bid trends in short many of our numbers continue to improve at least when you look at it from the statewide level there are some regions of the state that are more worrisome than others particularly the lake charles region uh with respect to cases and hospitalizations and the prevalence there uh the higher prevalence there than elsewhere at least as far as we know of the uk variant but i am encouraged by sustained decreases in hospitalizations across the state and also with the increase in vaccinations although i can tell you we still have quite a ways to go with respect to the vaccinations we believe that a majority of our particularly vulnerable residents are now protected through vaccination and as of this week yesterday as you know everyone 16 or older is eligible to receive their shot in order to protect themselves and their families again the 16 and 17 year olds their only authorized pfizer because its emergency use authorizations went down to age 16. the moderna and the johnson johnson vaccines are for those who are 18 and older but everyone who is authorized by the ua e-way covered by the ua is now eligible in louisiana and i think i saw a slide out of ldh that said if you're worried about who's eligible now it's all y'all is that didn't you put that out so all y'all are eligible and i'm speaking to the people of louisiana obviously those 16 and older today uh for our co-vid numbers we are adding 499 new cases on 11 866 new tests unfortunately we're also adding 10 new deaths and the death total since the start of the pandemic is 10 132.

363 people are hospitalized across the state that's up one yesterday where basically it flattened out in that range and 61 of those individuals are on mechanical ventilators that's down one from yesterday to put the 363 into some more perspective and that's the number of people currently in the hospital on march the 28th of last year we announced 336. uh the next so this is the lowest number since march the 28th of 2020 in light of these mostly positive trends today we will be easing the majority of current restrictions relative to occupancy levels and and so forth and we'll do that in the proclamation that we're going to issue tomorrow as you know the current proclamation ends tomorrow i will say at the outset that we are going to keep the mass mandate in place for this next proclamation period which will extend 28 days till april the 28th when i met with the folks from ldh and when we look at the cdc guidance the one thing that they are that they stress the most about where we are in this pandemic is the need to continue to mask as we ramp up these vaccinations at this point in the pandemic you know the three best tools that we have to win the race which means slow the spread and speed the vaccinations are obviously for people to be vaccinated for people to wear masks and people to distance so that's where we're going to be focused on going forward again i've heard the concerns from the state cdc about case counts across the country we currently have more than 20 states that are heading in the wrong direction in terms of case counts and hospitalizations and i believe positivity and you're going to see in a few moments that we have some regions of the state that we're particularly concerned about too especially as it relates to to variants which are both more contagious and more violent the the mass mandate again remains in place limitations on when bars and restaurants can serve alcohol will default to local ordinances so those hours of operation and hours of service restrictions are going to be completely lifted specific capacity limitations for certain venues are going to be lifted but with the requirement that that people wear the mask and engage in the six feet of distancing that will continue but restaurants bars gyms retail settings will no longer have in place a strict occupancy limit so you know if you go to a bar for example you'll still be required to sit at a table and that's one of the ways that we can lift restrictions but be relatively confident that that we're not going to be unnecessarily and unreasonably uh contributing to the to the spread of the virus businesses and venues that host larger gatherings like reception halls will remain capped at 50 percent of their capacity but the maximum now will be uh 500 people so it's 50 or 500 people that that per person cap is twice what it is in the current proclamation outdoors social distancing will be required but there is no cap and i want to just pause here for a moment and remind everyone that any activity outdoors is safer than that saying that same activity indoors and the weather is improving um it's it's nice out in spring more often than not the temperatures are nice the full humidity of summer hadn't hit us yet so i'm going to encourage people to have as many of their activities outside as possible sporting events will be limited to 50 percent of their capacity again with social distancing and if i didn't say it already masking will still be required under all circumstances except when people are actively eating or drinking today marks a big step forward but we're all going to have a role to play and do have a role to play in making sure that cases don't spike again so so three words mass distance vaccinate and be vaccinated as soon as you can get an appointment which with whichever vaccine is being administered at that location they're all safe and they're all effective this is how we're going to put this pandemic behind us it's how we're going to be able to take off our masks get back to more normal but it depends on getting shots in people's arms doses sitting on the shelf don't help us in the pandemic or in the freezer you know they don't help us end the pandemic it's doses and arms this morning i participated in the call with the white house and other governors and the good news is we are anticipating next week a substantial increase in our weekly allocations of doses and that increase is most uh well it's across all of them the thighs of the moderna and and the johnson and johnson and we don't have our specific allocations for next week but and at least that's my understanding they'll come out a little later today and then on thursday we'll start ordering but based on the increases that they told us are going into effect nationwide for next week we believe that we