North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum Holds News Conference Addressing Increasing COVID-19 Cases on Friday

BISMARCK, ND (trfnews.i234.me) The latest on the rising number of COVID-19 cases in North Dakota from Governor Doug Burgum.
afternoon north dakota thanks for joining in i want to start out with a personal shout out we’ve had over 75 of these press briefings and key to every one of them has been mike nowatsky he’s not here today because it’s his birthday but he’s been working uh remotely just got off a video call with him so happy birthday mike thanks for working on your birthday uh today we’ve got uh myself and our special guest today is a first lady catherine burgum who’ll be talking about recovery reinvented we also afterwards for questions both the superintendent basler and head of human services chris jones will will be here for questions uh let’s jump right in uh we know that uh new cases and positivity rates are still moving in the wrong direction in north dakota but as we have described before we need to put this in context of where we are last spring when our numbers were great so was everybody else’s in the upper midwest and we had a perhaps the good fortune to think that this was never going to be destined for the midwest or the rockies but now as some of the rest of the nation maybe gets some respite there’s a large swath of states through the upper midwest into the rocky region that are facing the the brunt of the covet storm right now uh and of course as we’ve said other things are different because last spring we had schools were closed universities were closed and we were heading into warmer weather where we had more opportunity to be outside and we were moving out of flu season this fall here we are in north dakota with our economy open and our schools open our university is open winter coming on flu season coming on and we’re surrounded by other states that have record record cases as well on sadly we know that this can be a deadly disease particularly for those with age or underlying conditions and there was just in in our region there was other states that set daily records for deaths on wednesday iowa minnesota and montana in kansas wisconsin to mention a few and even hawaii which has been basically closed down to visitation set a record for deaths on wednesday wisconsin illinois kentucky colorado and ohio all reported daily increases in new infections and uh 14 states in this region and around the country also had peak hospitalizations during the entire pandemic including alaska which has also been largely isolated through this time but arkansas iowa kansas kentucky montana missouri nebraska north dakota south dakota oklahoma utah west virginia and wisconsin so however you know through all this we’ve been seeing that there is a many positive things happening in our state we’re seeing local action supported by our state guidelines and i i think i want to again also focus a little bit on the uh the white house report this week because the white house puts out a report they were clear in their report this week that there must be increased mitigation in north dakota we’re seeing that at the community level which is fantastic they talked about how that partial or incomplete mitigation must be what’s going on right now because that would help explain the increased spread and we know that mitigation works there’s been many many debates about masks and mask usage and mask mandates or not mandates but we know that mitigation works and the most effective form of mitigation of course is social distancing this is a disease that a virus that spreads from human to human so if you’re not around other humans you’re not going to get this disease so that’s a the first thing in north dakota as we joked about early on we’ve got plenty of space for physical distancing it’s something that people say we’ve been doing since statehood and so we’ve got that opportunity here in our state when we’re unable to physical distance the white house guidelines went on to say if you can’t physical distance mask wearing hand hygiene avoid crowds in public and avoid hosting private gatherings as an alternative to avoiding crowds in public now does that sound like something we’ve been talking about for seven months because the north dakota smart guidelines are exactly that which is physical distancing if you can physical distance wear a mask hand wash your hands often and again maintain distance from crowds or avoid crowds so we are it’s not a question of do we need a new approach or do we need uh to have the white house put it in a memo versus what we’ve been saying here in north dakota for seven months what we actually need is increased increased compliance or increased participation increased motivation for participation in helping to slow the spread so i want to announce really today to the whole state to put out a challenge and i’ll call it the thanksgiving challenge because it would be really great uh to be sharing with all of you at thanksgiving that our numbers are going down as we head into the holiday period uh that we’ve got increasing amounts of hospital capacity that our schools have remained open that our businesses are open during that holiday season that holiday gatherings can go ahead with families and so if we want all of those things that we dearly love we have an opportunity mitigation takes some time because the incubation period of this can be several weeks so if we you know change uh behavior get more more people social distancing more people being aware more people practicing face coverings when they can’t socially distance even if we start all that today with 100 compliance it would be a couple weeks before we would start to see we might even see numbers go up before we saw them go down but they would go down because places where you’ve had increased amount of mitigation