Sign Vermont Terms of Use Agreement Myself

Document type sign terms of use agreement vermont myself

hello everybody um it's really nice to join you today can everyone hear me all right great great since we're a small group i just want to start with some logisticals i'm going to be jumping around a little bit on documents but feel free to use the chat room mike will let me know if we have questions that are pertinent to something i'm speaking about i'm happy to be interrupted since we're a small personal group it's easy to do that so you can also raise your hand while i'm speaking and then i know you know it's something that you'd like to ask right away if it can be saved we're going to have a question and answer period at the end as well because i think you all have very good questions and that's how i find out what you're thinking about um but today i'm going to talk a little bit about uh covid19 my name first of all is d uh my full name is dionna but i go by dee dee mirvang and i work for the department of health which we call vdh vermont department of health we love acronyms so i will apologize before i start i will use some acronyms but i will try to spell them out and feel free to ask me if i don't um i have worked with the state of vermont department of health now for three years uh it's kind of another new career change for me i'm in my 50s and i tell my grown children to not get too wrapped up in what they do because they may change careers six times in their lifetime which is it's kind of a new thing i think in our society but i thoroughly enjoy working here a real quick personal background i i actually grew up in vermont in woodstock vermont my dad worked for lawrence rockefeller and he worked at the woodstock inn and um i was blessed as a child because my dad worked for lawrence for 15 years and i was born in puerto rico i grew up in vermont and pennsylvania and then ended up in california but um i left at 10 from vermont and i would have dreams um that i had moved back to vermont as a child and uh it took me 40 years but here i am so i feel blessed to be back in this beautiful state i was able to bring my husband and our youngest son who is 15 at the moment and and we live in manchester and we really um really love being here so i i work for the department of health in a unique position um my position is called emergency preparedness specialist and um people ask me what do you do and i used to say i plan for pandemics just to see what kind of response i would get and mostly people would look at me very confused and not know what that meant now people know what that means but i have been blessed working here in the state of vermont on this response for the last eight months i was a part-time employee i've been full-time since the pandemic and it's really nice to feel like i have a job where i can work on the problem and feel like the work i'm doing is important so so thank you for joining us today and i hope everything that john and i have to say make sense and um helps you understand a little more how we're responding to the pandemic not just from an employee perspective but also volunteer perspective here in vermont so um my outline for today is i'm going to talk a little bit about kobit first and what our numbers are looking like and some of the things the governor's been saying and then i'm going to jump into our medical reserve corps which we call the mrc and talk about how that's part of my work but also what we do in bennington county who we are and how we're helping in this response and um so to start i like to start with numbers i'm i'm very focused on numbers more so than i should be sometimes but i'm going to share my screen and i'm going to show you the numbers that came out on wednesday which some of you have probably seen and then just talk a little bit about what's going on in the state let me try this just give me one second here okay can we see the case information numbers all right of course they have to be in red um let me make this bigger so this is a a graph that is up almost every day on vermont health um response if you have not spent any time on the internet looking up vermont health response i'd be a surprise but that is what i send everybody to for information um of course world information i go to cdc in the country but for the state i go to our health vermont covet if you put in only three words in your search bar health vermont hovid you will get the state vermont page on this and this is one of the graphs they put out daily it gives you a lot of information so to briefly go through it as of 12 p.m on the 25th which was wednesday we had 81 new positive cases that came in in the 24 hours preceding wednesday to give us a total of 3 827. the main thing to keep in mind as i'm sure you all know is our numbers have been going up over the last 10 days we're averaging closer to about 100 cases a day and we really want to see those numbers start to drop soon um why i'll talk about the why in a little bit currently hospitalized is a really important number that's you know the way i look at that number is that's two to four weeks behind the positive case surge so if you think we've had a surge in the last week the hospital numbers really aren't going to surge now for another week or two and what we watch is the currently hospitalized and the icu numbers so there's two things i tell people about covid that we're trying to control in vermont vermont is unique i won't go on and on about how great we are but i will say we've been blessed in that our covenant numbers have been much lower than most states in the country we have kept our positivity rate under 2 which i think there might be one other state in hawaii that's done that across the board since march why lots of wise i think after we get through this we'll all look back and learn but um i thank vermonters i i thank the fact that we're in a rural state and that we like to social distance anyway um and that we spent a lot of