will have more than three hundred thousand first doses allocated to louisiana next week that does not include the retail pharmacy program it does not include the federally qualified health centers that are directly participating in the federal program it doesn't improve the direct federal uh vaccination efforts at the va in the bureau of prisons and and uh indian affairs and and so forth and so what i what i'm trying to tell the people of louisiana is the month of april is going to be critical to our success we're going to have more doses than we've had at any point up to now and if it's within our collective ability to make tremendous progress against this pandemic in order to further this effort i'm excited to announce that as part of our bring back louisiana campaign we are also standing up a vaccine hotline existing contact tracing workforce members will be cross-trained to respond to this new stage of our covid response it's a smart solution it is timely and it comes at no additional cost the hotline will be able to schedule residents for vaccine appointments tied to our pilots and all ldh vaccine events it will help navigate the larger system of vaccine providers and locations and connect residents to a medical professional for any questions that they might want to ask about the vaccines this is a big deal our campaign is all about meeting people where they are breaking barriers so that everyone has the opportunity to get the vaccines this hotline addresses at least two specific barriers one the lack of access to internet tech savviness or the time and ability to navigate our network of providers and events to schedule a vaccine and two lack of access to a medical professional to answer specific medical questions ldh will train 60 call agents 10 specifically for clinical support that will happen this week we know that many eligible louisianans have jobs that make it tough to schedule appointments get their questions answered and get the vaccine during the day so this hotline will also help address that barrier with this hours of operation the hotline will be up and running next week and we're going to share more information later including the phone number and hours of operation in the meantime if you're looking to schedule an appointment please don't double book we know that that's happening across the state i've spoke with medical officers from hospitals all across the state of louisiana last week and they said they seem a number of people who are making multiple appointments and then they're going to the one that works best for them and they either then cancel the other ones or they just don't show up but what those cancellations and no-shows do is it prevents other louisianans from being able to access that appointment and get that dose of vaccine as soon as they should be able to do so so it's it's really causing some problems for the entire vaccine program so we're asking people to just make one appointment for a vaccination otherwise it's extremely different difficult for providers to know how many vaccines to prepare how many to take out of the freezer and so forth and then again it makes it more difficult for fellow louisianans to schedule their appointments and it delays their vaccinations unnecessarily and nobody should delay their vaccinations you know i happen to know of people who contracted cobid just a few days before they were scheduled to be vaccinated or maybe they they put off being vaccinated in the contracted covid so this is a race against time and we're asking everyone to be good neighbors if you have an appointment scheduled you've got a shot keep that appointment but don't hog multiple appointment times in addition to getting the vaccine wearing a mask and proper hand washing i also want to take this opportunity to remind everyone you should still do what you need to do to be your healthiest so please take care of your wellness checkups including important health screenings i recently uh did this myself it was reported this week that now more than 100 000 women have received breast cancer screening because of medicaid expansion alone these are women who may not have had health coverage but for the expansion in our state nearly 50 i'm sorry nearly 60 000 adults have received colon cancer screening and about 18 400 of them averted cancer over 466 000 louisiana adults have received preventative health care or new patient service since july 1st of 2016 and it's something we all need to do so that we're at our healthiest which is important all the time but is especially important during a pandemic and also if you're going to get a checkup you have an opportunity to interact with a medical provider and ask questions if you have questions about the vaccines so please take advantage of that opportunity with that i'm going to ask dr cantor to come up he's going to go through some information with you and then i will return um as usual please ask questions of dr cantor while he's here and then i'll come and wrap up and take questions of my own thank you all good afternoon thank you governor thank you for your leadership and um i'd like to just uh begin by um emphasizing what the governor said a few minutes ago which is as of yesterday everyone 16 years and older in louisiana is eligible to get vaccinated so all you all are eligible and we gotta avail ourselves of that opportunity without question um the um i'm going to run over quickly the epidemiologic trends that we've been looking at we look at these numbers um routinely and then we do a hard stop uh every time one of the governor's proclamations is set to expire to uh you know review where we're at and and see what would be prudent going forward so um what you see on the slide there is the typical uh gating criteria numbers that we look at i'm going to walk people through really quickly what we're looking at so on the top left you see covet-like illness cover-like illness is a measure of the percent of people presenting to emergency departments with covert-like symptoms so just a snapshot of what we're seeing in the emergency departments as a measure it's analogous to how we measure flu every year as you can see really since the turn of the new year since january 1st cover-like illness in the emergency departments has been downtrending rather steadily and that is encouraging on the top right you'll see new