increased mitigation leads to lower case transmission where all of the mitigation is about reducing the number of transmissible moments and so we we know that we have the ability to do that so there is uh choices that we can all uh make here in terms of how we want to uh participate in that and as i’ve said before uh everybody needs to find their why on why they might want to participate and we can stop arguing about you know mass and man masks or mask mandates and all agree that our interaction with other humans and how we do that has the potential to increase transmission rates we just we just know that and so everybody has a chance and when you’re finding your why you can look to find your why uh maybe by finding what you love if you love your community that might be a reason if you love your sports team that you’re a member of if you love your school and you want that to keep open you don’t want your classmates uh to miss any school if you wanna if you got a favorite restaurant that you like going to and you’re worried about them uh and their future uh that’d be another reason to again uh practice the smart guidelines that the white house has been recommending that north dakota’s been recommending especially with the recognition that we’re in the middle of a covid storm if you’re in the middle of a winter storm you don’t go outside without a jacket you don’t i know in our family growing up you made sure you had a shovel in the car in a winter survival kit uh when we’re in the middle of a coveted storm uh it’d be a good idea good time to understand the context of the region we’re in and that now more than any time since this began as a time for us to start thinking about how we can take take actions because there’s lots of debates about how do you have increased amounts of compliance and some would argue for more government mandates others would argue against those but we do know that this virus because it if it if it transmits in close contact under six feet then this really comes down to a family by family business by business school by school community by community approach in terms of the best way to increase the amount of people that are participating and slowing the spread and that requires leadership at all levels and leadership can come from people at any ages uh you know whether you’re a student or whether you’re a leader in your your family your community your uh your club your organization your team you can be the one that helps set the pace that helps slow the spread and keep everybody safe and particularly if we’re looking for things we love i think we all know that we’ve have you know a culture where we want to respect and do respect our elders those that have helped build our state and help contribute to our state and those those elders in our state or somebody we also if we care about them and whether they’re living at home or living in a congregate living setting again you know find your why find who you love and find a reason to be part of the the solution but we’ve had we’ve talked about leadership everywhere we’ve had some uh a number of people that have really stepped up this wheat and our state is a very diverse land and diverse people we’ve got areas that are densely populated we’ve got areas that are that are vast farm fields and expansive ranch land where it can be miles and miles between neighbors and so we know that when we’re dealing with this pandemic that it really comes down to each unique community each county each city has got to have the ability to make local decisions based on the risk within their community and if the number one best way to stop the spread is individual responsibility uh the next backstop behind that is communities getting together and making decisions about what they want to do to stop the spread in their communities the past several weeks we’ve begun weekly meetings and we’ll continue these throughout the pandemic we meet with the mayors and county commissioners that represent close to 80 percent of the state’s population which means the counties from the large large metro areas we hear from them what’s working what’s not working uh what additional support they might need from the state or federals and then we go to work making sure that they’ve got the resources that they need and many of them have stepped up with their uh either by executive action or through their city commissions this week to take to take action and we we will highlight a few of those they’re working closely in with their local task forces with their coalitions and with their local public health uh nearly a month ago mayor klug and williston uh took very strong action he brought back together a covet 19 coalition limited permits which again are issued at the city level uh for large events within the community uh mayor decker and dickinson took similar action by limiting large event permits in the community it’s been almost two months now when we’ve given a shout out to mayor bachinski and grand forks who took the action of limiting the hours on bars closures to 11 o’clock and to help reduce the dense congregation of unmasked crowds at late night mayor johnson from devils lake is working with lake region community college to bring together a community meeting uh today uh for ideas about how to brainstorm on slowing the spread and i know that he’s been reaching out to individual businesses in their community that have uh large amounts of customers to to talk to them about measures that they can do at a at a at a even a store by store basis to help uh slow the spread in their community and over the past week we’ve seen action by mayor mahoney and fargo mayor sipma and the city commission of minot mayor dardis and the city commissioner of west fargo and mayoral carlsbad in valley city all taking actions to address increased mass usage in their their communities we’ve also seen chamber