time outside and our circles are smaller than people who live in big cities so we just come across fewer people but we're also we also have been very careful since march we have seen more mask wearing in the state we've seen people being careful of their circles we've been we've seen people not shopping all the time but maybe going once a week you know some of these things that over time get very tiring for all of us and we get fatigued they really do work so what we look at is if we can keep our positivity rate so that's down under hospitalized under investigation we are currently as of wednesday at 1.4 earlier in the week we went up to 2.1 so we were climbing and right now we're kind of hovering between one and two percent keep an eye on that number in the next week or two that will be really important to see what's happening after thanksgiving to see if our numbers start going up again but there's two things we're really trying to do in vermont we're trying to keep our schools those that can open um if not partially open open here and there hybrid there's all kinds of models every school union and district has had the ability to have say in how they have school and i know um the bennington school district's been a little different than our district up here but we're really trying to keep our numbers down so kids can go to school and so teachers can keep teaching and then i'm sure you've seen across the country that really varies from state to state [Music] the other thing we really watch in vermont is our hospital beds and i know every state is doing this but i like to throw out two numbers they're easy to remember how many hospital beds do we have in vermont does anyone want to throw a number out there that are available at any time capacity is what i'm looking for any guesses you're all on mute so i'll keep talking we have about 800 hospital beds in the whole state of vermont most of them are in the uvm system um but we have about 800 beds if one hospital fills up they have the ability to transport to another hospital but the key number how many icu beds do we have that's a much smaller number and it's a much harder number to surge because of all the equipment and staffing that comes with icu in vermont get ready we have about 200 icu beds okay 200 for 630 000 people so that number is what drives a lot of what i do because we want to continue to have icu capacity throughout the pandemic so the sickest people in vermont can get into an icu bed if they need one and it might not just be a coveted person it could be someone having a heart attack or somebody with a much more serious condition so what i really watch and i i encourage everyone else to is that percent positivity and hospitalized in icu we can keep that hospitalized under 200 we're doing something right the other thing worth mentioning is we can surge in vermont meaning we can create more hospital beds and you may remember in the spring we did that and actually right now we're starting to reopen some of those facilities these are places like the spartan center where you have a very large maybe auditorium and we we bring the national guard in and they basically create walls and beds cots these are not your typical hospital rooms you're you're literally in a large space with a lot of other people so we send the least sick people to what we call surge facilities if and when we need those so i just wanted to throw that all out there because not everybody knows how our hospitals plan for these things and they are in what's called emergency operation command and as numbers go up they start planning for surge potential so the good thing is we had a lot of practice in the spring and now our hospitals are ready and ready to mobilize at an instance notice so that we can increase our beds um as we need to people tested um have have any of you been tested raise your hand so um many vermonters have been tested if not once more than once and um people tested is the number of people who have received tests so if you receive five tests you'd be shown in that number once um total tests is the number of i'm sorry i just said that the wrong way the total number of people is 218 the total number of tests means a lot of those people have been tested more than once and um the death rate you know we don't like to see any deaths from covid uh we were very blessed for many months we didn't have any deaths and now we're starting to see some most of these deaths are folks in congregate living settings who are older and often have comorbidities as well but we really have been working hard to protect our most vulnerable in vermont and the governor just announced today we'll be doing another round of testing in all our congregate living facilities and that is one way where we try to keep those cases low but also find when there's a positive um and oftentimes they come in from staff so we're getting better at testing all the time but any questions on these numbers uh before i move on okay let's see i'm going to go to my other sheet excuse the jumping around here okay there we go alright so i just want to say thank you to all of you for putting up with us i know it's been a very long eight months and i think we all know it's going to be a long little winter for a while um i will talk at the end of this about the vaccines that are starting to roll out and the pre-vaccination planning that we're doing which gives us all a little hope to look forward to but before i get into that i want to start by talking about our medical reserve corps as that's really why we were asked to speak today and the medical reserve corps is not unique to vermont we have medical reserve cars all over the country the mrc program was actually started after 9 11. we learned from various disasters around the world like the bhopal disaster as well as 9 11 as a good example that people want to help in times of emergency but people don't always know how to best help in 9 11 you may remember hundreds of thousands