good afternoon and thank you for being here today and i want to thank dr cantor for being here again um and he has some updates that he will go over in a moment as you can imagine we have a lot to cover today because of the winter weather the ongoing response to the pandemic and whatever else might be on your mind we'll see in a few minutes we did just complete a unified command group meeting on both cobit and the extreme winter weather event that continues to bring record low temperatures to large parts of louisiana along with snow and sleet and freezing rain in fact overnight the second system in 72 hours hit louisiana i was able last night to send a letter to president biden making requests for a federal emergency declaration related to direct federal assistance and category b assistance which is emergency protective measures and i was able to talk to the president on tuesday afternoon and make sure he was aware that we would be making that request and and of course i look forward to getting a response uh from him very soon as of noon today right at 125 000 louisianans did not have power and about 20 000 of those individuals had not had power since the 15th and most of those individuals were in the baton rouge area in the north shore and energy is working hard and believes that the vast majority of those people will have power at some point later today there are currently 98 water outages across the state impacting more than 245 000 people and there are multiple boil water advisories that affect almost a million people across the state the national guard currently has more than 960 soldiers and airmen activated in support of emergency operations and that number increases as it needs to to take on additional missions that they are being assigned currently they are coordinating with gosep to support both bulk and bottled water deliveries across the state they have distributed thus for about 28 000 bottles of water and i can confirm that that water's gone to willis knighton and shreveport uh christus in bossier along with sites in oil city and more in northwest louisiana but we're also working on bottled water distribution sites in places like lake charles and i was able to talk to nick hunter today and he made that request obviously the infrastructure in new orleans i'm sorry and lake charles remains compromised from hurricane laura and their water system is struggling because they have so many leaks on the private side of their distribution system and many of those structures are no longer inhabited and so keeping that water pressure up to serve the community has proven to be very very challenging and it's going to take some period of time even after the cold weather lifts for them to be able to make the repairs necessary but they are doing things like shuttling water to their hospitals using fire trucks for example to make sure that they they have the water necessary to stay in operation and speaking of getting water to hospitals i can tell you bulk water is being delivered as we speak by national guardsmen using containers that deliver 5 000 gallons of water each i know for example we have one of those containers in alexandria right now at the cabrini hospital but we also have several that are headed to shreveport the national guard continues to provide generator support as well in grant parish wind parish i have requests i think now from evangeline parish as well and we know that they are they're working as well with dotd for example i'll get i'll get to that in just a moment when we talk about power outages and cold weather we know that a lot of people are doing everything that they can to stay warm as well they should we just need for people to be safe in doing so and generators produce carbon monoxide which is poisonous and it's lethal if you're not careful and so please make sure that if you're using a generator out there that you engage in all the safety measures such as ensuring that that generator never operates inside it needs to be at least 20 feet from the house in a well ventilated area not in a crawl space or a garage not by a window or a vent for example and then make i'll make sure also that you let it cool down before you refuel it but we also are worried about individuals warming themselves by leaving the oven on and opening the oven door and that it's not made for that and that can be dangerous as well and so please be careful i think dr cantor is going to share some more information with you all in just a few moments the roads remain very treacherous in central and north louisiana and so even if you go to 511la.org and you see that the road is open that doesn't mean that you should be out and about for the most part uh in south louisiana along the 1012 corridor uh the the road conditions have been proved tremendously but when you start working your way north that is not the case so we're still asking people to be patient stay off the roads in central and north louisiana unless it's absolutely necessary to get on those roads there's still a lot of ice and sleet and snow and we have overnight temperatures tonight are going to be at or near record lows in north louisiana again and actually even colder tomorrow night so this weather system is going to be with us until sunday sunday will be the first time that the overnight lows don't get to freezing anywhere in the state of louisiana and so that's when conditions are going to improve and there will still be work required on the other side of that to make all the repairs necessary to infrastructure especially to our water systems dotd has been working around the clock to get more roads passable obviously ice continues to be a problem in many areas as of uh this morning there were still 57 weather-related road closures across louisiana i-10 and 12 did open yesterday at around two o'clock uh i-110 in baton rouge is now open i-20 is open technically but it is still in in very difficult uh i should say it's it's very treacherous in terms of the conditions with the ice and the snow that remains on the road and we also have issues with a number of commercial vehicles 18 wheelers that have stopped and on the side of the road and in a couple places uh in in the roadway itself and we're working uh to move those uh and get rid of those obstructions and in fact