organizations step up from across the state and taking leadership with their membership to urge increased mitigation within businesses to help us keep those businesses open we know that others are considering action and taking action uh and we as a state stand by to support all these communities and their leaders uh in in the tools that they need to help slow this because again if there’s something else that you love and you love the health workers in your community whether they’re in long-term care or whether they’re in the hospitals in your community it’s another reason we can continue to help help them out by making sure we reduce community spread because that takes a load off of those people who work in health care again we know there’s a lag time before the impact of those changes so we do we want to see positive impacts we expect that we’ll see those several weeks out from now but in the meantime uh there’s one other piece of advice we’ve been giving to people uh all along and that’s if you’re not feeling well uh please stay home if you’re sick because well you may think you just have a cold it could be coveted you may think you just have the flu it could be coveted and your uh you’re interacting with other people when you’re symptomatic could lead to others getting sick which lead to others getting sick which leads to uh you know dozens if not hundreds of new cases down the the tree of infection if you will and that puts pressure on our hospital situation so one of the simplest and kindest things we can do for each other right now is to make sure that we’re being again as we said north dakota smart this is not the time to be north dakota tough and go to work when you’re not feeling well we’re certainly grateful to all the the schools the faith-based leaders the businesses and the individuals who continue to make smart choices to reduce transmissible moments in their organizations and find alternatives for how to continue to work keep their keep their missions alive and going and and again we know that all of these mitigation actions have real consequences and so that’s why again we’re not asking uh businesses or others to to make changes their business model without support because while this may be unprecedented in terms of us asking the business community and others to make changes it’s also unprecedented the amount of of support that we are we’re giving to those organizations and we’ll talk about that uh later on in this conference but right now let’s jump into uh some numbers we this past seven days we had 5614 new cases uh and over 4 200 people that were recovered and of course sadly 52 deaths uh in the last week uh and that brings us to a uh a slightly higher new record of 63 63 active cases up 13 uh from yesterday the 11.3 percent uh rate for seven days in north dakota is a new high for north dakota there are many states that have lived in double digits level four months during this pandemic these are our first days being in double digits it’s territory that we had hoped to avoid as you saw from the slide earlier we’re doing substantially better than most of our neighbors where we have other neighbors in this area that have at the state level that have uh 30 plus percent uh positivity rates so from a positivity rate standpoint we feel in terms of the storm we’re weathering it better than others we are doing far more testing than others than other states are that is a positive thing because that’s helping us identify particularly asymptomatic cases which then when they isolate can help slow the spread this week does mark a huge milestone for testing for north dakota uh we are again leading the nation in this regard and we have now completed more than one test for the equivalent of every north dakota resident so that’s uh 79 799 000 just about by tomorrow it’ll cross 800 000 tests in a state with with 760 000 citizens and that includes testing 279 000 plus unique north dakotans and others have been uh including those people have been tested more than once are testing in long-term care of long-term care not just in skilled nursing but in basic care and in assisted living both residents and care workers again viewed as a best practice many in the nation have not been able to catch up with that and so again credit goes out to all the people that are involved in building up our in-state testing capacity uh yesterday uh we did distribute uh we’ve got some new testing tools coming on the way uh for the first time we’re just testing kits rapid tests that only take saliva as a form of a test and those are going to fargo grand forks minot bismarck dickinson and williston public health to be used as part of their testing capability you might also recall that last spring when minnesota was getting hit hard that we were able to conduct testing in our neighboring clay county in minnesota part of the fargo moorhead west fargo metro area we were grateful to receive word this week from minnesota governor tim waltz that they’re making saliva testing in clay county as they move to do that but they’re making they’re going to allow that to be open to residents in cass county and again they’re intending to express their gratitude for north dakota conducting significant testing for minnesota’s last spring and summer they’re opening this moorhead testing site to north dakotans through december 30th or until they reach the number of tests that north dakota provided to minnesota so like a good neighbor minnesota is going to be helping to test north dakotans until we sort of match equivalency we really appreciate that because of course it is one community uh with uh i think 70 000 or more bridge crossings going back and forth between those two communities every day they really are a one community we’ve got long-term care facilities that are operated by the same operator on both sides of the river we have people that work