of people with clinical backgrounds first responder backgrounds were showing up just showing up to help on site in many ways that was helpful in many ways it wasn't helpful because um some of the folks that were helping probably should not have been there have had health issues ever since or maybe weren't the best volunteers to have on site so what we learned is it's better to have a medical reserve corps which is also a civilian core so people think because of the word medical you have to be a trained clinician to be a member that is not true anybody with any skill set can be a help to the medical reserve corps but the medical reserve corps was started with the idea that we want people who have medical training and people who have first responder training to be signed up verified background checked and approved before the disaster great idea because we all get very busy when disasters hit and we don't have time to do those things so in vermont we have been building our medical reserve cores since 2003 and actually the mrc of southwest vermont our unit one of 10 units was the first unit developed in vermont we currently have 62 members in the bennington county or mrc of southwest vermont unit out of about 781 that number is continuing to grow we have had a huge influx of more members since uh covet 19 hit that's pretty normal when the disaster hits people want to help so one of the things i've been doing since march is just going out and talking about our medical reserve corps and helping people understand who we are what we are and why we ask people to sign up and um a lot of our members don't do anything for a couple years and then an emergency hits and they're on the front lines helping us so who are these people who makes up the core um i really like to show another visual which will just take me a second because i think it gives us a really good sense of who are these folks that and i'd have to find it okay let's see give me one more second here there we go so the people that make up the core um as i said earlier not all medically trained individuals we do ask for nurses and doctors and folks who have clinical backgrounds to sign up if possible i'm going to make this large can you all see this now okay so this gives you a sense this was in april um this was a count of who was in our medical reserve corps at the time and let me see if i can scroll down so what you see is most of the people who register with us are nurses and doctors but then i really like this because it gives you a sense we have a lot of clinically trained people whether it's lnas or licensed clinical mental health counselors are very important in times of emergency we have emts we have social workers we have pas all of those are fabulous but if we keep going down we have fewer and fewer of folks like teachers john gagnon my coordinator is a retired teacher veterinarians dentists military firefighters we really need a little bit of everything because as i'll talk later when we're activated the medical reserve corps we're often helping with things like vaccinations and yes there are people that give the shots but everybody else helping to run the vaccination clinic most of those folks don't have clinical backgrounds so i really like to give this as an example to show folks that the medical reserve corps is made up of you and me and everybody in between and the more folks we get signed up in vermont over the long term the better um okay now i have to go back to here there we go can you see the the screen again okay what do we do and who do we partner with so the folks who make up the core are really a variety of people that live in bennington county as i mentioned 62 folks in bennington county out of that list i think i have three physicians and about 10 nurses the key is that these folks have been signed up they filled out some background paperwork they got approved and now they're in my roster and any time the state needs something they can send out an activation to all 781 people or just to specific people within a region or within a geographic area um so for example i'm going to show you what it might look like if somebody were activated um let me see so can you see my email screen or is still the same yeah let me try this again one more time okay so this is this is an email can you see an email okay yes so basically once you're a member of the medical reserve corps u you're doing your life you're working a lot of our folks work full-time a lot of them work part-time and then they get an email from us and it says something like this so this is one of the more recent emails that went out to our membership it was asking if they would like to help with a long-term care facility that is struggling with staffing right now so and it's very specific what they're looking for they're looking for an rn or an lpn um what happens once you become a member of the medical reserve corps is the state can say okay we have a need for x is that something that would be appropriate for our medical reserve corps volunteers if it is they'll send out an email like this and you would get an email like this and you would scroll through it as a member and you would see that okay it's in burlington this is who i contact i let them know no i'm not available or yes i am available the beauty is that because there are so many of us in the state we'll get different requests for different areas of need but we won't feel like we have to respond to everything i don't generally respond to anything that isn't within an hour's drive for myself because i don't want to waste my time and everybody else's time if i don't have to um the nice thing is we can help in many different ways so mrc members have helped since covid19 respond to everything from helping to give out food at our food distribution sites helping to staff at hospitals svmc activated about 20 of our members in the spring to help with scheduling and screening of all their staff as they would enter the buildings