the national guard uh has five wreckers uh that it is bringing to i-20 and and working with dotd and the state police to try to clear those roadways but that situation especially along i-20 is going to be evolving the dotd continues to receive salt deliveries and and is uh using the equipment that they have to spread salt and brine in order to try to de-ice uh roads and bridges as they were able to do that in southwest louisiana dotd was able to keep at least one lane of interstate traffic open in each direction throughout the event please remember that ice is not only dangerous to drive on but it's also dangerous to walk on as well we've unfortunately had two deaths related to individuals slipping on ice one i believe slipped on ice and drown in the pool another slipped on ice and had a fatal head injury as a result the third confirmed death was due to exposure for an individual and as of right now we still have a total of three deaths that have been confirmed by coroners as a winter storm related and before i get to covet i did want to speak to just a moment about power we know that the electricity companies have been asking folks here in louisiana really this is happening across a big part of the country to conserve power we've had a few rolling blackouts over the last few days um and the biggest issue with with those were the fact that there just wasn't advanced notification uh that they were going to happen um but it at the end of the day those actions were taken in order to prevent the possibility of a catastrophic failure of the grid which would be obviously much more problematic especially when you had a second weather system coming in on the heels of the first one but it remains important for people to know uh that conservation is critical if we're going to avoid uh having more uh load shedding events these rolling power outages in the future especially with record low or near record low temperatures tonight and even colder temperatures tomorrow night and the periods of time when the energy companies are asking for your help and conserving are between seven and nine a.m in the morning and between 7 and 10 p.m at night so if you can and and this does not apply to elderly folks and and so forth but if you're able uh set your thermostat lower and just put on a sweater and don't do your dishes and your clothes and that sort of thing during those hours and if you do please try to wash with with cold water but at 7-9 a.m in the morning 7 to 10 p.m at night and that's going to remain in effect for today and tomorrow and for saturday morning after saturday morning we shouldn't have any any more need for that in louisiana but it remains really important getting to covid now we're going to talk about today's update and an announcement regarding vaccine eligibility we have received some good news over the past several weeks and then again this week with doses being increased that in terms of the allocation coming to louisiana and this most recent increase the previous increases have been primarily on the modernist side this next increase coming next week is on the the pfizer side now that's the good news the bad news is the shipments coming in for this week have been delayed and the white house talked to us about this on tuesday and that's for a variety of factors employees were having a hard time getting to the pharmaceutical manufacturing sites in order to package things up but then you had a winter storm affecting closures at various airports where the distribution occurs and so our large shipments of pfizer and madonna for this week which normally would come in on monday and tuesday haven't yet arrived and so we expect to get those shipments uh we don't know when it could be saturday or sunday and then monday or tuesday we should get what would have ordinarily come on next week anyway and dr cantor is going to talk more about this but bottom line is we we're going to have to double up next week as best we can in terms of the number of doses that we administer in the state of louisiana but the good news is that the weekly allocations are increasing we have at least three weeks of visibility on that now and we've been told that those are minimum planning thresholds and so we're more confident than ever that we can expand the number of louisianans who are eligible currently to be vaccinated and so i'm announcing today that this coming monday not today or tomorrow or saturday or sunday but monday phase 1b tier 1 will be expanded to include teachers and support staff working on-site in a k-12 school but also staff at daycare facilities as well in addition to that individuals aged 55 to 64 with at least one of the conditions listed by the cdc is placing them at an increased risk of severe illness from the virus that causes cobit 19 and five estimates that that are being included in the current order of priority uh again starting on monday and uh the lists because i mentioned that age 55 to 64 you're going to have to have at least one of the conditions those conditions are cancer chronic kidney disease copd or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease down syndrome heart conditions such as heart failure coronary artery disease and immune to compromised state a weakened immune system for example from a organ transplant obesity severe obesity pregnancy sickle cell disease smoking and type 2 diabetes so if you have one of those conditions or more of them and you're between age 55 and 64 or obviously if you're pregnant regardless of your age you can need to fill you will need to fill out a copy of the louisiana covin 19 vaccine test station form indicating the condition or conditions that you have for the vaccine that you are going to receive the form can be found on the louisiana covid vaccine website ldh is encouraging residents to print and fill that form in advance but they're also working with providers to make sure that it's going to be available on site as well so this is very important and uh as we signaled a few weeks ago we intended for teachers and other school workers to be in the next order priority we just weren't sure when that that was going to happen but being able to get to them is really important for our state as we all know they've been on the front lines of this pandemic and they play a