on both live in one community and work in the other and so the integration there much like we have here in bismarck mandan but dealing with the complexity of two states it’s great to have that collaboration with minnesota the binex now tests which we’re receiving from the federal government we’re getting ready to deploy those soon and those those will be deployed we’re doing some validation testing on those right now and then working on the it systems to make sure we can get those those rapid 15-minute tests uh into our systems but we intend to start rolling those out in long-term care to help with the residence with workers and and potentially to help facilitate visitation our 14-day positive rolling average this is slightly lower than our seven day because we’ve got rising numbers the 14 day always lags whether you’re going up or down to a seven day but again this is new territory rising above uh 10 for the first time since we’ve been in the in the pandemic i want to spend a minute talking about underlying health conditions when we’ve been reporting the those that have passed away with kovid the we’ve been always saying that the majority of them have underlying health conditions feedback that we’ve received from local public health and from the medical community perhaps because we included those words those are the words that come off of the the death certificates uh and so we are perhaps people think that by saying that that somehow we’re trying to downplay the seriousness of this disease uh there’s certainly more known about this disease now than there was at the time and there’s more known about the tie between underlying conditions and who is at most risk one thing for sure we know from the death statistics that this continues to be particularly challenging for people with advanced age and as it is here in north dakota as it is around the country uh the majority of those people who have passed either with or from covet in north dakota have been over the age of 70 but again when we take a look at populations one of the good things about north dakota is people live long lives here uh we have over 15 percent of the state population or almost 115 000 individuals that are over age 65 so that’s a group that’s at risk but now when we’ve got this broader list of things that could could lead to be considering a health condition which gives you a more risk of either serious illness or death from covid it includes things like cancer like a heart disease like obesity like chronic kidney disease diabetes uh asthma and certainly smoking is also something that’s been added to the list so then we say well then how many north dakotans uh have one or more of these underlying health conditions well the sad news on that is that it’s about 66 percent of the state of north dakota has has at least one of these conditions and and there are others included being like you know immunocompromised uh or or people that might have recovered from cancer so we don’t want to give anyone a false sense of security surrounding their risk so beginning tomorrow when we’re announcing the death certificates we’re removing uh the underlying health conditions from the news release but if you want more detailed information on deaths visit the dashboard at health.nd.gov coronavirus and again i know that as we tend to during this uh try to look at state-by-state comparisons we’re doing that here today on positivity rates but when it comes to the death certificates there’s another level of challenge because we do know that states are reporting deaths differently and so they’re they’re i’m sure this will be debated long after the pandemic is gone but state by state comparisons can be challenging based on differences that the states are using in their coroner’s office and others for how they’re reporting uh coronavirus either with or from covid when we go to active cases across the state i mean again this is the thing where we talk about our numbers headed in the wrong direction we now have again we’re in a position where every single county in north dakota has at least one active case the highest totals of active cases remain centered in some of our most populous region that makes sense with cass at 1347 and burley morton being very similar combined almost identical in that 13 53 range grand forks six 672 ward 623 morton 341 i was including that in the burley ones earlier williams 200 and stark 196. the good news on this chart the darker it is then that’s the more cases that you have but if we flip to the the active case rates which is again dividing cases by population we know that several weeks ago williams and stark were among our highest in terms of cases per 1000 residents they’ve come down off of that some of our smaller counties that have had outbreaks have have popped up on these these lists and we want to be very cautious not to make the same mistake the national media regularly does so we’re not going to you know call out and write a statewide story about a very small county with a very low population that has a few number of cases but on a per capita they may be on the top of this list but we do we would say again that there has been some positive movement in some of the western counties and i’d say in the eastern part of the state and burley morton we continue to still go the wrong direction with that relative to the county levels which we went into effect last friday we are not changing any of those today we know it takes time for businesses to adopt it takes time for people to to sort through this we’ll continue to monitor uh risk levels and we will be potentially making some additional changes next thursday at our press briefing we take a look at this slide uh one addition that we do have added on here is uh the uh the five uh tribal nations with which we share borders we continue to work closely with our tribes uh to uh and they’re