Rhode Island’s number of COVID-19 patients increased by 77 overnight to 566 total, Gov. Gina Raimondo said at her daily briefing on the crisis held Wednesday afternoon, April 1, from the State House.
The 77 new cases, according to Dr. James McDonald, a medical director at the Rhode Island Department of Health who joined the governor Wednesday, range from children to people in their 90s.
The officials also announced two more fatalities overnight, one each in their 50s and 70s, and both had underlying conditions. The number of COVID-19-related deaths in the state has reached 10. Sixty patients are currently hospitalized.
Testing increases
With those figures as a backdrop, Gov. Raimondo said the state as of April 2 will “massively ramped up testing,” increasing capacity from 500 to 1,000 per day. The effort already includes six swabbing sites, six processing labs.
She urged primary care physicians to immediately start making appointments for patients who are in need of testing. The governor noted the tests are to prescribed by doctors only. No one without an appointment will be serviced.
On the subject of procuring personal protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers, the governor said local officials are “scouring the world for critical supplies.” She said the state has purchased some 5 million N95 masks, 3 million surgical masks and hundreds of thousands of other PPE supplies, such as gowns, which are en route. This comes after the state procured roughly 500,000 respiratory masks and a slightly lesser number of surgical masks.
Business notes
Gov. Raimondo announced Rhode Island Commerce in conjunction with Bank Newport has initiated an emergency loan fund in the amount of $2 million, evenly backed by both entities, for small businesses of 10 or fewer employees.
The governor said, in anticipation of the state receiving its share ($1.2 billion) of the $2 trillion federal COVID-19 response stimulus, those businesses first must submit the proper applications to the Small Business Administration (SBA), then reach out to the state.
She termed the loans “a bridge to a bridge” to the federal monies, expecting the size of the local loans to be in the “thousands, not the tens of thousands.” The program is for businesses which she said “can’t wait” and “won’t recover” without the immediate cash infusion.
Gov. Raimondo urged owners to call 401-521-HELP for assistance and also prodded other banks and lending institutions to join in the effort.
Response teams
Gov. Raimondo spent a good deal of her briefing describing the number of people in government working on the state's COVID-19 response, detailing some of their ongoing efforts and lauding their performance.
She said a “a whole army of people are working around the clock” on all facets of the crisis. The governor said the state is “getting ready for a surge,” adding, “It will be hard, there will be a lot of sick people, more fatalities. It will be tough, but the team is in place working to get us through this as safely as we can.”