i heard dr fauci speak about yesterday that the next vaccine comes online and may be available for administration as early as the beginning of march and that would be the johnson and johnson single dose vaccine which would be a game changer and of course we can't get too far ahead of ourselves because the clinical data is is being put together now and i think in in a couple of weeks they're going to be submitting that information for that emergency use authorization but that would that would obviously be very very helpful to us to bring on a third vaccine and have an additional allocation of a single dose vaccine so that when those individuals receive that dose they are vaccinated and of course we'll have to monitor whatever the advisory committee on immunization practices comes up with is recommendations for that particular vaccine but it should be very helpful but there's a lot of talk out there about mass vaccination events and we hear it locally we hear it nationally and typically the the story goes that they have a venue they've got everything set up they're ready to go they just don't have the vaccine to be able to execute in the numbers uh that they would like and and as a result we're we're not even trying these mass vaccination events in louisiana yet because in order to resource them with vaccine we would literally have to stockpile vaccine over a period of time so we wouldn't send it out to our enrolled providers so that they could be administered as soon as we receive it we would be holding it back in order to put it together to do a mass vaccination event well that defeats the purpose of trying to have as many people vaccinated as soon as possible within the priority groups uh that we've established now we do look forward to having some mass vaccination events when our allocations increase and we're able to do that but it's it's not something that you're going to see immediately now we do have some partners out there particularly hospitals that will have the the the flexibility to take their allocation of doses and go out into the community as opposed to administering those on their campuses and we're going to be working through that as we move forward but i did want to take just a moment to speak about mass vaccination events um and and why you're not yet seeing those in louisiana it would literally slow down the administration the vaccine in our state where we to undertake those at this time uh that brings me to today's announcement ldh is adding a new dashboard new data to its its dashboard it's it's about vaccinations now you will be able to see more information about the the number of doses that we have administered across the state who's getting the vaccine in louisiana by region by age by gender by race and then just as the the covet dashboard evolved over time and became more granular in the data that it that it presents that's going to happen on this dashboard as well it's critical information that we know where we are and how to target our future efforts and this is going to be helpful but we also want to be as transparent as we can be with the people of louisiana i believe transparency breeds confidence and so we're going to try to do that ldh will update these breakdowns on tuesdays and thursdays as part of its larger covid vaccine updates now one of the things that i will point out now that that is a bit of a problem is the data that we have around race because when you look at that i think about 55 56 percent of the people being vaccinated are being categorized as other or unknown and so clearly that's that's not the case and so we're going to make every effort to ensure that the enrolled providers who are administering vaccine are accurately completely and timely submitting data to us via links where where that picture clears up because quite frankly we don't really know what's happening there when it comes to vaccination by race and one of the things that we're focused on here not just with respect to vaccinations but overall is equity that's why we formed the health equity task force um so we will be making sure that that information is better represented going forward and we'll get that fixed the department is actively working to enroll more pharmacies and other enrolled providers in our links immunization system especially those in the underserved communities but we're getting close to 2 000 enrolled providers that's a lot and that's that's more than the vast majority of other states who took us a different approach but it's serving us very well because we're able to have a vaccine shipped directly to enrolled providers all over the state of louisiana and we can we can be sure that every week we have vaccine go into all 64 parishes and so we're going to continue to to to work it from this perspective we will make sure that we have strike teams available so that if we see that there are areas of our state where we're not able to get enough vaccine in uh and and administered as we would like that we will be able to see whether it's an urban area or a um rural area we're gonna have strike teams much like we did around community testing for covid we're going to be able to send in in coordination with local governments send in strike teams in order to administer vaccine and you're going to see some of that in the not too distant future as well so i'm going to ask dr cantor to come up now he's going to share more information on these new features i would encourage you to direct your questions to him about the these features or anything else that's happening with respect to covid that you may be interested in and then i'll come back after dr cantor's finished thank you thank you governor good afternoon everyone hope everyone has had a good week coming back from from the holiday we i'll talk a little bit about where we are with kobe we'll talk a little bit about