→ See more of our coronavirus coverage, including community resources and personal stories.
Rhode Island will use four benchmarks to assess whether the state is seeing an upsurge in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations after the recent lifting of a stay at home order, Gov. Gina Raimondo said Wednesday an interview with The Public’s Radio.
Here’s a transcription:
Donnis: Governor, now that the stay at home order has been lifted, do you have a specific set of metrics that would lead you to reimpose that stay at home order if indicators take a turn for the worse?
Raimondo: I’m going to be dedicating much of Thursday’s press conference to talking about this in detail. It’ll be a combination of factors. Number one, we’re going to be looking at, did we see a spike in you know, any kind of a surge in the number of cases or hospitalizations? On account of our reopening, we’re going to keep a very close eye on hospitalizations. The thing I’m most worried about is we cannot let our healthcare system be overwhelmed. What would be concerning, you know, [is what] what percent of our ICU beds are being taken up. We will look continually at our ability to manage outbreaks. If there is an outbreak or more than one in phase one, we’re going to make sure our system can handle it. We can get there within four hours, test everybody, quarantine and isolate everybody effectively. We’re going to be looking at compliance in phase one. Our ability to move to phase two depends totally on whether people are obeying the rules in phase one, social distancing, hand washing, mask-wearing, etc. And then just all evaluate our underlying systems, like we are making great progress around testing — testing, vulnerable communities, contact tracing, symptom-monitoring? Assuming that that continues, we’ll continue to move to phase two. If for whatever reason we — and I don’t expect this — but if we were to see any kind of weakening in our systems, then it would cause me to pause. So it’ll be like four factors we’ll look at in total, what level of increase infections, hospitalization.
Donnis: What level of hospitalizations and deaths would you consider unacceptable?
Raimondo: We are still working through it. We have one more call to finalize that.
Donnis: Some economists believe it will be the mid-2020s before all the jobs have been lost in the pandemic will be recovered. Do you think that will be the case in Rhode Island?
Raimondo: I hope not, though it’s possible. Here’s how I think about it. And this is a very, very important point. I don’t think anyone knows. I spend time every day talking to people in business, folks who work at the Fed, policymakers, local business people here, bankers, trying to get a handle on. What is this recession going to look like? It’s clearly horrible now, Great Depression levels of unemployment. The key question is, well, will it look like a U or V? And if it’s a U, how long will it be? Some of that will depend on what we do here in Rhode Island. For example, if we continue to or try harder to find folks who’ve been who’ve lost their jobs, give them training to get a new job, and job placement, then that’ll help enormously. If we use some of our COVID stimulus money to help stimulate the Rhode Island economy, that will help enormously. If we support our small businesses in Rhode Island with some of our COVID stimulus to some of our other initiatives, they’ll get back on their feet more quickly. I do not have a crystal ball. I wish I did. I’ve seen surveys which suggests that most people feel their layoff is temporary. And I certainly hope that’s the case. I think for the vast majority of people the layoff will be temporary. You know, a year from now or much less than that restaurants will be back up and running retail will be back up and running. I do worry that there’s a certain number of people who are in low-wage businesses who themselves are low-skilled. And if we don’t do something to up-skill them and help place them, they’re going to be long-term unemployed. And so we [have] to keep our eye on that.
Donnis: You spoke recently during one of your briefings about the need for the state to make strategic investments to try to position things so they’ll improve moving forward. But given the dire amount of red ink, will the state really have the capacity to make strategic investments in the next year, two years?
Raimondo: We have to. I’ve been talking to a lot of folks who ran governments or ran businesses during the last recession. The ones who did the best job did find a way to continue to invest in growth. It will be difficult, exactly as you say. Just keeping the lights on, providing basic public services will itself be a gigantic challenge in light of the deficit we’re facing. However, if we are going to hope to be out of the recession as quickly as possible, and not repeat Rhode Island’s continual cycle of first and last out, we need to be forward-thinking, strategic and keep an eye on making sure the bottom doesn’t fall out of our economy. Which means we have to find some ways to invest in infrastructure, job training and job creation, however hard that will be.
Donnis: What will your top priorities be in the budget, with there being ongoing uncertainty about whether we’ll see federal relief to help states like word uncovered deficits?
Raimondo: Right now, it’s impossible to try to think about balancing the budget. Because we are being told that there’s a reasonable likelihood that Congress will be passing an additional relief package for cities and states. And I talked to the speaker and Senate president. Our view is, we just need to hang on a few more weeks to get a bit more clarity from the federal government before we can seriously get to work. Do we have an $800 million hole or $200 million hole? We have to continue to focus more than ever on job creation, infrastructure, support to small businesses and job training — the only way forward. We need to find a way to make sure our kids continue to get a high-quality public education, even though there will almost certainly be cuts. We’ve got to get creative. We need to stay liquid as a state, right. We have to be able to always pay our bills and have liquidity. And shore up our hospital system. We cannot afford to have any one of these hospitals go into receivership. Those are kind of the core principles that I would see as non-negotiables. And then we’ve got to work around the rest of it. The picture is so foggy right now. The numbers they’re throwing at us are gigantic. You may or may not get 100 percent reimbursement from the federal government for the National Guard. Well, that’s a $100 million swing right there. We just have to hang tight a little bit longer before we can get to work.
Donnis: Most of the deaths of relates to COVID-19 have been for people over 70. Should the state have done more earlier on to focus on nursing homes and people over age 70?
Raimondo: We did everything we knew how to do at every point in time. The federal government was really slow those first couple of weeks. We were begging and pleading for help to get the situation in Rhode Island under control and in our nursing homes. You know, the PPE just wasn’t available in the quantities we needed. The testing wasn’t even close to what we needed. Put it this way: [could] we [have] done better, almost certainly. But did we do everything we knew how to do with working as hard as we could, being as creative as we could at every point in time? Yes.