critical role in our continued recovery and obviously the education of our children and we all appreciate uh teachers and and support staff daycare workers i know i certainly do and and therefore very happy that we're going to be offering them vaccines starting next week and i also want to thank senator clio fields for working with us over the last couple of weeks to to make this happen in an organized fashion we also know that older people and those with certain comorbid health conditions are at greater risk for having a poor outcome should they contract covid19 and that is why we are getting to those individuals 55 to 64 who have one or more of these comorbid health conditions so the decisions we're making are consistent with the principles we outlined at the very beginning and that is we were going to follow cdc recommendations the the asic recommendations if you will to the greatest extent that we could here in louisiana consistent with the overarching goal of preserving our hospital capacity and saving lives uh and that is what we're continuing to do and with respect to individuals who are pregnant as you all know we've had challenges around maternal mortality in louisiana for many many years we've had a number of initiatives over the last few years to address that this is a continuation of that but also is faithful to the cdc's guidance that we should make the vaccine available to pregnant women so if you are pregnant you have access to the vaccine now if you have questions please speak to your doctor about that but but do get vaccinated because it is safe and effective to date we've administered a little more than 812 000 vaccine doses and the last utilization comparison that i saw was in terms of the total doses administered louisiana was 11th in the country in utilization and as for individuals who have received their second dose was i think number eight in the country i don't know how that's going to uh shake out after this week with all the interruptions we've had around the country but but i mentioned that to let you know that that our team here at the state but also a lot of local partners in hospitals and clinics and pharmacies and and so many others are are just doing tremendous work in order to make sure people can get vaccinated as quickly as possible as far as today's numbers we're reporting 832 new cases on 14 338 tests very sadly we're reporting 15 additional deaths we're now at 9406 deaths since the start of the pandemic 823 patients are hospitalized across the state today with cobit 19 128 of those are mechanical ventilators to put the number of folks in the hospital into perspective we haven't been at this number since before thanksgiving so we have made a lot of progress since january the 8th and i did want to express my appreciation to the people of louisiana because i will tell you uh early january we were in a very bad place and headed in just an awful direction but things things have improved because of the work that's taking place out there and people following mitigation measures and abiding by the restrictions it's it's critically important and while we're much improved baseline numbers remain relatively high in terms of new cases in terms of hospitalizations and and of course we're still reporting far too many deaths every single day we do have 15 confirmed cases of the uk variant here in louisiana there are at least 32 pending cases and likely many more than that across the state and so my message to the people of louisiana is quite simple the uk variant is here it is widespread it is all over the state and the cdc estimates that in as little as a month from now it could be the predominant strain of the virus in the united states and certainly here in louisiana the reason it makes a difference is because it is more easily transmitted i think it's 50 percent more transmissible and then there's growing evidence that you have a poor outcome on average if you contract this strain of the virus so it's serious but the the good news to the extent that there's good news is the all of the mitigation measures that are effective against coronavirus are effective against this one as well masking and distancing and washing your hands staying home when you're sick getting tested when you believe you've been exposed and getting the vaccine when it is your turn speaking of testing it wasn't just vaccinations that were interrupted this week with the severe weather that we've had testing has fallen off significantly nobody ever likes that you always want to know what's going on with respect to cases when you're in a pandemic regions one three four and nine so that's the new orleans area south central louisiana acadiana and the north shore they have operational community-based testing sites tomorrow we believe that community testing will be taking place in all regions except for seven and eight so that's that shreveport over to monroe corridor so at this time i'm going to ask dr cantor to come up he will make some remarks as you always do please address any questions you have to him when he finishes remarks and i'll come back after that conclude mine and then i'll take some of your questions as well good afternoon um thank you governor thank you for your leadership and um i would like to just open by thanking um a lot of folks who are working hard and in the weather right now to keep us safe and open to state back up so department transportation folks police state police first responders um there's a lot of people out there trying to trying to keep things going make sure hospitals get water national guard make sure nursing homes are taken care of so my thanks to them and also my thanks to uh healthcare workers in hospitals who a number was having to work double or triple shifts because they can't get out or people that are kind of taking a slow commute in to relieve them so sincere thanks to all those people who are working hard right now i do want to start by talking a little bit about the risks to life that exist right now and the governor mentioned a couple really important ones as we see with disasters and we certainly have our experience with those there's the disaster itself and then there are other things that can make a bad situation worse and that's really what i want to focus on the two of the