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Gov. Phil Scott’s bread and butter during his decades in public office has been fiscal restraint and economic development. So his decisions in March to swiftly shut down swaths of the economy, and now his measures to slowly unwind those edicts, haven’t been made without anguish — both within his administration and his own conscience.
“I worry, you know, are we going too far? Are we going too fast? Should we be slowing up? Or should we be going faster?” Scott said during an interview this week. “I mean, I have these internal thoughts all the time. Because it’s unchartered territory you’re taking, you know, when you’re debating this, and you’re rolling out these openings.”
Vermont was among the region’s most proactive states in shutting down schools, restaurants and other businesses as the pandemic began to spread. And with 52 reported deaths from the virus so far, and five Covid-positive patients hospitalized as of Thursday, Vermont is in an enviable position as Scott joins governors nationwide in formulating his reopening strategy.
Scott sat down — on a Zoom call — with VTDigger on Monday to reflect on the first two months of his response to the Covid-19 pandemic, what the coming months will look like in Vermont, and what he could have done differently along the way.
Scott’s brand of reopening has revolved around a proverbial spigot that moves one quarter turn at a time, which he has done once each week for the past month. The governor’s latest quarter turn — opening up golf courses, recreation areas, play dates between trusted families and other gatherings under 10 people — marked the first time in weeks that some Democrats have been sharply critical of the Republican governor.
“There will be a second wave but …yeah… Cool. Cool. Cool. Everything is cool,” tweeted Kiah Morris, a former House member from Bennington who is now the movement politics director for liberal advocacy group Rights & Democracy. “This is a horrifying form of job security for me and my healthcare colleagues,” replied Rep. Mari Cordes, D-Lincoln, a registered nurse.
But the results of Scott’s response have generally left little room for partisan attacks. A recent survey from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center found that 88% of Vermonters feel the state government is “reacting about right” in response to the epidemic, the highest rate in the country (page 262 of this report). Scott says he shares a deep concern about how quickly the state’s caseload could increase if Covid-19 isn’t kept in check.
“I’d rather be accused of being too cautious than having to look in the eyes of a family member and know that I caused harm to them or, or caused the death of someone by being too reckless,” he said. “And I don’t think we can be accused of being too reckless. I think we’ve done things as well as we could have done them with everything that we had to deal with.”
The Scott administration’s major pain points in responding to the virus — delays in unemployment insurance payouts, limited testing supplies early on, and the related failure to intervene before outbreaks spread within nursing homes — are shared by almost every governor in the U.S., which Scott often mentions when pressed on the problems.
“Did any of us anticipate there’d be 90,000 people unemployed in a matter of about a month and a half? I dare say no,” Scott said about his administration’s struggle to process unemployment insurance claims. “It overwhelmed the system we have in place. It overwhelmed the labor department. We’re seeing it across the nation. Other areas as well. It’s not unique to Vermont.”
Scott says he has other regrets about how the administration responded to the virus early on, and its preparedness for the pandemic. “Of course, we would do things differently if we’d known what was coming,” Scott said. “I think we as a country would have done things different as well. I bet if you asked any other country, whether it’s Italy or Spain, or even China, would you do something different? And the answer would be yes.”
What makes Vermont unique from many other states — and countries — is how little death and disease there has been, comparatively, and the quickness with which the public health predictions went from grim to relatively promising.
Since two early outbreaks at Burlington nursing homes, which still account for almost half of Vermont’s 52 deaths statewide, most of Vermont has been spared from the loss, suffering and health care burden facing many places in the U.S. Yet the virus continues to wreak havoc on cities in nearby Massachusetts, which Scott noted had more than 1,000 deaths last week alone.
“So they’re far from over this, and, and again, that was just within our region. So we have to look regionally, not just isolate myopically on Vermont,” he said. Many are wondering whether people in New York or Massachusetts, where the virus has hit much harder, will see Vermont as a safe haven, or at least a nice place to visit over the summer.
While announcing the state’s recreational reopening steps on Wednesday, Scott made clear that the measures were not an invitation for out-of-state visitors to take part in the fun. “My message is to stay home, if you can, and not come to Vermont at this point in time,” Scott said.
Although hotels may start taking new reservations as soon as mid-June, any reopening of the summer economy would require some major — and fairly immediate — changes to Scott’s executive order. Many summer camps, museums and cultural programs have closed for the season.
Scott said Monday his administration may loosen its current 14-day self-quarantine restrictions for anyone traveling to Vermont, as part of efforts to open the economy — if the public health data supports the change.
“We’ll be able to contemplate maybe having more people come to our state but the first thing — first things first, you know — I want to take care of Vermonters. I want to make sure that they can get back to some sort of normal,” he said.
‘We’re actually on the other side of it’
At his press conferences, Scott follows the textbook on public health communications — reminding people of the importance of following his social distancing directives, and the collective benefits of mass compliance. He leaves many of the details to his health commissioner, Dr. Mark Levine, a former UVM medical professor with a specialty in internal medicine, and other senior officials leading Vermont’s response to the coronavirus.
