March 16th, 2020 by WCBC Radio
This evening, Governor Hogan joined The Situation Room on CNN and PBS NewsHour to discuss the latest updates in Maryland’s ongoing response to COVID-19, the novel coronavirus.
Today, Governor Hogan ordered the closure of bars and restaurants, expanded the prohibition on gatherings to those of more than 50 people, and announced a public health surge to bolster Maryland's capacity and infrastructure to treat patients. View a comprehensive list of these actions here.
(Watch)
Excerpts
“Federal, state, and local officials are going to have to take drastic actions right now to stop this, the spread of this disease, and we really can’t wait for decisions at the federal level. We can’t wait for the guidelines to change tomorrow, so we’re just taking the actions that we believe are absolutely necessary. And while they may seem extreme to some people who aren’t completely up to speed with exactly what’s going on here, and they may be scary, but they are absolutely necessary to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in America.”
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“We're trying to do everything we can for our own citizens and not waiting. We're also desperately calling on the federal government to ramp up their delivery and assistance to us. It really has to be all-hands-on-deck with the federal, state, and local governments working together, and rather than us just criticizing and complaining about what didn't happen yesterday or why we haven't gotten things, I want to try to work constructively to just work together to do everything we can to save people in our states and across the country.”
(Watch)
Excerpts
“We don't want people to panic, and I understand that these steps that we're taking, they sound really scary and they are disruptive. I want people to just understand that most people that get this virus are going to be okay… We're trying to protect the people who are vulnerable, which is our older citizens, the people with underlying health conditions, and those younger folks who are not really going to get that sick can help us save the lives of many others. But it's obviously the worst crisis, I think, that any of us have ever dealt with…It's going to challenge and tax every resource we have, but I just want people to understand that we will get through this together, and everybody at every level is trying to do everything we possibly can to try to save lives and keep people safe.”
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“We've taken actions every day for the past two weeks, and we think we're doing everything we can do, and then another thing changes, and we come up with another thing we've got to do… Time is not our friend in this, and the actions that we hesitate to make mean whether some people are going to live or die. So we're trying to just make them as quickly as we can.”
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“We have to get as much help as we possibly can from the federal government as quickly as possible, and we made that point very clear, I think, with the President, but we're also taking actions on our own to try to get these kinds of things from private sector and from other sources because we don't have time to argue about whose responsibility it is. We just have to get things done no matter how we get them done.”
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