three deaths that we had so far were theoretically preventable there there were people that fell and and i we know every time that we have an emergency like this where there's potential loss of power there's the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning which is another entirely preventable death so that's the first thing i do want to talk about the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning is real and families need to know about it anytime somebody has a loss of power and is using a generator or alternative heating devices they have to be very very careful carbon monoxide is completely odorless completely painless and the only way you know about it inside your house before it kills you is if you have a carbon monoxide detector that's the only way it's a very silent killer but every emergency that we have it pops up and just remember back to hurricane laura when we had power outages in the southwest part of the state we had a number of people unfortunately die from carbon monoxide poisoning so i do want to ask families if you're heating your house through alternative means right now as the governor said if you're using a generator always outside always well away from the house well away from doors windows and other air intakes and never never heat your home with a kitchen oven or a kitchen stove it does two things it emits silent toxins into your house that you don't know about and it also is a pretty large fire risk in and of itself those are two things that can help prevent making a bad situation even worse another thing i'll mention is i really as the governor did as well ask people avoid traveling right now if you can avoid it by any measure the roads are are not very safe and there's a lot of car accidents out there if you can avoid going on the roads it's better for your own protection it also allows emergency responders and people hauling water to places to have a little bit more space to operate out there so please avoid travel if there's any way that you can safely avoid it now i do also want to mention for individuals who are dialysis dependent these people that live at home and take dialysis three days a week if you live in an affected area if you live in the shreveport area or some other northern parts of the state it is likely that your appointments will be affected because of the weather please communicate with your dialysis provider this is the place where you receive dialysis they will reschedule you please communicate with the dialysis provider we want anyone that has to miss or postpone a dialysis session to get back in as soon as possible so please reach out proactively communicate with your dialysis provider they will reschedule you as the governor mentioned because of the weather and not just the weather in louisiana this is a national issue right now a good number of vaccine deliveries both first and second doses that we expected this week are being postponed and again it's not just because of the roads in louisiana although that's a big problem a number of the shipments never made it out of a central hub in other states because of weather or because of personnel shortages so unfortunately that's affecting us here there are a fair number of people who were expecting to receive a vaccine dose this week who unfortunately are going to have those appointments rescheduled for anyone who falls into that category if you have an appointment coming today tomorrow or the next day or if you were supposed to have one earlier in the week please communicate with your vaccine provider this is the clinic the hospital the pharmacy that you had an appointment with they will let you know when you are rescheduled for don't forgo this don't don't use this as an opportunity not not to get the dose the dose is still really important but please just communicate these appointments will be rescheduled if it was a second dose appointment that is getting rescheduled that's okay reschedule it take the dose if it ends up being a week or even two or three weeks later that is okay it is still efficacious it will still provide protection the cdc says you aim for the right follow-up the 21 days for pfizer and 28 days for moderna you shoot for that but if something happens to make you have to delay like um an unprecedented weather event that's okay it's still safe you don't need to restart the vaccine series so anyone that has a second dose appointment delayed because of this weather event please call that vaccine provider get it rescheduled it is still beneficial to take that second dose even if it's days or even a week or two later than it otherwise should have been i'll give a quick heads up of where we are with doses we should expect next week and as the governor mentioned next week is going to be a high volume testing week we're really going to be asking a lot of our vaccine providers next week because we have increased doses coming to us anyway because our allocations went up a little bit and we're going to have a lot of doses that would have arrived this week that are going to come later this week or early next week so we'll be asking vaccine providers to do a lot next week as they've been doing the whole time i should say so next week this coming week will be week 11 for us two two changes are happening with with the doses we're getting number one the pfizer doses starting with this coming week this is this is a policy change by operation warp speed will be counted as six doses of vial so we've known for a number of weeks now that with the right equipment and care you can actually get six doses out of those pfizer vials even though they're labeled for five the company applied to the fda to formally change that labeling and they that was granted and the operation warp speed waited a couple weeks just to make sure that they had enough of the load dead space syringes to make it possible for every vaccine provider they do now and now any vaccine provider that gets pfizer is getting a kit that includes those load dead space syringes so starting with this coming week pfizer allotments will account for six doses of vial which means the angel doses that we have enjoyed won't they won't be there anymore so in terms of a vaccine provider if they're being told they're getting let's say 100 doses it's actually 