the vaccine and i'll talk a little bit about a new feature with um exposure notifications that we'll be launching today which is very exciting to us as the governor had mentioned our numbers for covid have uh begin to perhaps plateau a little bit it's always easier to make those um judgments after the fact we're in the middle of it now but they do seem to be plateauing a little bit percent positivity is at 10.3 percent but as the governor said it's it's very very high and we're thankful that it's no longer continuing to go up quite frankly it was it would have been drastic it hadn't gone up any farther but it transmission is still is still very high this is still a very dangerous point in time for louisiana as the governor mentioned all 64 parishes have um greater than 100 new cases per hundred thousand residents per seven days which according to the cdc criteria puts them in the highest risk category so if you were to look at the map judged by the cdc community risk transmission categorizations all 64 parishes are deep red right now um it's been that way for a couple weeks now um there's a lot of covid um we know that hospitalizations are a little bit of a lagging uh measure and we know that fatalities are certainly a lagging measure and as the governor said as well it continues to be unacceptable to us the number of fatalities that we have really for the past few weeks we've been reporting between 40 and 70 new deaths a day that are covered related that's a number that that weighs very heavily on me it's a number that weighs very heavily on everyone in the department of health and i know it does as well for the governor and his team um and we know each of those fatalities there are family members that are now grieving because of that so i'll ask folks to keep that in mind there still is a lot of covid circulating in louisiana it still is a very dangerous time it's still very important for us to be following the mitigating measures and even more so now because we know confirmed what we presumed was true before that the the uk variant is in louisiana so we've identified one case as the governor said we send samples regularly up to the cdc we do have a handful of samples which are in the process of being looked at and confirmed by the cdc if they show to be positive we'll announce that as well but but we should presume we have many more cases than the one that we've been able to identify and what we know about this variant is that it's more easily transmissible perhaps 50 percent more transmissible we do not think it's any more virulent meaning we don't think it's making more people we don't think it's making people sicker than they would be if they were infected with the other strand but when you have more transmission you just have more people getting sick because of that because there's more virus out there we do think that the two vaccines we have now the pfizer and the moderna are a good match for this variant and that's awfully good news but um i'm not going to be surprised if we see our transmission rates go up even farther in the coming weeks because we can expect this variant to spread farther within louisiana everyone needs to know that everyone needs to be careful because of that i'm happy to announce that we have another tool uh to help us with exposure notifications this is a an initiative that's being launched today and it's a it's a it's an it's an app on your phone called covet defense it's available now on the app store it's both available for android phones and for iphones and this is a exposure notification program that in a anonymous and confidential way will push a notice to users if they come in close contact with somebody else who is participating in the program and identified as a positive case of covid it's completely anonymous it does not transmit any protected or personal health information it does not track anyone's location it does not feed the state any of that information in an anonymous and coded fashion it communicates via bluetooth in a certain radius and if someone is identified as positive they will get a code so to say from the contact tracer that they enter into the app on their end that will allow their phone to anonymously communicate just by bluetooth any other participating phones within that close contact radius and so an end user if they do come in contact unbeknownstly to someone else who is positive they will get a push notice on their phone letting them know that that contact happened advises them to take precautionary measures this is another tool i think this is going to help us certainly help people know that they've been potentially put at risk i think it's going to be really useful in some settings to be honest i think i think we'll find some use in college campuses i think other workplaces where sometimes it's challenging to go back and do do contact tracing this is going to prove to be very useful a number of other states have started using these type of programs and they've worked well we've been looking at what's happening in other states and particularly with the variant now this is going to be helpful for us i mean we don't want to leave any any tool on the table so to say so i'm happy that this is out there it's completely voluntary no one is required to do this if you don't go actively download the app onto your phone then then you're nothing nothing new happens you're not participating but for those who are interested and i would really encourage you folks to do it because it's it's an added layer of protection it's available on the app now it's 100 free and 100 private as the governor had mentioned for the dashboard we are happy to put some more demographic information on there now so as of today's update at noon um for vaccines administered you'll be able to see a breakdown on the statewide basis in terms of gender in terms