case incidents so this is the number of new cases or positive new cases of covid so it that means a positive test and deduplicated so so no one had it before we run it through a duplication process average over the population and smooth on a seven day rolling average and you can see that for the past i can we kind of added 77 days the state has been declining the number of new cases of covid diagnosed day in and day out on the bottom left you'll see a combination graph the line on the top of that the purple line is testing volume for the number of tests that are being conducted per capita in the state and the orange bars on the bottom are percent positively the percent of all those tests being conducted that are positive we are at 2.8 percent right now which is a number we've held flat for about a couple weeks right now that's significantly down as you can see from where we were about a month or two prior and possibly the most important measure here the one that is the most closely related to mortality or people dying is on the bottom right which is hospitalizations and we have made tremendous improvements in the state and the number of hospitalized covert patients throughout the state i'll remind people that during the surge the most recent surge the christmas and new year surge we we surpassed 2000. we are now down to 363 which is tremendous progress and i think if you talk to people that work in hospitals they will tell you that it feels feels much different a lot less coveted in there and that is that's a very thankful thing let me go to the next slide please and this is when we scale out the state as a whole on the top line and then each of our nine public health regions we rank it across our three categories cover like illness cases and hospitalizations this is how the graph looked a month ago the last time we took a hard look at this this data i'm going to flip forward to how it looks right now and walk folks through here so you'll see that as the state we're down trending or decreasing in cobalt illness we're decreasing in new cases and we're decreasing in hospitalizations now as the governor mentioned when you look beyond that more granular into some of the regions it's not universal down trending and we're keeping a very close eye on this and and some of the regions particularly region five are giving us um given us concern so when you dig in a little bit closer you can see that regions four five seven eight and nine are all plateauing in covalent illness and regions two four and five are plateauing in cases and region six is increasing in cases in regions four five and six are increasing in hospitalizations um by and large for most of these not not large increases but but little variations that were very attentive to keeping a close watch on again on the whole i think the state has made tremendous progress no question i think we've come down from the surge the increasing rate of vaccinations has certainly helped in that and i've been encouraged as a lot of us have with how far we have come since we began this year it's been encouraging one thing i want to show and go to the next slide please is what's happening in nursing homes and this is one of the most encouraging pieces of data that that we have seen in the state the blue line there on the top is the number of new cases diagnosed amongst nursing home residents in the state of louisiana week on week and what you'll see on that now is that we are at a new historic low since we began counting this closely over a year ago this past week we identified or diagnosed 14 new cases of covet amongst nursing home residents and that is the lowest number to date since we started following this closely in the pandemic the reason for that is very simple it's because we now have eighty percent eighty eight zero percent coverage vaccination coverage amongst nursing home residents if anyone had questions about the power of these vaccines what they can do both to an individual to prevent them from getting sick but in a population to prevent cobalt from spreading that's the graph right there to look at look at that blue lawn and how it's how it's gone down in the setting of eighty percent coverage amongst nursing home residents and this is in a difficult to control setting remember covert can spread very quickly in nursing homes it's a congregate setting and it's filled with very vulnerable individuals and with that eighty percent coverage we have made just tremendous tremendous progress we can do that for the rest of the state that can easily be a model of what we can do for the rest of state and over the next weeks to months we will have the doses available to us to do that that is not a question that slide gives me a lot of encouragement it tells me not only that what we're doing is right that we're protecting the very most vulnerable people in the state but what is possible for the rest of us in the weeks ahead i do want to give an update on the variance this does um give me a lot of concern and we're paying very close attention to it so of the b117 or the the uk we now have 183 confirmed or presumptive cases in louisiana as we've said the past few weeks this is very much a tip of the iceberg scenario because we don't do a whole lot of genomic sequencing in the u.s so when you have 183 known you have many many more that you just haven't been able to sequence and identify the lion's share of those 103 of those 183 cases have been diagnosed in the greater lake charles area and we do believe that is why the lake charles area is experiencing some increases in cases right now the cdc will say that as a whole on average the percent of all covid circulating in louisiana of that 3.5 percent is this variant that is lower than some of our neighbors florida is at 13.2 percent texas is at 7.1 percent and dr fauci estimates that across the country the number could be as high as 20 percent so we're a little bit better off than that but these things can change very quickly just as last week we're thankful we do not have any identified cases of the b1351 variant that's the south african variant it has been identified in 30 states this week with the addition of alabama which is a new edition texas mississippi florida georgia north carolina south carolina and tennessee have that variant as well likewise we have not identified any cases of the p1 or brazilian