100 doses they won't be able to bake in a 20 bonus on that because it will not be six doses of vial on top of that our allotments are also going up a little bit next week so it's not just an accounting increase it's a it's a raw increase as well so the numbers that we expect to come in next week for pfizer are forty five thousand six hundred and thirty and again that's an increase because of that six dose vial accounting and a genuine increase on top of that and then for mandarina it's 45 thousand doses giving us a total of ninety thousand six hundred and thirty the other announcement to make on that is we are extending the federal retail pharmacy partnership program in louisiana we had brought walmart on as a partner a couple weeks ago and we'll be bringing on cvs as a partner this coming week so i don't know offhand how the weather is going to affect the shipments that they would otherwise have expected on monday but cvs stores will start to carry throughout the state through this federal partnership those are doses above and beyond what our normal allocation is and we will include cvs locations that have vaccine in the monday morning updates that we put on the website we're very excited about this partnership again it's it's more doses coming to the state than otherwise would have come to us uh the last thing i will mention is um as the governor had said you know we're we're clearly coming down in the right direction from covid we we peaked around the christmas in new year's time we've made considerable progress now and if you look at the epicharts which are up to date on the dashboard right now we've actually recovered almost all the ground that we lost with this new year's surge we're almost at the point that we were prior to thanksgiving around the beginning of november when we started to go up we need to keep that we need to keep going in that direction so as of today percent positivity for the state is at five percent and there are only 46 parishes out of 64 in the state that are ranked as high highest uh risk of community transmission by the cdc that's an improvement but it's not great it's not great we're going in the right direction but just like we talked about the past two weeks there still is a lot of risk out there looking forward with the variance circulating and we know from what the cdc projects that the the b117 or the uk variant that the governor mentioned is doubling in numbers across the country about every 10 days excuse me it's it's certainly possible that we have another spike in our future and our goal right now in addition to keeping yourself and your family safe should be to drive transmission down as much as possible so that if we do have another surge we are equipped to weather it well that we don't get ourselves too high how high you get in a surge is is very much related to how high you were when you start that surge and this past surge we started pretty high and we ended up very high we would like to do it a little bit lower if if at all we have to do it the next time so i will say for for people out there there are two things that really should should give people concern that you need to give caution towards right now one is just the general risk of catching covet out there which again in 46 out of 64 parishes is the highest category possible by the cdc even though we're encouraged in the direction we're going and the second is ancillary risks with this cold weather driving on the road when you don't have to slipping and falling being careless with how you heat your home please please be careful we want to minimize any suffering that we have from this weather event we'd be happy to answer any questions if there are any melinda are the walmart pharmacies getting now and when the cbs pharmacies come online will they be getting additional doses on top of what walmart is already getting or will you be splitting up the pool to more pharmacies additional on top of that what what the feds did the feds had an initial allocation for that retail program of about a million doses nationwide they double that to about two million which then goes through the same pro-rata calculation you know divided up by states by population we haven't it's not confirmed we the the walmart's got about 14 100 um last week that was in addition to 5700 that we seated them with to start the program off we believe that the cvs's will be in that ballpark because it's it's been um another million added to the national pot but we haven't been confirmed with those numbers and again with the weather i don't know exactly when they're actually going to be shipped we were um on average per day and that chart sort of plummeted as we got today's update primarily i would assume because of the storm i guess i'm wondering you know it's tens of thousands of doses that haven't shipped yet how long is it going to take us to catch up and make up for that lost time of this week i don't know um i wouldn't expect more than a week or two um you're right we were doing really well and i think we still are doing really well and and this setback is is not just louisiana a number of states are you know really affected by this right now there's no question that we you know even today have much more capacity to deliver vaccine in louisiana than we have supply i mean supply really has been our limiting factor so i think that our vaccine providers are going to do a good job next week with the added volume essentially make up for for lost time it might take a week or two to get back to the rate um as they as they build up because they're also doing second doses with that as well and and some delayed second doses on top of that um so i would expect a week or two but i think though our provider is going to do a really good job because we still you know we still have unmet capacity to deliver we still in a situation where supply is our biggest limiting factor yes sir can you give us an update um you know generally speaking about lost doses um in louisiana and then i know yesterday at least one person from lda said they hadn't yet heard of any losses or waste due to power outages um can you give us an update on that today as well yeah the number uh is 754 right now we've of lost doses which is i off top of my head probably about less than the percentage