Hi this is Mayor John Hamilton, it's Monday morning, March, 30th and I just wanted to check in with you and during these emergency health times. Let you know how the city's doing what's going on and encourage you to keep doing what you are doing to stay at home, we're in heading into second week of the statewide Indiana stay at home order directing us all unless we are an essential worker or doing essential trip or business to stay at home.

If you need to get groceries, if you need to get medicines, that's fine, but otherwise we should be staying at home. Every time we can, you can get exercise but keep physical distancing. This is really important right now to keep the virus from spreading further in our community.

It's here we're trying to protect our health care system from the surge we've seen some of that around the country and we're doing all we can and I need to ask you to continue to do all you can to to keep that virus from spreading, and mostly that happens by us. Physical distance stay at home, and so thank you for doing that. That's really important.

We do have a lot of people doing essential work from our health care system to the grocery stores, to pharmacies to government workers and I.

Do want to thank and hope you'll thank all of those people working so hard to keep our city safe and functioning in the midst of a health emergency, our public safety officers, our sanitation workers, our water system operators, our animal shelter, folks, streets department, many others are doing those essential services to keep our city functioning and if you can thank them and the health care workers, heroes who are helping all of us stay safe, that's really important, as we continue to physical distance and stay at home.

Whenever we can, you should know that governments are coordinating city, county school system with Indiana University with the health care system to do all that we can to deal with the challenges and to work together to help our most vulnerable people who are homeless. People who are needing food people who need childcare is an essential worker. We have serious work going on with that. In fact, some couple new organizations we've stood up to lead those responses on social services and on our economy. You can hear more about that in the days ahead.

I do want you to know as well. Your own taking care of each other is really important to you, whether it's an elderly member of your family, whether it's a neighbor, whether it's somebody who has particular medical vulnerability, all that you're doing is so important to them. Thank you. I know these are scary and difficult times, sometimes doing each of us what we can to again physical distance stay at home that protects our family members, our neighbors, and it is so important.

This is a health emergency. It's going to get worse before it gets better here locally. We probably have a few weeks ahead of us of this kind of physical, distancing and staying at home. So we ready for that. If it gets extended, take care of each other reach out. We don't need to be socially distant. We can call we can email, we can be in touch with each other. You can get exercise, and nice days like today. Just keep a physical distance so that we don't let the virus spread further.

We had a firefighter who was a confirmed case over the weekend, we're following all the protocols. That's our first city employee that we know of. We will have more. There are plenty of people in Monroe County with this virus, so we need to protect each other physically distance from each other and stay at home.

If you have questions reach out to our office or each other or the health care websites like at the CDC or the county or the state healthcare websites take care of each other take care of Bloomington, we will get through it and we'll do it together. Thank you for being well as you can. Thank you for taking care of each other in Bloomington.