variant excuse me it has been identified in 22 states closest to us continue to be texas oklahoma florida georgia and now tennessee one of the things that concerns me and the reason why i'm so attentive to getting vaccine out there quickly and continuing to reduce transmission is that the more transmission you have the more opportunity for mutations the virus has and the potential for new variants to emerge increases right now this b117 variant is a good match for the vaccine it's a good match for the vaccine and that's an opportunity for us we've got to continue to capitalize on that opportunity i tell you the vaccine rollout continues to go to go very well and i got really assuring reports just last night of jefferson parish and the ochsner's vaccine fest that was 24 hours they hit somewhere between four and five thousand individuals um extraordinarily reassuring i think there's going to be more of those throughout the state at this point in time 25.7 of the state's population has at least initiated the vaccine series 15.9 have completed the vaccine series and 69 percent of louisianans 65 years of age and older have initiated the vaccine series those are encouraging numbers for us nationwide there's been 147 million doses of vaccine administered so for folks that want to see what the experience is like in other people for folks that are trying to collect all information out there and and see what it looks like to them taking a step back and looking at that 147 million doses administered across the country is a is a real strong marker and there have not been any concerning safety trends or adverse events pop out and that's a very very large number 147 million people um there are two studies that have came out in the past week that i wanted to mention because they're they're pretty important studies the first this past week the cdc reported one of the first real world studies on vaccine efficacy in the u.s population and they looked at 4 000 first responders healthcare workers and other individuals they followed them through and after vaccination and then they tested them weekly after they finished vaccination remember we consider being fully vaccinated 14 days after you get your last your last dose now the trials as we know for the vaccines were great 95 94 those type of numbers you always wonder what does it look like in the real world when you're not doing a trial when life happens when you might not get the second dose exactly on time all of these things complicated that's what this recent cdc study looked like and under the real world conditions ninety percent reduction in both symptomatic and asymptomatic coveted and people who completed their vaccine series and this followed people for four months total it the study began four months ago this is the most reassuring data to date that these vaccines can are and will be effective in the real world conditions here in the u.s and louisiana the other study that i found important this past week was a study in the american journal of obstetrics and gynecology that looked specifically at women who were pregnant and women who were breastfeeding infants who received the vaccine again this is a body that a lot of work is being into and there's a number of studies ongoing and every day more and more data accumulates to show that the vaccine is is not only safe in pregnant women and breastfeeding women that it actually has significant benefit beyond that and this study is the biggest one to date so what it showed number one is that the vaccine is just as safe and pregnant and breastfeeding women as it was in women who are not pregnant or not breastfeeding number two it showed the vaccine was just as effective in those women for their own protection just as likely to induce the creation of protective antibodies in those women as it is for women who are not pregnant and not breastfeeding number three it showed that those protective antibodies were transmitted through the placenta to the unborn child in pregnant women meaning that when pregnant women get vaccinated they pass protection on to the unborn child and number four it also showed that those protective antibodies were transmitted through breast milk to breastfeeding infants so when pregnant women or newly delivered women get vaccinated they also confer that protection to the infant if they're breastfeeding those are very encouraging measures and there's going to be more data about pregnant and breastfeeding women to come looking ahead to next week as the governor mentioned we do not yet have the precise number of doses that the feds are going to allocate to us we typically find that out on tuesday evenings then it gets confirmed sometime on thursday but after listed after being briefed out by the white house a couple hours ago we expect a dramatic increase of doses somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 000 first doses coming to louisiana next week that's going to be a significant increase from what we've been receiving and i'll remind people this past week we had another significant increase 148 000 new first doses plus the federal pharmacy allocation which is what enabled us to open it up to everyone 16 years of age and older the federal retail pharmacy program continues to be a high volume vaccination avenue the feds so far for louisiana have allocated a total of 358 110 doses to that program and the brookshire's pharmacy chain will not be added that as well in addition to a couple small independent pharmacies so this program is going to continue to grow and the feds are looking at this program every day to move more and more volume and it's worked well for louisiana i'm taking a step back we certainly have some things that we need to keep our eye on ahead particularly the variants what's happening in the lake charles area um and then the easter holiday coming ahead as well we have the tools to keep covered at bay and the governor mentioned them it's masking it's distancing it's preferentially spending time outdoors and it's getting vaccinated we have the tools at our disposal with easter coming i'd like to remind folks number one get vaccinated and get your families vaccinated too um whether the governor had mentioned this i i folks will know that i i work as an er doc i had the opportunity to practice clinically this past weekend and we saw less coveted than