they’re doing uh work some of the some of them have put in mass mandates and have had had really strong masking throughout this and we are going to continue to work with them whether it’s on testing or hospital capacity to make sure that we continue to partner with them and and whatever challenges they’re seeing and whatever resources they may or may not have through the federal indian health system uh we do have on that chart that was up uh we still have four counties that remain at the the new normal or the blue level 17 at the lower low risk or green 15 at moderate risk and 16 counties in high and so again if you’re in a moderate or high-risk county which represents the majority of the population of our state again a good time to uh to pay attention uh the active support of all of our local leaders and north dakotans is one of the best tools we have to slow and stop the spread otherwise we’ll continue uh heading in a negative direction and your actions as as individuals and as communities can help drive a positive trend and hopefully in the future if we all are in this together uh we’ll continue to be moving in the right direction so as i close out that section i would put out again this challenge since we are four weeks away from thanksgiving i’ll call this the thanksgiving challenge but i would challenge every county and every community that’s on that chart right now to have better numbers at thanksgiving than you do today that’s the challenge and uh we’ll mark what your starting point is now and we’ll see uh who’s gonna be on the leaderboard in terms of taking that down uh to being the uh in the the having the most positive improvements between now and thanksgiving i wanna also also talk about contact tracing we know that from the beginning of this the the testing and contact tracing work absolutely together both of them are invaluable tools and they help guide the response of our resources in addition to building some of the most robust testing because we were testing at levels anywhere from from two to in some cases nine times more per capita than other states uh commensurately uh the fact that we were able to keep up with contact racing meant that we had if we had if we were keeping up with contact racing which we were till last weekend that meant that our contact tracers were also doing more contact racing per capita than almost any other state we’ve gone from less than 10 to over 450 train contact tracers and i want to thank them because that’s their hard work their dedication and whether those were members of the north dakota department of health department emergency services north dakota i.t department north dakota national guard lots of people helped build that capacity when we had the big increases last week in certain parts of the state we did get overwhelmed uh so we had a blip where we had a backlog uh that was extended and they uh resulted in extended notification times for positive results thanks to decisive action and uh in quick action this week by a number of people uh the north dakota department of health uh along with the north dakota national guard has successfully resolved the backlog of notifications uh we had got over 50 additional north dakota national guard soldiers added to that effort and more than 800 north dakotans were notified and we dug through the backlog in a day and a half and it’s the third thing that i want to say is that we also know that hey we we’re doing stuff which has largely been a manual process uh over the years uh that we continue to add more automation we’ve done this throughout uh with the contact tracing but we’ve added a new capability was launched this morning for the first time and 250 people were notified this morning that they were a positive case delivering automated notifications people can choose to be notified either by text or by email when you receive those you’ll know it’s from the department of health you’ll be asked to submit some personal information that confirms it’s you and and then you’ll get your results then and then i would also again say that for contact tracing for healthcare settings k-12 schools university sessions are going to continue as usual which is the teams that we have in place will continue working doing in-person contact tracing again for health care workers k-12 schools university systems and health care settings includes long-term care so we’ll continue with our resource against that if you’re an individual you you and you sign up for this you could be notified automatically get the results faster that’s going to help you make choices there are new videos that are out on the north dakota department of health website and i think that some people were reacting that that we react you know somehow asking people to do their own contact tracing uh i was kind of shocked when i saw a reaction of that because i would hope that throughout this pandemic uh or even if it wasn’t a pandemic if you had the flu or some infectious disease and you found out you’re positive i would hope that you would be contacting the people you’d been around to say hello co-workers i’ve got xyz and i’ve been contagious i thought i would let you know so this is again part of that you know the traditional uh north dakota spirit of caring about our neighbors and so now we’ve created tools uh there’s some short videos out there that help you understand what to do and you can forward those videos to others and let let them know that you yourself may be positive but i would again hopefully we’re providing a tool to support something that’s been going on all along we also prior to this did have a system that delivered automated notifications to individuals with negative test results uh and that system will continue to work uh and has been working well and of course that’s the majority uh even right now you know when at a uh a 11 rate that means that 89 of