point of the total doses that have been given here we've not yet had any confirmed loss from this recent weather event we very well might there's a process that goes into this and the first step when a provider reaches out to us with concerns that they lost power or something like that is we communicate with the vaccine manufacturer pfizer or moderna and they walk through what happened there are some instances where depending on the circumstance depending on the temperature range you can actually still use those doses so that's the first step if the manufacturer says you can't use it then we work with the provider to do an investigation so nothing that nature has concluded yet but it's certainly possible we'll have some pop-up yes sir so the governor said that 475 000 people will be added from um including teachers and school staff so is that just the teachers of school staff or is that the entire trp that is inclusive of people that work in a k through 12 or daycare environment plus people aged 55 through 64 with at least one of the cdc listed preconditions some of these are estimates um but it's a total number for this yes sir more than 271 000 people have completed that vaccine series in our state what's kind of that magic number of sources all are looking at along with kind of people who have already had cases to kind of need that level of immunity to get things back to normal a lot more than that uh probably somewhere around 65 70 um you know unfortunately it does not appear that prior infection is definitively protective that's why people that had coping in the past are still advised to get the vaccine and that's why we're seeing a fair number of people have re-infections so really is vaccine is the prime way to do that again ballpark 65 70 maybe 75 percent of the population which i don't think we're going to get tours until sometime hopefully in the late summer you know maybe early fall i would imagine i don't think the number now with 271 000 is really enough to put a big dent on a population basis but it surely means an awful lot if you're one of those individuals and i do think in specific risk areas like like nursing homes for example we should expect to see fatalities go down considerably because we've made so much progress and then melinda in terms of where we are in percentages absolutely so total doses administered in the long-term care facility program to date is uh 61 427. that breaks down for resident doses of 39 824 staff doses of 21 603 100 of the nursing homes have now completed their first round visit and the majority of them have completed their second round as well there are three visits um typically for each facility each facility receives three visits each one 28 days apart to date in the nursing homes 83 percent of residents have taken the vaccine and 38 percent of staff have 30 38. and this question following up on that um we see like a pretty precipitous drop in hospitalizations and we've now been vaccinating elderly people and more likely to end up in the hospital for months now i'm wondering if we're starting to see you know these folks who might have otherwise ended up in the hospital but for the vaccine do you think that's making a dent on our numbers yeah i i think it's possible and i think that's by design as well you've heard the governor say a number of times now that with so many people hospitalized and with the fatality count so high it's very important for us to be directing vaccine to people who are likely to suffer those complications and that's part of what informed today's decision to extend it to to the those age groups who do have the one or more those underlying conditions when you look at the graph right now our incidence is going down as well so i think it is a combination of those two sam i think cases are going down because because they're going down we peaked and now we're coming down and so hospitalizations follow and i think we are beginning to make a dent in the people more likely to suffer complications and last question yeah um really very important for a second time okay and please um please keep your eye on the ball the next couple days it's risky from a covered perspective and and the weather makes it very dangerous as well please don't do anything to increase the risk of what what already is an unfortunate situation thank you thank you dr kenner um you know we in louisiana were not accustomed to these extreme winter weather events thankfully they don't happen that often and this has been a very difficult week for our state and for much of the country we are not out of the woods yet we still have a lot of ice and snow on our roadways we have electric electricity outages and we have severe complications and disruptions with respect to our water systems and further than that tonight for north louisiana they will achieve record lows or near record lows and then again tomorrow night it'll be even a little colder so this winter weather event is going to be with us until sunday again that'll be the first day where the low temperature nowhere in the state drops below freezing so let's the longer the duration of an event the more people who make poor decisions and so just really want to encourage people to do everything they can to make the best possible decisions for themselves and their families for their safety be patient be safe but also check on your neighbors if you've got someone living next to you who's elderly or or needs special assistance please check on them and make sure that they're warm enough make sure that they have something to eat and please do it while wearing a mask and staying physically distant as best you can and i tell you louisianans know how to be good neighbors proven that over and over again and i know that that's happening out there right now our next scheduled press conference will be on thursday of next week obviously if we need to speak to you before then we will reach out to you uh and and let you know that we're scheduling a press availability so with that sam governor um we're already going to be testing our capacity to deliver vaccines next week because the winter storm and now we're adding a whole new almost half a million people i'm wondering are you worried about a bottleneck where people aren't going to have access for a