than we had in in weeks past no question about that but still saw a little covet and i treated a very sick individual with covet who got admitted to the icu who she had the opportunity to get vaccinated a few weeks prior and and and and decided to wait how terrible would it be if one of your loved ones got sick with covid and had the opportunity to get vaccinated ahead of that how terrible would that be um remember to keep easter celebrations safe remember that if everyone in the private gathering is fully vaccinated you can take off the masks and you can not distance and if you're gathering with one other household who is unvaccinated and no one in there is high risk for complications you can also take the mass off and and not distance and it's much safer to do those gatherings outdoors and i took a look at the weather and most part of the state on easter sunday is going to be 73 degrees partly sunny so why not why not do it outdoors um and just remember i'll say it one more time everyone now 16 years of age of age in louisiana is eligible for the vaccine if you've already gotten it i thank you if you have not yet if you have already gotten it i'm going to ask you become an ambassador talk to your friends and family talk to them on what your experience was and try and get your friends and family vaccinated too it's going to make a difference we have to answer any questions if there are any yes sir testing decrease looking at the numbers seemingly a significant drop from january to where our numbers are right now are you confident that we're getting a a pretty accurate picture of what covid looks like in this state and that that positivity rate is actually what it is yeah it's a very good and very fair question and you're right the testing volume is decreasing we took a hit i'm testing volume in late february during the winter storms that recovered but then it's been trending down a little bit and there's a couple reasons for that number one testing volume tends to go down as cases go down because more cases we get more testing there's more context the more reason to be tested and a lot of you know institutions are are understandably putting their attention towards vaccination the things that give me assurance that we're getting an accurate picture is the percent positivity has stayed relatively flat when your testing volume goes down and your percent positivity shoots up that tells you that you're not testing enough that tells you that there are cases out there that you're not catching when you keep your percent positivity relatively flat or even decreasing as we did a couple weeks ago it's a pretty good bar that you're still doing enough testing to get a representative sample the other thing that gives me reassurance more than that is the hospitalizations you know there is no way to mask or fake or or obscure the number of people that that gets sick it's a representation of how many people are getting covered when more people get covered there's more people not in the hospitals when less people get cold but they're less people in the hospitals and that number that 363 today gives me a lot of assurance on that first contact tracing goes you know these were big keys that we've talked about at the beginning of the pandemic are we still seeing active participation and contact tracing and and are we able to still measure how wide you know how many uh how widespread you know someone's contact is if they have if they do test positive yeah we are the the system is going pretty well and one of the things i like the most about it is it's not just about contact tracing it's an opportunity for information dissemination it's an opportunity to talk to someone about you know it's really an opportunity for counseling and that's what we call them contact tracers but they're really more like counselors they talk to individuals what it means to be positive what you should do what you shouldn't do what you should say to your friends and family and they actually connect people with resources if they need it so that program's going well as you would imagine as the incidents as the number of cases go down the number of contact tracing encounters goes down as well and that's one of the things we're actually able to use some of that apparatus that we stood up to gear up for the covert vaccine hotline that the governor pro mode because we have a little bit more of room on those on those teams yes sir better cancer when you see like a sort of some trends nationally and stuff like that and some people nationally sort of saying you know a little doom and gloom like kind of the cdc director last night um i know she said that how does louisiana fare compared to the rest of the country and how do we keep going and doing so good that we're doing right now again a very good and fair question and on the white house call today dr walensky the cdc director noted that of the past week you know cases nationally have gone up 13 and that's really focused in the northeast some parts of the midwest as well the southern states somewhat remarkably have done pretty well i wonder if some of that is weather related and we've been able to be outdoors much more of this past month than our neighbors up north have been able to it does give me pause because cobit has a way of not respecting boundaries you're not respecting state boundaries you know as we've done it every step of the way we have to let the data drive these decisions and when numbers are going in the right direction and things are going well it's an opportunity to relax regulations but if numbers were to go in the other direction as we've done every step of the way you know the state has to respond appropriately i don't think that that dynamic changes the larger question of at what point you get enough vaccine coverage to prevent against a spike you know that really is an unanswered question i mean it almost is you know it's being determined in real time i'm not inclined to wait and see what that answer might be i mean we have an opportunity to really protect now and regardless of what that number might be i'm not inclined to leave that to chance which is why i feel so urgent and pushed to get vaccines out there because if there's one major major tool we have to safeguard against the chance for a spike and again you know states in the northeast are maybe beginning a