so they they see us as an additional staffing resource as needed um so if a hospital is experiencing staffing shortages which is starting to happen all over the state right now um they can look at this as a resource for them to draw new staff from now often they will ask for a volunteer to serve in a capacity on a short-term basis but we have had some of our volunteers being asked to step up and be paid for the position a little bit longer term so that's also an option for some people most of my members aren't looking for work they're really just looking for a way to help and the nice thing is whenever an activation comes through it's very specific for what the work is and for how long the person is needed so the mrc can help with everything from testing for covid to getting food to people who need food who's staffing at our hospitals and long-term care facilities to helping with vaccine distribution so right now we are starting to gear up for covid vaccine which is very exciting i think we're all very happy to hear that some vaccines are coming down the pike when you think about vaccinating say 70 of the american population it's never ever been done before especially in a way we're going to be doing it where we want to make the vaccine available but we have to do it by priority groups and then we have to make it easily accessible and then we have to track everybody who gets the vaccine because they're going to have to have a second shot and they have to come back for their second shot so there's a lot of people power that will go into these vaccine clinics and this is where the mrc will really shine because we will have the people necessary to open these points of distribution very quickly and help people get in and out quickly and answer everybody's questions as people will have many questions so um having a conservation corps some people know it better as that a medical conservation corps in this country is really going to help us has helped us during this pandemic tremendously but will continue to help us during the vaccine phase and hopefully into the future with any emergency we have in vermont it could be weather related it could be internet related an i.t issue for example university of vermont uh three weeks ago was um was cyber security hacked that's the best way i can put it their systems were hacked this was happening all over the country and um they went down their systems were down for almost three weeks they were still able to perform their duties and operate but it was a huge hit to our system we were able to put some national guard folks in and uvm has been working non-stop to get back up they are currently in the process of standing up all their their i.t systems once again but it did take three weeks that's a great example where a volunteer corps of i.t folks can come in and actually be a huge help in a short period of time okay who do we partner with um so that is the best one of the best parts of my job is uh when we're not in an emergency mode i get to spend time building relationships with organizations individuals and groups that really fit with what we're doing so first responders i i've been working hard with the police departments in bennington county the fire fighters in bennington county our local emergency planning commissions you know the beauty in vermont is we're small enough they're about 38 000 people in bennington county um that we serve and i get to know everybody on a first name basis i know my town managers i'm still getting to know my fire chiefs my emt folks um but also organizationally who do we partner with we partner with the free clinic or bg uh bc uh oh here we go bcch bennington county coalition for the homeless we partner with g bix uh greater bennington interfaith community i believe um we we really look at how can we be most effective and usually by partnering partnering with some key organizations rotary would be another one is there a good fit for us working with rotary on maybe a service project in the future we look to partner with anyone who would like to partner with us so this could be a health fair we partner with the hospital quite a bit when they do a health fair we'll send in some people to staff the health fair or to provide more information on who and what we are we've been wanting to have a table and a booth at the bennington garlic festival and we were going to have a cooling booth this year where you could get misted and learn all about mrc so we're always looking for ways to just get out into the community let folks know who we are and what we do but also to provide services um we do trainings so what kind of trainings do we do so as i mentioned we look for folks who want to join us many of them already have clinical backgrounds but we do ask all our new members to take the basic trainings so that if they were activated tomorrow they would they would know things like personal preparedness do you have yourself prepared in times of an emergency so you could leave and go work at a shelter for a few days we talk about things like taking care of how to distribute medications effectively we we teach on pods points of distribution which we'll be using in the vaccine efforts what is a pod and how do we use them in vermont we also do individual trainings like cpr and first aid we we kind of look at what does our membership in our unit need or what do they already have and how could we augment or support them more one area that there was a lot of interest was personal protective measures uh we you know a couple years ago we're talking a lot about active shooter incidents um still due to this day in in the country and so we were doing active shooter trainings what would you do in the time of an active shooter how could you be the helper we really can train on almost anything but the beauty is once you're a member of the medical reserve corps there is a training site and you can find a training on almost anything psychological first aid to how to do