week two weeks just because there's not enough capacity to deliver it and also could you clarify the teachers and the school staff is that public schools are all schools all schools it's all schools and it's and it's not just k-12 it is it is a preschool too uh early childhood learning centers for example you know i have enough concerns to keep me awake every single night we know that the disruptions in the delivery and administration of doses this week will complicate next week when we were already going to get more doses than we've received at any point up to now and then i checked very multiple times with secretary phillips and others is this the right time to add these new individuals to the priority group who can be vaccinated starting on monday and the decision is yes the doses are available we again are going to ask people to schedule those appointments uh be patient and understand that the providers are having to juggle a number of balls all at one time in the air as they try to catch up from the doses they were unable to administer this week and to administer and administer next week's doses which were in some cases will be the most that they've been able to receive but it's also true that that you know we've been saying we wanted to add people to the priority groups as we receive more doses we're going to have more doses to administer next week than we've ever had before and so from that perspective it is exactly the right time to add in individuals to the next priority group but is it going to be as smooth as it would have been had we not had this winter weather storm this week probably not and so i'm encouraging people to be patient to call communicate with your providers whether you weren't able to get your first dose or your second dose if it was scheduled for this week follow back up with them and then for for everybody who's looking for a dose next week who's in the priority group please call and schedule those appointments as well we're going to get through this i have every confidence that within a week or 10 days all of this is going to be ironed out and we'll be back operating uh smoothly and and and we're going to get a lot of people vaccinated over the next seven to ten days too it just won't be quite as smooth and we may have to be open later at night we may have to do more weekend events and that sort of thing in order to catch up yes sir your wife was obviously a teacher as well how important was this to get teachers vaccinated for you well look donna was a teacher and and uh it's we've always prioritized teachers uh as a group in terms of the occupation um because they're so critical uh to educating the children but also if school is in session then parents don't have to stay home with their kids and especially k through 12 and in the lower grades you know distance learning is not optimal and there are more problems with that and and so forth and then when you when you conduct in-person on-site education again especially at these lower grades it is almost impossible for teachers to remain physically distant from their students it may be possible in high school we know it's it's much more uh feasible in college uh so for all of those reasons and and uh you know the the trump administration first now that by the administration has asked states to prioritize teachers and so for us if we always knew we were going to get there and and this is a the order that we were going to take we just didn't know when uh on the calendar because we didn't know uh what our allocation of vaccines were going to be over time and what the uptake was going to be with the current priority groups but this is the right time to do it um and and i'm i will tell you i got if you were listening i got a call from a teacher on my radio program on wednesday asking about this and and of course i knew the answer but i wasn't making the uh announcement till today um but so it is something that we've intended to do for a while and and i do want to thank all of the uh leaders in in education in louisiana uh for working with us on this uh and and i i think it's the right thing to do and um and i'll look forward uh by the way to uh expanding these priority groups over time as we were able to do it literally every single day i get multiple emails or messages asking me to include some additional group as as priority for the vaccine and every one of those requests makes perfect sense the challenge is you can't prioritize everybody at once otherwise you prioritize nobody and so we're we're being guided by the recommendations coming from the cdc but also our own experience here in louisiana is who it is that's showing up in our hospitals most often who is it that is dying most often and and so that's that's the way we're going to tackle this and we're going to continue to do that and i make that point because i know that that people are tempted to believe well if they're not in the current order of priority then then then they're not important or that i don't think that they're important that's clearly not true but we're next week is week 11. we just haven't been at this long enough with enough doses to work our way through uh the priority groups i look forward to the day and i know dr fauci said the other day he thinks it's june when anybody who wants one regardless of priority groups can just go to their hospital to the doctor to a clinic or to a pharmacy and get a cobia 19 vaccine and by the way backed it up to june because not because there's going to be a delay in the johnson and johnson vaccine being approved but because the initial allocations once it is approved will be smaller than they originally thought and they're going to they're going to ramp up considerably over time with their manufacturing output but initially it's going to be smaller than they thought and that's why they're saying june now until we reach that time period yes sir governor a few minutes ago you've obviously talked about the need to conserve power and the issue with energy not necessarily putting up those advanced notification of those rolling blackouts on tuesday obviously a bunch of those notifications via voicemail or text went out yesterday when you spoke with energy officials after that first round of blackouts on tuesday did you discuss the need to give