Governor Hogan appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation” to discuss the steps the State of Maryland is taking to support hospital systems and distribute more than 20 million free N95 and KN95 masks amidst the Omicron surge across the country. A poll this week showed 76% of Marylanders approve of Governor Hogan’s proactive and balanced leadership on the COVID pandemic.
Governor Hogan on Current COVID Surge: “Over the past four or five days, we’ve seen fairly dramatic decreases in both hospitalization, positivity rate, and case rate, and so it’s hopeful. We’re going to keep an eye on that over the next ten days to see if we continue but we’re still in a pretty rough spot, and that’s why I declared a state of emergency. We did a lot of things to try to help increase the capacity of our hospital systems, sent in 1,000 members of the National Guard.”
Governor Hogan on Schools: “If there is an outbreak in a particular classroom or a particular school, then they have certain protocols that they should take, but shutting down entire school systems…I understand people being concerned about kids. We all are, but we missed a year of learning in some cases and it’s absolutely not the way to go to keep an entire school system closed down.”
Governor Hogan on Federal Government COVID Failures: “We are trying to get as much help as we can from the federal government, but quite frankly they are falling short in a couple of ways…The President announced nearly a month ago before Christmas that he was going to distribute these half-a-billion rapid tests across the country and, so far, we haven’t seen any. We were acquiring our own. The states have been on the front lines throughout this crisis. And now it appears as if, rather than producing more of these rapid tests, the federal government is just purchasing the ones that we had already contracted for. It’s sort of hijacking the tests that we already had plans for.”