contact tracing in times of covid and all of those trainings are free to our members so training um is a big a big perk for a why a lot of people become members because all these trainings are free and um they're constantly being updated okay one last little piece of info um for the day so we talked a little bit about what would we be activating our members for so we are now starting pre-vaccination planning as i'm sure you've read in the news there's a lot of logistics involved in the covid vaccines coming down the pipe some of them have to be stored at incredibly cold temperatures some of them have to be given within an hour of being taken out of a box um you know we're hoping these things will get a little easier but the beauty is because we've been planning for a disaster for a while we have what are called pods and pods can mean lots of different things but in this context they are points of distribution and we have as john mentioned public pods or open pods and closed pods closed pods are private organizations or businesses who apply to become a pod and the idea is they have a medical person on staff and would be able to distribute medication or a vaccine to their population for example a couple of my clothes pods in bennington county are the hospital is a closed pod meaning they can receive vaccines and distribute to their population we also have bennington rescue is a closed pod the veterans home is a closed pod the town of bennington is a closed pod uh town of manchester our biggest businesses like orvis is applying to be a closed pod mac you know we're we're basically trying to take some of the pressure off a public pod so what is a pod if you look at this and i and i make it a little bit bigger let's see if i can there we go so the mission of a pod is to quickly and accurately distribute medication or administer vaccines the idea with a pod has always been if you activate a pod you should be able to administer to your full population in your district or county within 48 hours it's a little harder with a shot and we're not actually going to roll out this vaccine that fast but a pot is a location that already has a legal agreement in place and we could actually stand up and use within four hours of notifying them pods are used for worst case scenarios meaning if the hospital and the pharmacies can't vaccinate everyone then we will be using pods so in vermont we are going to be looking at opening an open pod in each district the first vaccines that will be coming out sometime in december um we'll be going to the first phase and the first phase will be our frontline healthcare workers in vermont and so the hospitals will be doing what we call phase 1a and they will be vaccinating their frontline workers those will be the first people to receive a covid vaccine after that it very quickly goes to what we call our vulnerable populations so in vermont we're looking at folks who are over 65 and have what we call comorbidities or other health care issues that might make them more susceptible to getting covet and not doing so well so the pod is a wonderful option because we can send the vaccines directly to our closed pod hospitals to do that they administer them they track everything and then we the department of health can be focusing on opening our public pods and starting to prioritize who are the folks coming through the pod and how are we letting them know that it's their turn this picture gives you a sense of where our pods are related you can see we've spent many years setting up this system so we not only have a pot in every district health office but we have pods at college campuses in bennington county for example we have pods whoops sorry i went a little too fast there we have pods in manchester at bba academy the high school we also have a pod at north shire civic center or riley rink and then in bennington proper bennington college has been one of our more responsive pods they have been fantastic through this whole pandemic giving us their location whenever we need it and we also have southern vermont college as you all know is going through a bit of a transition right now my hope is as that looks like the hospital may be acquiring it that we'll be able to continue using that location as a pod as well a pod has to be a very open space that's inside like a gym and if you think of bennington college gym or um greenwall auditorium they call it that's one of our pods a pod has to have a really good flow meaning people can come in one door and exit a different door and it has to have a lot of space to accommodate the neat the numbers of people the airflow and all the things that we have to take into consideration the staff for the mrc are the folks who actually uh work the pod the head of household model is more focused if we were giving out pills but in a vaccine shot distribution people would have to come individually to get their vaccine we can't send shots home with mom and dad to give to the kids um let's see i don't want to spend too much time because i know we're getting close here i did want to show you the flow of a pod just because it's it's kind of interesting so people would have to go through what we call triage that's often outside of the pod triage is to make sure that somebody who might have coveted doesn't walk into the pod we're going to have police and security folks we're going to have mental health workers on site but basically if someone shows up with any symptoms or any potential symptoms they won't be allowed in the site we have to protect the people that are in the site to our best of our ability once they're allowed in they go through intake registration and basically they're sent to what we call our medical professionals to get their vaccine and then they're sent home with paperwork and directions for when to come back for their next shot so um pods are a really nice way to safely and effectively immunize a population everyone enjoy your weekend and stay safe and stay healthy