At Monday’s press conference, as he often does, Scott recognized the state’s collective “work to stay separated, which slowed the spread of the virus,” adding: “As a result, we’ve avoided the worst possible outcomes, and saved hundreds of lives.”
Vermont has consistently ranked high in national research on social distancing compliance, supporting Scott’s belief that most Vermonters are falling in line. (Levine also offers weekly updates on his weekend grocery trips — up to 90% of his fellow shoppers are now wearing face masks and social distancing.)
Scott also says he is confident that the state’s current capacity for testing and contact tracing — Vermont has the capacity to conduct about 1,000 tests a day, with about 50 contact tracers to follow up on positive cases — means that the Department of Health will be able to detect and intervene before reopening measures cause a spike in new cases.
“That’s why we have to watch the trending to make sure that we’re not exceeding the capacity of our health care system once again, and that we don’t have to pull back,” Scott said. “I would rather just slow down rather than pull back from opening up the economy.”
Despite some clamoring from the public for the governor to add teeth to his coronavirus order — such as fining people for not wearing masks in public places — Scott says his approach of enforcement by education is working. The majority of governors have not issued an enforcement order for individual coronavirus compliance, he said.
Can he envision a scenario in which he would order people to wear masks in public? “I don’t believe so, because we’ve seen thus far that it’s working. And we’re actually on the other side of it,” he said. “Even with enforcement, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to accomplish your goal. Because then there’d be resistance, then there would be people doing more reckless things, possibly.”
‘We had a problem on our hands’
Scott said he first began discussing emergency orders when the coronavirus started showing up in Washington in February. On March 1, Scott got a call from Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire about a patient who tested positive at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover, New Hampshire.
“Governor Sununu called me and said that they have, we had, a problem on our hands and it had to do with Dartmouth, and Vermont,” Scott said. The New Hampshire resident had recently returned from a skiing trip to Italy, and had then attended a party in White River Junction, across the border in Vermont. “And that was when it started to become very real for me,” Scott said.
On March 13, Scott declared a state of emergency and limited public gatherings to 250 people. The blitz of subsequent closures — schools, restaurants, public life — didn’t have an immediate effect on rising caseload. By March 25, Levine was warning of “exponential growth” and Scott’s administration was scrambling to secure ventilators, personal protective equipment and testing supplies for a possible hospital surge.
“We watched it, in real time in Washington state, when we saw it come to New York, and we were watching right before our eyes, literally within 250 miles of us, and we were seeing the death toll starting to rise, the hospitals being overwhelmed,” Scott said.
Although Vermont has beaten even its best initial projections on cases, at least for this stage of the pandemic, there has been little enthusiasm in Vermont for the “open the economy” protests in other states. Still, Scott often says he’s as anxious as anyone to open the economy — if and when it’s safe for Vermonters.
“Sometimes you’re a victim of your own success,” Scott said. “I think we took early measures, made tough decisions implemented early, earlier than other states did. So, well, our numbers are showing where we’re down below what we expected. That’s good news, right? I mean, we want that to happen. But it could have gone very different. It was the unknown. There’s no playbook.”
‘You have to prioritize want versus need’
When Jeb Spaulding, then the state colleges chancellor, announced on April 17 that he would propose closing three of the system’s campuses amid dire financial projections, Scott did not join the chorus calling for Spaulding’s head (he resigned two weeks later). Instead, Scott said the state colleges were the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of tough economic decisions in the months ahead, and praised Spaulding on his way out.
Scott said Monday that almost every facet of the economy was headed for a reckoning — from public schools to restaurants and fairgrounds. But he said he has particular concerns about the health care sector, pointing to the UVM Medical Center’s announcement on May 1 that it is projecting a $152 million loss this year. It’s the largest hospital network in Vermont, he noted, but is not unique in facing financial challenges.
“So I would say on the health care side, we’re going to see huge challenges in the amount of resources needed to make sure that we keep them viable, keep them going, keep their lights on,” Scott said.
Initial projections from the state’s economists show Vermont could lose $430 million in revenue next fiscal year, leaving enormous holes in the education and general fund. The Scott administration has proposed using the state’s financial reserves, as well as additional Medicaid money and alcohol sales tax revenue, to help fill some of the immediate gaps.
The Legislature is planning to create a 2020-2021 budget in phases, first passing a limited budget to get through this fiscal year, and then writing a budget this summer for the rest of the fiscal year, hopefully with more clarity on what kind of federal assistance states can expect. The governor said he expects it to be a painful process.
“You have to prioritize want versus need to take care of the basic necessities. You know, like the food, shelter, water, that type of thing. As well, I’d say our health care system is pretty important to us. We need to make sure that that’s viable. And public safety is important, making sure that we protect them in all ways,” Scott said.
“And then we just work our way down from there. I mean, this is, again, it’s going to be very difficult. But I think we’ll get through, we’ll make our way through.”
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