of age in terms of race and then regionally where vaccines have gone and and how many have been administered we're going to add just like we did to the regular cova dashboard more granularity to that as time goes on i think it is unfortunate that about 56 of individuals are currently categorized as either unknown or other race that's clearly not true as the governor said we're working with our vaccine providers to clean that up we need our vaccine providers to enter in accurate information about race it's important to us important everyone in the state to be able to track this to be able to know that vaccines being distributed in an equitable fashion we need good data coming into us to be able to do that so that's an ask that i'm making of all vaccine providers now that when you do fill out information and i know the feds ask an awful lot of information of vaccine providers but it is really important to put in accurate information for the patient's race because that's the only way that we're all going to be able to know that this vaccine is being distributed equitably um looking towards the allocations that we're getting from operation warp speed uh unfortunately it's it's the exact same amount that we've gotten last week so by the by the end of this week by by tomorrow uh we would have been allocated to louisiana a total of 379 950 first doses of which 93 600 have been directed towards the federal long-term care partnership program that's the nursing home and assisted living facility vaccination program leaving 286 350 doses for in-state distribution for the next coming week our allocation is going to be flat it's going to be the same thing we got this week which is 29 250 doses of pfizer and 28 900 doses of moderna just like last week the cdc has granted us a reprive and we do not have to contribute any of those moderna into the long-term care partnership program because they have enough banked up so all of that will come to us for in-state distribution just like it did this current week what we've been told by the operation warp speed is to expect similar allocations for at least the next four to five weeks unfortunately that means that we can't be doing the the very large-scale events that we've been prepping for for so long once supply increases and certainly once um the johnson johnson or astrazeneca vaccines get authorized and become available to us we're looking forward to doing that for now we're going to continue with the very broad network we've got about 1800 uh providers enrolled as the governor mentioned that's more than most states and we really do think that's going to serve us well down the road once we have enough supply we're going to have to be firing on all cylinders we're going to have to be doing the big events and putting it into small clinics and pharmacies throughout the state we've stood up the more challenging part of that now which is this broad network of providers we put in a lot of legwork the team and the health department has worked very hard to do that that's going to pay dividends to us down the road when we have enough supply to leverage all of that at one time i am encouraged that we're moving vaccine well where again as the governor mentioned cdc has us at 10th among states and i want to get to number one but i am encouraged that the strategy we're using is working well and i'm particularly appreciative of our vaccine providers and these are hospitals these are clinics and these are pharmacies and they're working so hard to connect vaccine to patients and we're asking an awful lot of them you know because we don't find out how much vaccine we're getting exactly until a few days before it ships and gets arrived here we're not able to tell providers how much they're going to get so we're asking them to minimize waste they've done a great job of that we're asking them to only make appointments and not have people congregate and form lines and we're asking them to do all of that with not a lot of notice week on a week on what they're getting or if they're getting at all that week they've really stepped up to the challenge and all of our providers hospitals clinics and pharmacies so i just want to express our appreciation of what they're doing they are the reason along with everyone else who's coming up to get vaccinated that the state's doing as well as we are right now um before i take a couple questions i do just want to reiterate that um although we are plateauing with with transmission we are incredibly high i mean having a percent positivity above 10 for the state is is still astronomical there's a lot of risk out there a lot of danger i'm not convinced we've seen the entire bump from new year's yet um and then we know that this new variant is going to be taking hold it is taking hold you know under our nose right now so all the reason the world for people to be cautious and i really ask people to continue to think about you know what's what's important to them what's important to their family and it just takes one or two bad decisions to have you know a family member land in the icu and that's just heartbreaking when that happens so i do ask people to to be cognizant of that and continue to be careful be happy to answer a few questions if there are any sam uh on the race data can you talk more about why exactly we have 56 people in this category is this a matter of patients selecting a certain box is it provider selecting a certain box and do all providers have like more or less the same just need to get them to fill it out properly it runs a number of those at the end the information that gets input into our lynx system is the same but different providers have different interfaces for that some of the larger systems hospitals and some larger clinics have a direct linked interface with their electronic health record and so information gets