the people we have to notify are negative and so that automated system working well now we’ve brought that over and are going to roll that out for positives but again grateful to the the work of the contact tracers and all everybody who worked to resolve that backlog and everybody in it that worked to bring in these new systems related to closed contacts is the new guidelines we offered several weeks ago regarding the close contact and whether close contacts had to quarantine or not we knew have some information coming out of the schools we know that masks work we know that wearing them can help keep others safe and in school settings we had identified there were 300 individuals that were identified as a close contact to a positive in 226 of these cases so way more than two-thirds of that uh 226 both the person who tested positive and the close contact were wearing masks so this has allowed healthy young people who have very little risk of hospitalization they’re very likely not going to take any hospital capacity almost negligible risk of death those healthy young individuals if they’re both wearing masks then do not have to quarantine they can continue to wear their mask properly and attend their sports in school etc this is helping keep our schools open and our students in school helps them with all their social and emotional learning and again uh this was an innovative new approach to create an incentive for mask wearing and again the 74 individuals that were required to quarantine a good reminder uh for others uh that if you were both wearing your masks then you wouldn’t have to be quarantining so again particularly at the school level uh it’s there’s a strong incentive now for everyone to do their part and wear masks when you’re not able to socially distance next topic is new school dashboard we have of course had one guideline through all of this whether it’s any agency in the state government and even before the pandemic we were committed in our administration of transparency there’s a num number of things that have gone on uh that have helped us increase transparency whether that’s from omb uh or whether it’s through the department of health but uh continually updating the information that we’re we’re sharing north dakota is going to be adding a a new dashboard the k12 cova dashboard this another layer of transparency that constituents whether their parents or teachers or school boards can help us navigate the complexity of of trying to get a hundred and twenty thousand students uh and their different learning environments in north dakota all back to a in school uh environment safely uh this dashboard will provide a glimpse into our k-12 age population and how the virus is impacting student staff and communities it’ll do this in a way that protects individual health information and we’re launching this school board this dashboard with school affiliated tested data from static sites around the state as we work to prepare the remaining data collected as we work our way through this we’re going to continue to emphasize today there was some confusion last week so we’ll say it again today school instructional models and the school instructional models might include you know are you face to face are you hybrid or your distance school instructional models are separate from any smart restart county colors school districts their school boards their superintendents can make those decisions and ultimately a parent can make the decision about where where and how their student is going to be is going to receive their education but again these are those are unhinged from the smart restart we want our kids in school the data from around the country indicates that they can be there safely and so again this new dashboard will help everybody have information so i’m grateful again to the the ndit department the department of public instruction and especially to superintendent basler for her leadership and that website is going to be available at the health.nd.gov under the schools link and so take a look there and as i said earlier the superintendent baser will be here for any questions related to the k-12 next topic has to do with the the relief side that we’re doing for individuals and businesses and support of health care through the coronavirus relief funds as we’ve talked about throughout this we’ve had i’d say again unparalleled or without parallel in the history of the state collaboration between the executive branch the agencies and the legislature and legislative leadership during a time when the legislature is not in session there whether it’s a calls and meetings that are happening every day or the work that’s occurred through the emergency commission in the budget section uh there’s been great work to act with both the care and expediency to allocate north dakota’s 1.25 billion share of the cares act coronavirus relief funds in an effort to get this deployed early that was part of the strategy was because having money literally in the bank or in the bank of north dakota that wasn’t in the hands of citizens or businesses or health care organizations or our schools we’re not helping anyone so we had a strategy early on to try to make thoughtful careful decisions about how we could get the dollars out and of course following the federal guidelines this is money that could not be in in any existing budget between march uh beginning of march and december 30th so it could not be part of any uh state budget prior to that it had to be covid related and there’s a number of other elements that were included there but this provided some guard rails which we have followed closely throughout this but we have had some turn back we got that money out early and which was great but some of it we’ve been able to be more efficient and so when we have money that’s come back today the emergency commission had an opportunity to