spike right now it's tough to say if there's one major major chance we have to prevent against that it's getting vaccinated yep last question dr kenner a clarification then a question um with this new order does anything change as it relates to live music from the previous orders that'll stay the same um as i understand it the live music will be allowed under guidelines from the open safely document the state fire marshal's document those are going to get tweaked a little bit to make it a little bit easier for some venues but the general framework that live music will be allowed with participants seated and with some mitigated measures to prevent the spread of aerosols is going to stay and then my actual question is they announced it earlier this week and it's coming later this week but new york is going to be the first state with a vaccine passport app that's tied with venues entertainment venues sporting venues we'll have data about vaccinations testing wise is the state louisiana considering that have there been discussions on a vaccine passport regardless of what that answer is why it's certainly been discussed i know it's been discussed nationally i think it's too soon to really say definitively one way or the other the federal government has kind of said that they are going to support these type of apps almost on the back end with some tech but they're going to leave a lot of it to states and really to the private industry i think i think it's very likely that some businesses might find it a useful tool to assure the safety and you can imagine at some point in the future that you might be able to do larger occupancy if that was in place but i think it's going to be driven by businesses and entities thank you thank you dr cantor and just to follow up on a couple of things there is no doubt that testing volume has decreased i think we've reached an all-time high in january but we're over 500 000 tests in the month of mar in the month of march to put that in perspective we were at the end of june of last year getting the 500 000. and when the white house chronovirus task force set a goal for us is admittedly a minimum goal in order to see what's really happening in our state they said you need to be at least 200 000. so we're gonna be you know we're still testing robustly enough to have a really good indication of what's happening out there um but i think dr kenner's other points are really important you also look at the percent positivity because sick people are going to get tested and so the fewer you your tests that that symptomatic group's already built into that and so if you're if you're testing enough and and the uh i'm sorry if testing goes down but percent positivity doesn't go up you can feel good about that and then hospitalizations that's ground truth hospitalizations and deaths or ground ground tooth is where you are with respect to live music i do want to refer people to the open safely guidance but it will be a little easier for these venues to satisfy that guidance going forward because we found that the limiting factor before were the hvac systems and so now with the distance and other mitigation measures between the performers and and the crowd the spectators the the hvac won't be a necessary component of that and so but look at the open safely guidance but it's going to be easier for venues to satisfy that guidance guidance and actually have live entertainment before i take questions i want to transition away from covid for a moment talk about dsnap this is related to the winter storm which has been a long time but it was actually just last month and it has been approved for 23 parishes so get ready we're going to go through those parishes in just a moment the the storms occurred again last month the application process will run in two phases between monday april the 5th and saturday april the 17th and will follow an alphabet schedule according to applicants last names and the approved parishes are as follows of oils bienville bossier caddo calcu catahoula claiborne concordia de soto east baton rouge franklin grant lasalle madison nakadish washita repeats red river richland sabine webster west carroll and wynn residents who received dsnap benefits in february of 2 of 2021 are not eligible uh for dsnap residents who began to receive snap benefits after 2021 may be i'm sorry after february 2021 may be eligible finally this is the last press conference before that we had planned at least before the easter weekend and for many of us this will be the first easter and perhaps the first holiday when because we have taken the opportunity to be vaccinated and so have our family members that we may be able to spend that time with family indoors in a safe environment dr cantor went over that again and obviously last winter a different situation with respect to our churches so i want to encourage everyone uh as you prepare for easter please continue to be mindful that while we're doing much better there is still reason for concern we are not out of the woods yet and everyone should take the proper precautions in order to keep themselves and their loved ones safe and as difficult as the past year has been we all have a lot to be thankful for and so we have a big reason to want to get together and and celebrate and and share with one another uh we just don't want to share covet it's still out there there's still people getting the the disease every day they're going into the hospital every day and unfortunately as you know too well people are still dying every day um outside gatherings and small groups are always be always best and if members of your family are not fully vaccinated clearly precautions need to be taken and and i'm taking some time to go through this because i just want to remind people what it was like when we went through easter and new year's those holidays because of the related travel the gatherings the activities caused the largest spike to date and we don't want a repeat of that not when we're so close to having the opportunity for everyone who is 16 and older to be vaccinated and to protect themselves from this disease so i'm praying that this season of new birth will be one of blessings and happiness to everyone um and i am confident that 2021 will certainly be better than 2020 but how much better and how soon depends upon each and every one of us so