pushed sometimes that that it link works sometimes it doesn't when it doesn't we need to go back and fix it that's that's part of it sometimes and this has been happening with some of the larger hospital systems they will kind of as you allude to ask patients to pre-enroll their information ahead of time and that typically doesn't get vetted too well i mean if a patient enters in or doesn't answer the question then then that's that's the error there and then for providers that enter it in i say manually but i just mean in the computer directly not on a direct feed i think there's probably the temptation just for expediency's sake to click other for race and move on because they're trying to get through patients as quickly as possible and we do ask a lot of them in terms of information so i just want to communicate with providers how important it is for that piece of information because we we have no way to track this which is an important measure to track unless we get the good information so it is kind of an all of the above answer to that and just like the data if you'll remember way in the beginning when we started the covet dashboard there was a lot of noise in that data and you know we cleaned up in time as we were able to communicate i expect that to happen here so i i want to see that number that 56 number 56 get lower and lower each time you guys send out that memo to the providers telling them not to click other that was just the tuesday so i don't think enough times really elapsed yeah but i do next week i really hope to see it improving yes sir it's a process um we do our best job to direct it proportionately based on where people live and what the populations are and the parameters around that have changed a little bit you know we're in week six right now next week i think will be net week seven and back in the first couple weeks we were directing it primarily to hospitals so they went to where the hospitals were you know for the front line health care workers and then we began standing up this network of community providers pharmacists and clinics and so over the first couple weeks of that we in some cases were limited to where enrolled providers were now that we have the network pretty robust and nothing close to 1800 i believe across the state we're able to select more um and some providers are more able to handle pfizer have ultra cold storage than other ones so i think week one week you're going to see it reflect more specifically the population of that area and that that will become apparent week on week what louisiana has requested from the federal government or is it you know i wish that the situation was that we would make a request and then the feds fill it what actually happens is every week the federal government tells us what we are entitled to and then we place those orders and and we as you would imagine order exactly the amount that the feds have offered to give to us that is based that to date has been based on population they they what the federal government has done is take some vaccine off the top so to say for a federal interest va hospital department of defense other things other of the remaining of the lot they do a calculation based on the percentage of state residents who are above 18 years old who are to get the vaccine and i i believe the louisiana percentage was 1.46 percent of that total number that was the calculation used that's what's been used to date there's been some suggestion by the previous administration that they would be transitioning to a more incentive-based allotment where they would allot it towards states who are using quickly a greater percentage of that if that did happen i think louisiana would be advantaged because we're number 10 in states right now i'm not i've not gotten confirmation that the new federal administration is going to do that or not yes sir despite everyone's reassurances that the vaccines are safe hospitals in the baton rouge metro are telling us that nearly half of their health care workers have declined the covid19 vaccine is that concerning it is it is i think part of that is probably deferred or delayed i've heard a lot of healthcare providers say that they wanted to wait a little bit and see other people get it um i would advise them not to as you know right now there's not really enough vaccine to be able to expand the eligibility but that soon enough we will and i don't want healthcare providers if they want to get vaccinated i don't want them to jeopardize their opportunity to do so so it's it is a safe vaccine it's an efficacious vaccine really i mean as far as vaccines go the two we have now are really home runs and it it does pain me when the healthcare provider who is putting them on the size on the line has you know given so much to their patients that they deprive themselves of that opportunity checked around the state to see if other hospitals and other cities are lining up with those same figures as well numbers i've seen have been told anecdotally vary and some hospitals have gone well above that and some hospitals below that it's it's been a mixed picture yep sam a lot of appointments related to supply issues it looked like they overshot how much vaccine they were going to get are you changing how you're coordinating or are you advising providers at all to avoid kind of mass postponements of appointments like that we are i think what happened there is is the institution really leaned in i think and tried to line things up and there was some confusion because of what was announced by the white house and that there was there was a suggestion that a bunch of stored vaccines were going to be made available and a lot of states got very excited about that and then within one or two days it came out that there actually wasn't anything else available and and i think that's really unfortunate we've