consider 220 million dollars that was turned back some of that was because of the there we learned there’s a large allocation that was made uh for emergency loan programs at the bank of north dakota turns out during this time frame there was not an appetite for businesses to add more debt to their balance sheets the one of the good news things is we also had a turn back of a significant turn back from our unemployment insurance fund and the reason for that was because we’ve been able to keep our economy open we’ve had a record number of people come off the unemployment rolls and we have announced yesterday that we as a state have the fourth lowest unemployment in the nation at 3.8 percent and this is a credit uh to uh our the the business community uh and to the state working together to keep our economy open because this is a 3.8 and we’re still in the middle of of a significant downturn in ag and in energy and so again this is a really really remarkable so great work team on that we also there was changes that were made in the rules uh fema reimbursement to the department of health and also to the uh the our attitude general general dorman the national guard and department of emergency services with those changes in reimbursement some of the dollars we had allocated for corona virus relief funds can be accessed through fema dollars so those were able to be turned back and then we also had through commerce i had put together a program for energy resiliency grants but we know that those under the current guidelines were not going to be fully utilized before the end of the year and so those were some of the bigger areas of potential uh turn back but what we have done the the highlights the repurposing this is that we with the action today uh by the emergency commission the emergency commission uh consists of our uh the majority leaders and the the the two chairmen of the house and senate appropriations along with the secretary of state and myself uh that group of six advanced the these recommendations which will be reviewed next week by the 24-member legislative budget section but as of today uh approvals that came out were going forward uh is uh 30 38. 33.8 million going to k-12 on top of the roughly 30 million that was allocated before so that brings a total of almost 64 million dollars going on top of k-12 and that’s on top of already north dakota one of the highest in the nation with ten thousand dollars of state aid per student uh another 64 million dollars to help the schools with with the covid related this round of dollars that are going out today will allow more flexibility for schools uh whether that’s on you know tech support uh mental and behavioral health support for students and staff personnel related costs including substitute teachers upgrades to ventilation systems and other physical planter building improvements and additional training for instructors instructors and staff on the new teaching and learning environment we also in today had 10 million dollars going to our the six large referral hospitals uh two in bismarck ii in fargo one in grand forks and minot these hospitals you know have played will continue to play a critical role in expanding hospital capacity if needed in the the coming uh coming months ahead when we’ve got flu season and we typically always have higher demand for hospital care in the winter time in north dakota but when we have uh that the seasonal demand plus kovid that we feel that these are the organizations that need that particularly this grant is going to allow them uh to apply these grants towards incentives either whether it’s paying bonuses for overtime whether it’s incentive packages for people working additional shifts but all of these things are more cost effective than hiring more more out-of-state contract nurses we know that that has to happen but as we compete with other states for contract nurses in some cases in the region coming off of our weekly call with the hospital leaders from across the state that in some places are charging as much as 150 an hour for a contract a nurse that money doesn’t go to the contract nurse it goes to a company the nurse might get paid a fraction of that but we want to for that sort of labor arbitrage that can happen during a critical time like this we want to provide the resources so that our large referral hospitals can help put money in the pockets of north dakota health care workers that are that are working exceptionally hard and help retain them or to get people to come off the sidelines who may not have may still have a license but haven’t been actively on the front lines this may help them with that so again i want to say thanks to the hospital leaders that we continue to work with who are all committed to a planning process that’s going to allow us to make sure that we’re making the full and best use of the north dakota’s capacity uh 29 million dollars is going towards uh additional grants to support our hospitality in in hospitality industry and again we’re we’re repurposing 25 million of the existing economic resiliency grant so this is going to be a 54 million dollar grant program we know that uh that those in the hospitality industry have been those that have been sung some have been the most hard hit as travel has been reduced uh and as guidelines sometimes include for more social distancing within hospitality organizations uh if we’re asking them to do their part uh to help slow the spread we also want to stand up and give them support to help them do that and these grants will provide up to 25 thousand dollars per location other things that quickly uh going through this thing on the on the the money that was approved today uh the emergency commission previously supported cities and counties in august providing 59 million dollars of crf funds to reimburse them for for law enforcement costs uh for the for