have a wonderful safe and happy easter and i will take your questions yes sir thank you governor dr wolinski yesterday said that she felt impending doom of a fourth surge um and following that president biden you know uh urged governors not to ease restrictions um do you see the actions today as bucking that federal advice and what do you what did you make of those comments yesterday well i mean clearly we eased restrictions and we did it because we've had a framework for making these decisions since the very beginning and it's on the gating criteria in combination with the baseline numbers and the gating criteria in the baseline numbers are consistent with reducing the restrictions and i know what dr wilinsky was talking about there's been over this there's a a seven day running average of cases it's up thirteen percent in the last week um there's a and it's i think sixty two thousand in the country there is also a similar average for debts uh it's up six percent over the last week and i think that that number is right at a thousand um they've seen about 21 states moving the wrong direction and clearly as i mentioned before we have some parts of our state that are not doing as well as others but at the end of the day we're trying to be consistent to do what we can that always seeks to strike the right balance between lives on the one hand livelihoods on the other i think we've done that in this case and i will point out that much like my own experts like dr cantor and others at ldh dr windlinski's most fervent plea is to keep masks on over the next several weeks because it is critically important because we're finally going to have the opportunity to get an awful lot of people vaccinated very quickly if only they will choose to take advantage of that opportunity and so we're still very much in that race against the virus against the variants and and the mask is a way to to slow the spread even as you bring more people in close contact with closer contact they should say with one another while those vaccinations ramp up so what we did i believe is is prudent i wouldn't have done it otherwise but i am mindful that that the some of the guidance uh that was put out by the white house and by the cdc uh would suggest that you don't loosen any restrictions at this point uh i obviously wasn't comfortable with that approach yes sir governor on a different note i understand that congressman graves has asked your administration to consider taking a billion dollars from the arp and dedicating it to mississippi river bridge in baton rouge and a new calculus i wonder if you're considering that and if you have anything else to share in terms of how y'all are thinking about using the arp funds given that the rules you know change well first of all we i did get a letter and and uh congressman gray's preference would be for us to go big on infrastructure i will tell you my first priority is to replenish the unemployment insurance trust fund uh because without that we're going to cause uh automatically by operation of law a tax increase on every employer in the state that pays into that fund come september when the rec recognizes the fund balance of our ui trust fund that is below a certain amount and the severity of the tax increase and surcharge depends on how low that amount is well that amount is exactly zero today it was 1.1 billion dollars a year ago so i believe that that's the first order of priority and then on top of that and by the way that's going to be a considerable amount of money to get to the point where those tax increases are not necessary on top of that we don't have uh the rules issued yet by the treasury so we don't know how much of that funding we get in the first year as opposed to year two or year three so making those allocations just isn't possible yet but i can tell you i've already started conversations with legislative leadership including the speaker and the president but also other members about that funding and and what it is that we should be doing with it i will point out that to the extent at least i believe and we have to wait and see exactly how the treasurer interprets the legislation to the degree that the funding replaces lost revenue compared to the 2019 base year i think you can use it for infrastructure of the type that congressman graves is interested in doing it but we don't know exactly how that's to be computed yet on the other hand the money has to be used for co-bid related expenditures again replacing the lost revenue or can be spent on water projects sewer projects or broadband and so that would potentially be a limiting factor on how much funding is available for infrastructure that is not water sewer or broadband yes sir the latest surveys on vaccine hesitancy show a lack of trust or has a hesitancy among conservatives or republicans um and even some um state republican lawmakers have said they don't trust the vaccine what do you say to them and what's your message to folks who may be watching who foot that category yeah you know um i don't know what they're waiting for first of all i believe that the clinical trials were robust and i think all the efforts that were made to ensure the safety and efficacy of the three vaccines that have been approved thus far were considerable and and i remember going through this day by day working within the the trump white house uh and and most especially vice president pence who who chaired the coronavirus task force um and and the effort there by that entire team uh was to make sure that there was confidence in those vaccines if and when the fda issued the emergency use authorization and i i said even before that happened that i was fully satisfied so the i don't know what role uh once political ideology plays in this it doesn't seem to me to make sense on any level but particularly for republicans when this was the number one thing that the trump administration uh used uh as it's to measure its efforts with respect to fighting this pandemic where the very quick way that safe and effective vaccines were produced and tested and and granted authorization and then the administration of the vaccine that came less than a year after the pandemic started and i i will note that the president himself uh the former president has been vaccinated as has the vice president so i i just don't i don't get it but even if they had