been as clear as possible from our perspective that we don't think our allocations we have no reason to expect our allocations to increase substantially over the next four or five weeks maybe the fed said maybe five percent maybe even 10 but nothing substantively and so we're trying to communicate as best we can the providers that not only are we don't think we're going to get substantially more vaccine in the near future but we are trying to allocate to the whole state and and just because the provider got some amount one week unfortunately we're not able to guarantee how much they're going to get the next week because we're not going to find out until a few days i think that's probably what happened there i mean i i'm encouraged that providers are leaning in on this i'm encouraged that there's so much demand and once our supply meets that i think we'll be in a really good spot yes sir so you mentioned the supply being much higher much lower than demand what has been the biggest challenge here has it been the supply or has it been um trying to figure out where the supply should go especially since we have these flawed racial numbers it's the supply you know i mean look it's when you have limited supply it's always difficult decisions to make sure it's going to the best place where it can be used you know by the most people but at the end of the day we have many more providers clinics hospitals and pharmacies in louisiana who are telling us hey we're ready to to vaccinate people you don't need to give it to us we're ready to go and we have many more people a lot of people who are 70 and above saying i i want it i i'm on a waitlist on my many wait lists i want it um that's where we stand now i think again it's at the end of the day it's i'd rather have that problem than have more vaccine and and have no one want to give it out or have no one want it in the first place and i'm encouraged that when we do get more we're going to be able to use it very effectively i just you know i'm frustrated with everyone that there's not more supply to be had right now yeah last question much has been completed well it's an interesting question you know for so right now we've done phase 1a and we're in the middle of phase 1b tier 1. if you add up the eligible population there how many people in theory and it's you know it's population estimates it's about 900 000 people and clearly we haven't had 900 000 doses be made available to us 1a plus 1b tier 1 equals about 900 000 900 000. so um the x factor is how many people within those uh buckets are gonna want to be vaccinated and um the general sense the advice that we've gotten from the cdc is it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to move into a successive tier while you still have long wait lists because you don't actually create opportunities for vaccination you just make longer wait lists so you know we keep in pretty close contact with our providers and you know once we start hearing that there is some space in there that there's a little more availability that's going to be a signal that that we move on to the next phase listen i really do appreciate um everyone's work here and again i can't emphasize enough i'm encouraged that our numbers have not increased even farther in terms of of covered transmission but they're still awfully high way too high for comfort and there's still a lot of risk out there so families still need to be taking a lot of precautions thanks everyone thank you dr cantor as you can see there's a lot of information to go over today and i did want to go back over a couple of things one is the hesitancy for vaccination that we saw among health care workers and i think it was it was a question we got that like all vaccine hesitancy around the country in all groups it is diminishing over time and i can tell you for example that our long-term care partnerships where we have walgreens and cvs going into our nursing homes when they went in for the very first clinic visit to to start administering the first doses to staff and to residents the number of staff that were actually availing themselves of the vaccine was much lower than we wanted but now that they're going back for the second visit to give the second dose we're seeing many more staff saying okay now i'm ready for my first dose and and that's that's obviously uh um gratifying and and i look for that to happen across the board and certainly it needs to because again the only way we ever put this pandemic behind us is to have a sufficient percentage of our population vaccinated and we know that these vaccines are safe and effective and in conversations with governors from all over the country and we do this generally once a week on a video telephone conference i had an opportunity to visit with a number of governors on wednesday we all are asking for the exact same thing we want more vaccine as soon as we can possibly get it and we want more lead time to know how many doses we're going to get so that we can do a better job of planning at the state level but also then communicating allocations down to all of our enrolled providers uh and we have 1800 or so enrolled providers we don't have 1800 entities out there administering the vaccine but we're we're uh we're i think about 300 or so about 300 right now of the 1800 but this is the way that it works first of all we have been flat basically flat in our allocations of first dose vaccines for four straight weeks we find out on tuesday a planning number for the following week anytime before thursday that number can change but we start to plan on tuesday that number gets confirmed to us by operation war speed on thursday that is when we finalize our plan and we order vaccine and then we start to communicate immediately with those enrolled providers who are going to be receiving vaccine and if they get it direct shipped