notification did you make it clear that was a priority or that residents needed to not be caught off guard necessarily well i mean i did we discussed the entire episode and how these things happen and and of course i had the benefit of having some discussions a couple of days uh before tuesday about the possibility of of load shedding through these um rolling blackouts if you will um and the re but but there are certain things about them that that that people need to understand first and foremost i want electric companies whether it's cleco or energy or swepco whoever it might be to provide as much communication in advance of these events happening as possible and by the way i think they want to do that too with respect to tuesday night they were not given advanced notification they were told you have to do this you have to do it now and it was literally the case that i think was 7 30 uh when i was notified uh by gosap that that the public service commission uh representatives had had notified gosep that this was going to happen within a few minutes i was on the phone with with entergy but it had actually already started and it lasted for a few hours so the communication is critically important i think people can accept better the fact that they're going to lose their lights if they have some advanced notification about that and they know that it's only going to last for two or three hours or whatever but i do want people to know that that this is not a decision that is made by local companies like entergy or cleco or swepco they're all part of regional associations that have to take these directions and every now and then when the demand on a grid exceeds the ability for the grid to sustain it they have to do these rolling blackouts in order to prevent uh catastrophic failure and that's critically important because had we had catastrophic failure then everybody loses lights for a long period of time and we had these follow-on weather systems coming at us and so so what they did they didn't have a choice they had to do it it was the right thing to do under the circumstances but we all agree and this includes the energy companies themselves that more advanced notification would have been helpful and i think you saw yesterday and today entergy continuing to communicate about the possible need to shed load going forward especially tonight when we have very low temperatures and then again tomorrow night and asking people to conserve electricity during those hours of 7 to 9 in the morning and 7 to 10 in the evening to minimize the likelihood uh that that may happen again so and as you know if you're following the news across the country uh louisiana is not the only state or even the primarily a primary state that's that's uh being affected by these uh load shedding events yes ma'am that seems to be common is that people aren't getting any information from entergy in particular about when restoration is estimated do you feel like you've been getting um good information from entergy about what restoration estimates there are and and do you have concerns about the lack of information that went out to the public about that yeah well i don't i don't want to say that i've been satisfied with the information that i've gotten from entergy about power restoration i will tell you that greatly improved today so the public service commission briefed at the unified command group meeting today at 1 pm for example that the vast majority of of individuals who have suffered outages since the 15th those outages will be restored before the end of the day today and i think some of those estimates were as late as 11 o'clock tonight and again those outages are primarily in the baton rouge area but extending over across saint lina livingston tangible parish and so forth and we always want to know when the lights are going to come back on and it seems like we get better estimates or at least we get information about an estimate of restoration of power sooner after a hurricane than we did in this particular event and these outages are very different however there are times in a after a hurricane where the companies know that when they do certain work in a certain location it's going to restore power uh to large numbers of people all at one time the nature of these outages because of uh snow and and ice and by the way it's primarily ice it's it's not snow uh which is why when that half inch of ice formed in northeast louisiana all of a sudden you saw from tinsel parish and ouachita parish in areas up there the lights go out in broad areas is because it happens in in discrete locations and you have to go out and do work at a lot of of locations in order to restore power and then the roads are a problem for them too right it isn't just uh the general public that can't get to where it needs to go these these crews can't get to the locations in many uh instances where the work has to be done and and so it's all very very complicated but but i think whether you're talking about power restoration or whether you're talking about these rolling blackouts communication is very very important and and that was lacking initially and i think yesterday and today it has gotten much much better and that's what we would expect to happen from here on out and for the next events as well any other questions today well i want to thank you all for continuing to cover this and thank you as well uh we will see you all next thursday unless we have reason to get with you sooner than that uh everybody please be safe out there be patient and and check on your neighbor uh it's it's critically important that we do that uh and then let's work as best we can together to get through this uh weather event and and we know that that's not gonna happen before uh sunday so we still have a a a couple of three days to go and and i'm i'm optimistic that we're going to get through it uh and get these uh these systems repaired just as soon as we possibly can but i do need everybody to please be patient and understand that if you're out there too early and you put yourself in harm's way then the first responder is being needlessly put in harm's way in order to come out and try to render assistance to you so so let's be patient let's be good neighbors and we'll see you next week thank you you