some issues with the way that it was produced at this point we've been administering vaccine uh in this state since i think december the 12th he dr cantor gave you the numbers of the people who have initiated their vaccine series how many people have completed and so forth and what we're seeing is are vaccines that are incredibly safe i don't know of a more compelling visual demonstration of how efficacious these vaccines are than looking at that nursing home chart and and if you could put that back up where you see that where the third vaccine clinic happened as a matter of the timeline and then the very quick uh and precipitous drop in cases where 80 percent of residents in nursing homes have been fully vaccinated you get down to 14 cases statewide and these are people who by their age are vulnerable to disease they typically all have at least one comorbid health condition that makes them additionally vulnerable and they live in a congregant setting this is why so many deaths happen in nursing homes to begin with right because the this is the most vulnerable population that exists and yet with an 80 vaccination rate you see what happens to the cases i don't know what more anybody would ever need to know that this is a safe and effective vaccine and we have the opportunity to do that for the entire state if just enough people will avail themselves of the opportunity to be vaccinated and i quite frankly don't know what folks are waiting for uh it just it just doesn't make sense to me but i'm going to continue to appeal to them to reach out and have a conversation with a trusted source a physician somebody so that if they can articulate a question or some basis for hesitancy or whatever that that can be addressed so that that person can protect themselves and others because this pandemic only stops when enough people get vaccinated it doesn't stop before that and when the pandemic is over the coronavirus is still going to be with us kovid 19 is still going to be with us but those people who are vaccinated are not going to be feeling its effects so so it's just important to do but i cannot begin to understand how one's political philosophy interferes with the process of deciding to avail oneself of this particular vaccine or any of the vaccines yes sir capacity limits sort of uh easing up a lot of course who is going to enforce so like the social distancing and stuff that like places like this and like bars and stuff like that yeah well the the enforcement will be the same way that it has been it's pretty easy to go into place and see whether the patrons are seated at a table for example and if they're all seated at the table then and and we're in their mass when they're not then they're going to be in compliance we're not going to be looking for hours we're not going to be that they're in operation and serving and that sort of thing um but i will tell you what i said going back to the very first proclamation that i issued we're not going to enforce our way out of this pandemic we have 4.6 million people tens of thousands of businesses thousands of churches and so forth and so we we're calling on the people of louisiana to do what works what we know works um and one of the ways we know these measure works is because if y'all will remember back at the outset of the pandemic louisiana was number one in the nation per capita cases for weeks and weeks last number i saw we were 25. and so what that means is after that initial surge we've done collectively in louisiana a better job than most states at managing our response to the pandemic and to reducing spread and so forth and that's happened because of the people of louisiana and it's one of the reasons why i'm confident that we're going to continue to collectively do what is necessary now do i wish that we had more compliance absolutely i mean i know that there are a number of people out there who are not doing what what they should in order to keep themselves and their families safe and so forth but at the end of the day we have an awful lot of people who do take this seriously and more often than not they are engaging in in the right behaviors and that makes a tremendous difference and so so you know we will enforce what we need to but we continue to call upon the people of louisiana to be responsible and to be good neighbors or maybe that was it look um i really believe that this is our moment this next 30 days is going to be critically important for us it's going to be critical to our success in terms of putting this pandemic behind us and getting the state to a place where it is extremely unlikely that we will see another surge i am also convinced that we are not there today but we have plenty of promise and potential over the next 30 days there are three safe and effective vaccines consider that nursing home information that we just went over more than 25 percent of our state has at least started their vaccination series we believe that there will be well over 300 000 first doses allocated to louisiana next week and if you extrapolate that going forward there will be well over a million doses first doses made available to us in the month of april every single person 16 and older is eligible that's everyone contemplated by the emergency use authorizations that have been granted by the fda to date there will be ample opportunity for people to be vaccinated in every nook and cranny of the state and you're going to have an opportunity to do that during the day on weekends at nights and so this is a critical month as we try to make sure that that we win this race against time and against the virus and the variance and there are two overarching priorities they are masking and they are vaccinating let's collectively put forth a tremendous effort in the month of april uh and and if we do that i am convinced uh that we're going to position ourselves just 13 months after the start of the pandemic in a way that that will really make a meaningful and lasting difference and everyone have a blessed and holy easter and please continue to lift up our state in prayer and all those people who are struggling with covid the family members of those who've died over the past year and there have been well over 10 000 of those now and let's be resolved that that number will be as low as we can possibly make it going forward thank you all and god bless you