to them they're going to get it on monday or tuesday of the following week if they get it through our wholesale distributor in state they're going to get it on tuesday and wednesday of the following week so we're asking an awful lot of our enrolled providers and our partners and they're doing great work and they all want more vaccine than we're able to give them um and so on occasion and and i hope this doesn't happen often going forward you're going to see and that that certain entities and i know what happened with ochsner they had to to call some people back and say i'm sorry i know you have a scheduled appointment but we're not going to be able to get to you this week because our allocation um didn't increase the way that we had thought it would or hoped it would that's all the function of the of the vaccine we're getting and the amount of time we have from the time we know what that weekly allocation is until we can communicate that to our partners but they are all doing extremely good work and and on behalf of the people of louisiana i want to thank them uh because we wouldn't be where we are without them no way uh and we got a long way to go and they are going to be very key to our overall success as we move forward and like everything i mean it seems like we've been doing this a really long time our first vaccine was put in uh to an arm on december the 14th so we're just over a month into what is going to be a well i don't know how long this is going to last to be to be quite honest with you but it's going to be many uh many months so i did just want to to go through that very quickly the app that dr cantor mentioned i just want to make sure people know that it is free it is voluntary it is completely anonymous and it allows you to reduce potential exposure risk to your family your friends your neighbors co-workers and others and it is available at the app store and you go to covid defensela.com covid defensela dot com this is an additional tool this doesn't replace anything it doesn't obviate the need to do away with masking distancing washing your hands staying home when you're sick any of those things those things are incredibly important and probably because of the emergence of these various variant strands of the virus more important than ever uh and so let's all double down on the things that we know that work and while we were very optimistic and hopeful about the vaccine and the vaccination effort that is the way we put the pandemic behind us it remains the case that this mask is our best tool at present because we're limited in the number of vaccine doses we get every week we're not limited in who can wear the mask there's masks out there for everybody so so please do that let's not uh let up and instead let's step up all right um i'll take questions now our next briefing by the way will be next thursday um and i think we're going to i'm sorry yeah next thursday and i'll do my radio show on wednesday of this week coming up because i wasn't able to do it this past wednesday as it was scheduled because i went up to the inauguration i also want to let you know that i'm going to be in southwest louisiana particularly in cameron accountancy parishes on tuesday to deal with hurricane recovery and a little bit of covet work there too and do plan to have a press availability uh on that trip yes sir giving any outreach to black communities or minority communities for the vaccine yes and in fact there is a meeting of the health equity task force today that dr cantor is going to be talking to him and and it is about amplifying the communications the messaging to the african-american community to overcome vaccine hesitancy to promote the vaccine its safety its efficacy and by the way this is happening all across the country as well and so absolutely key part of what we're doing yes ma'am reporting on the unemployment situation here in louisiana hundreds of people call our tip line and email us daily have you heard from lwc any concerns about the length of time it takes to pay out unemployment claims and could louisiana yeah well the answer is yes and yes um you know we have unprecedented numbers of people who are filing unemployment claims that's been the case throughout the pandemic but we also have new forms of assistance that have been created by legislation coming from congress and and it is incumbent upon us to make sure that we're doing what we can to protect against fraudulent claims and and so we've had to increase uh certain measures that that we do to to ensure that it's a valid claim and that that requires identification and and so forth i will tell you under the most recent legislation that was passed by congress in december from january the 1st through january the 15th lwc distributed more than 166 million dollars in unemployment aid across all of those unemployment insurance programs last week alone lw received just under 22 000 new unemployment insurance claims and paid 88 million dollars in all of last week out on those claims but having said that uh and and i speak to ava dejoy and her team often they're they're still doing more they're pulling more and more people they're extending their hours they're working through the weekends in order to get through these claims and make sure that they're paid as timely as possible and and i will tell you just a recent i think it was last week the u.s department of labor the outgoing administration recognized the louisiana workforce commission as number one in the country in terms of timely benef benefits payments uh for for but having said that and and i am gratified that we're number one in the country we have an awful lot of people who are waiting longer than they should uh to get uh these uh payments and so we're going to continue to improve yes sir you mentioned the i guess is this the bite administration telling you