the march uh through the earlier part of the summer and we’re now extending that for five more months it’s about 12 million dollars a month that will bring the grand total for the political subs to about 122 million to help cover the costs of law enforcement payroll costs uh those payrolls public safety payroll costs they’re considered allowable expense but we should so they are allowable so the payment goes out they can easy for us to calculate what those dollars are if a local uh if a county or a local community had already covered that payroll cost and this dollar grant which is sent to cover payroll cost they can use those dollars for others whether it’s a first responders for for fire for other needs that they may have within the city so it’s these are dollars that will be transferable within those communities once they receive them we’ve also repurposed nearly 16 million dollars to our department of human services for a number of great things we have continuation of the very successful child care emergency operations grant continuing that through december that’s 8 million long-term care and skilled nursing facility uh environmental uh im improvement that includes air purification and hvac systems over three million community-based behavioral health services uh critically important right now 1.7 million the emergency rent bridge program which thankfully there has not been much demand for but we are continuing to support that for people that may be falling out of the bottom of the keeping people uh housed as opposed to the more expensive approach for them to become homeless to help them get through this time four hundred thousand dollars and then the great plains food bank and citroen senior nutrition services four hundred and twenty thousand dollars so again uh those are all fantastic and one of the other ones which was was approved today for the energy industry the energy industry is a critical part it’s about nine percent of the gdp in north dakota but it represents uh over 53 percent of the north dakota state tax revenue let me say that again nine percent of gdp 53 of state tax revenue it’s critical uh that we support the workers in this industry particularly those in north dakota who’ve been put out of work uh and we’ve found smart ways to do that and protect the environment there was a about 40 million dollars that was spent earlier to help reclaim abandoned wells and plug those that that helped us keep employment uh for crews in north dakota but it also helped to solve an environmental issue uh we were one of the first to launch that that was copied by other states and again here we’re repurposing some of those dollars that could not be spent because of the winter weather coming and the need to get this money expended by december 30th uh we’re we’re repurposing 16 million to provide an incentive for uh to buy water acquisition water is something that is needed for both producing and and and also disposal after a well is fracked and this will incentivize the completion of 80 wells which will preserve 500 to 1000 jobs in the oil fields in each of these wells when produced will produce millions of dollars of tax revenue to the state it takes about 150 000 of sales tax for all the other things they have to buy uh to complete a well and so i have no doubt that this will be the highest return on investment for taxpayers of any karex dollars we’ve used and with uh 80 additional wells running that’ll help maintain oil production at the levels it is what through through the next summer which again will help stabilize the entire budgets and the the revenue with 53 of takes state tax revenue coming uh from that sector then there isn’t a single budget whether it’s k-12 or health care or infrastructure uh public safety uh the universities every single budget is touched by the energy sector so again finding ways to preserve employment for north dakotans buying north dakota products to help keep that industry going so with that in summary i’ve got a slide here of the 1.25 billion and i think again the north dakotans can all be feel inspired by this chart because when we take a look at the left side of this which is the top left corner economic support for businesses lower left economic support for individuals uh these are uh will represent well over half of the pie chart here so you’re talking about close to 700 million dollars that’s gone uh to help support those individuals who’ve been asked to make you know changes or sacrifices uh who’ve been affected by the downturn in the economy because of this pandemic and then on the right hand side of that slide we’ve been able to for only 16 percent of this has gone towards the continuation of of government uh services and then the upper right hand corner public health and safety that includes everything with the department of health and human services and everything we’re doing on that right hand side of the page to support local political subdivisions so fantastic balance and again i know that other states that early on got caught up in the the the pandemic at a level like we saw in states in the northeast where a thousand people were dying a day in some of the northeast states that most of their dollars went towards fighting the pandemic and we’ve been able to have more than half go towards supporting individuals and businesses one of the reasons when you look at that chart it’s one of the reasons why our unemployment is at 3.8 percent so with that again let’s conclude on the the the coronavirus relief funds by again sharing my gratitude with the legislative leaders uh and and all those that serve on on the emergency commission and budget section and many more that have been in discussions on how to appropriately uh invest these funds uh for the for for north dakota uh to help us support the mission we’ve had all along which is saving lives and saving the livelihoods