to expect flat allocations of vaccines for four to five weeks and where did that collect what is the reasoning behind that why because that's not obviously as you mentioned but it wasn't part of what we assumed would happen we thought it'd be ramping up so why are we getting flat allocations for the next one well what i can tell you for sure is going back for the last four weeks we have been basically flat everybody was working under the assumption that over time the manufacturing output would increase and allocations would increase as well and that that we would be ramping up of the number of doses that we were administering especially first doses and and i do want to just stop for a second make sure that everybody knows we are holding second doses so the second doses are absolutely available in louisiana if it's if you've received a pfizer uh dose first dose then three weeks later you get your second dose and you go to the same place in fact you're making your appointment at the same time you receive your first dose and if it's moderna it's 28 days later and so we are absolutely holding those doses and so when we talk about uh stagnant or flat allocations we're principally talking about first doses uh out there so they have been flat for for four weeks we've been told on and this is recently so this you know if you go back and look at representations that were made back in november and december we always believed that that there would be increasing allocations that is going to happen at some point it just isn't happening yet um and and that presents some problems uh as as you can imagine but but we have been told that that the allocations will will be relatively flat going forward for the next uh four to five weeks as well and then hopefully those those allocations will start to to increase and you know that that is the limiting factor not just here in louisiana but around the country if you just look and see what's happening no matter what model a state has implemented for vaccine distribution and administration nobody can administer a vaccine those that they don't have and so that that is the the limitation and it's it's my hope that they'll be able to to speed the ramp up in production well you know sam i we're getting as best i can tell 1.46 percent of what's being made available to the country so i can only assume or is it 1.64 it's one of those because that's our pro rata allocation uh so i can only assume that the manufacturing coming out of pfizer and out of moderna that is being made available to the united states of america is flat um i mean that's so i that's the answer yes ma'am [Music] it's a perfect decision on the keystone pipeline louisiana louisianans are worried about how energy policies may impact jobs in our economy here do you have any advice on how the new administration may impact our jobs here well obviously what all administrations i'm concerned about any decision that would adversely impact our economy investment that happens here job creation that happens here jobs that that get maintained here and i don't know exactly what impact that would be if the keystone pipeline isn't completed but but rest assured that any decision where i believe there's going to be an adverse impact to the state i'll be communicating to the administration my concerns and and asking them to to to take another look and change change course uh with respect to those decisions that they've made about lwc what do i tell the thousands of people who aren't receiving payment well first of all you can tell them that we're working as hard as we can um basically um uh all day and and and over the weekends uh the backlog that that the secretary desjardins reported to you all um on january the 8th was 30 000 claims 16 000 of those have been cleared out an additional 80 employees for from the workforce commission have been pulled in to help with the remaining backlog and we're just going to continue to work as as fast as we can um and and look if if you're there and you you need that payment in order to to buy food to pay rent to to live uh there's nothing i can say today that is going to satisfy them they they need that that check i get it uh and that's that's what i've instructed ava to do with her team and and again they're doing it better than anybody else in the country but that doesn't help those individuals until they get that check and and i understand that but we also have an obligation to make sure we're not paying fraudulent claims and we have stopped 60 000 claims that that had every appearance of being fraudulent because of the the measures that we have implemented in and typically and i just want you to understand this if for the normal unemployment insurance program you have an employee and when that employee no longer has a job you confirm that with an employer but under the new program these benefits are being made available to people who are self-employed they're get so you can't do that normal confirmation and so you have to make absolutely sure that you're dealing with someone who is entitled to the benefit that they are applying for uh and it didn't take long for the bad actors around the united states of america to know that there was a new program that had been stood up that they were paying benefits to new categories of of workers and that that traditional form of verification wasn't available and so we had to increase the the amount of identification and so forth that they were showing in order to prove eligibility for the benefits and and that that has has slowed down the payment of claims but it was absolutely essential because if i pay 60 000 fraudulent claims then that 60 000 bona fide claimants said i can't pay because i'm out of money right and so we have to try to get it all right and we're doing that we're not perfect we make mistakes it takes longer than we want it to take i get it but those are the things that we're dealing with and i will say it again number one in the country and timeliness of claims being paid yes sir uh so we've been in this almost a year now um we've been it seems like ten yes it seems so long um so i know dr cantor talked about it looks like we're plateauing that kind of thing but the second variant it's there's lots of coverage still out there with that being said we're all of us in here are wearing our masks but there are still people out there who aren't um can you maybe take us back in time for lack of a better word our term about the math mandate is it state mandated or what's what's what's the best way to describe it because it seems as though there's some confusion behind it well first of all there should be no confusion and the science is very clear that masks work they work to slow the spread the transmission of covid19 and because we know that the primary means of transmission or through droplets that that are emitted when people speak when they breathe and so forth when they cough obviously and having a mask over your mouth and nose prevents that from happening we also know that it also protects the wearer we didn't know that initially but we now know that because of additional studies that the wearer of a mask is also benefiting from having that mask on because airborne particles from someone else don't get through the mask as easily so the science has been very very clear and the cdc recommendation on this has been very clear wasn't early on if you remember at the very beginning of the pandemic and i think i don't know that it was ever a statement about the efficacy of mask more than it was about the fact that there was a scarcity of masks and we wanted the mass that were available to be allocated to front line medical workers people at hospitals and so forth but is but as soon as soon as the um supply of mass started to catch up and they did some studies the cdc has been recommending that people wear a mask and and that recommendation is for all 50 states and all the territories and in addition to that the white house coronavirus task force recommended mass mandates especially in states like ours where we have unacceptably high positivity uh transmission new cases and and hospitalizations and so forth and so nobody should be confused by that masks remain essential in fact as i mentioned earlier the vast majority of people in louisiana today can't go get a vaccine you can't it's just not available we don't have the supply but you can't put a mask on and it's essential that you do that and it is probably more essential than ever if you look at our current numbers and you you look at those numbers in the context of what we are being told to expect again by the cdc that this new uk variant could be the dominant strain in louisiana and around the country as early as march it is 50 percent more transmissible and when you look at the high baseline that we're at right now first of all we need to get that as low as we possibly can you can only do that by wearing a mask but if you look at that high baseline where we are right now and then you think that that over the coming weeks we're going to have a strain that is ever more prevalent in louisiana and elsewhere that is 50 percent more easily transmitted then you know that we we need to be wearing masks and i don't for the life of me understand how wearing a mask despite the cdc recommendation despite what was coming out of the white house coronavirus task force every single week that that some people developed an opposition to it and and kind of base that on political ideology or it just never made any sense to me still doesn't make sense to me that virus doesn't know or care whether someone who wears a mask or doesn't wear a mask as a republican or a democrat or independent or who they voted for i mean that that just the idea that that that happened here and around the country um just just doesn't make sense to me but no matter how we got to where we are today it is never too late to do the right thing the right thing is to wear a mask it is how we are a good neighbor to one another in the middle of a pandemic that is obviously deadly we reported 41 deaths today 59 yesterday 59 the day before that i mean just look and quite honestly it's not a very onerous thing to do so i encourage people no matter what you've done up to now put on the mask and let's get through this together with the least loss of life possible um so if we'll do this we're all going to we're all going to be better for it i do want to thank the people of louisiana uh for the work that they've done thus far uh encourage those who haven't been quite as conscientious to do better and let you know we're going to do everything that we can moving forward to to ensure that we preserve our hospital capacity for life-saving care minimize death and speed the number of people who are able to receive vaccines in these priority groups and we'll have more information for that on that for you next week and until then you'll be able to see on the dashboard the covid the state of covet and the state of vaccinations across the state of louisiana i do want to thank all the people at the department of health who are putting the effort forward to make this information available to the people of louisiana and i also want to thank all of our partners across the state of louisiana who are actually making those doses those vaccinations happen so that we have something to report on i continue in many many ways to be inspired by the people of louisiana who are good honest decent people uh and and they they want to be uh good neighbors and and do their part uh and if we could all do that if we could all embrace that uh then then we're gonna be much better for it thank you all very much and i'll talk to you next week you