Pritzker closes schools to slow coronavirus
State reports 14 new cases, bringing Illinois total to 46 COVID-19 patients
Gov. Pritzker announces he’ll be closing all K-12 schools statewide for two weeks starting Tuesday. (Illinois Information Service)
By Ted Cox
Gov. Pritzker announced Friday that he’d close all Illinois K-12 schools for two weeks starting Tuesday in a bid to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
“It’s the weight of the evidence,” he said, as the state registered 14 new cases in the COVID-19 outbreak, the largest single-day increase so far. That brought the total number of Illinoisans known to be infected to 46. All but one of the new cases was in Cook County, with the other in Lake County.
“Social distancing is the right answer,” Pritzker added, and while children have generally been found to be less at risk in the global pandemic, the closing of schools statewide is expected to deter the spread of the disease in Illinois.
“This is the right thing to do, to protect our students and their teachers and school workers and parents,” Pritzker said. “I will not have us look back after we are through the immediate challenges and say that we didn’t take action soon enough.”
Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, again stressed that the state had seen no deaths from COVID-19, adding that just one of the patients thus far has been hospitalized in critical condition. But she didn’t minimize the danger or the need for action.
“Like it or not, this virus is here in Illinois, and it will continue to spread,” Ezike said. “We will continue to have increasing numbers of cases, but we want to minimize the severity of illnesses and deaths associated with it.
“Like it or not, this virus is here in Illinois, and it will continue to spread.”
Dr. Ngozi Ezike (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
“We want to get ahead of widespread community transmission,” she said. “Closing schools will not only help the students and the teachers … but also help reduce spread of the virus on a larger scale.
“As the governor said, we would rather at the end of this be criticized for doing too much,” Ezike added. “It would be very hard to live with being told you didn’t do enough to protect the people of Illinois.”
Pritzker emphasized that no community should feel secure, even if they’re hundreds of miles from Chicago and its suburbs, where all of the Illinois cases have been detected so far. “Your community is not immune,” he said. “We have seen this around the world.”
Schools will be open Monday, allowing teachers to prepare lesson plans and homework assignments over the weekend and deliver them to students ahead of the two-week hiatus, which is scheduled to last from March 17-30 — although the governor allowed that things change daily and they’ll have to trace the trajectory of the outbreak over the rest of the month before classes can resume.
Carmen Ayala, the state superintendent of education, said the time off would be considered “act-of-God days,” with school personnel being paid and no funding cut. Pritzker said the state is working out the logistics to either deliver meals or have them picked up for students who get school lunches and breakfasts. Ayala said the state was making sure that at least one administrator stays on duty at each school to welcome students if they have nowhere else to go.
Although Pritzker pointed out that many local school districts have already shut down in the face of the virus, with an estimated 280,000 students affected, he said, “I understand the gravity of this action.”
He called it “a critical part of our larger social-distancing efforts,” which saw the state move Thursday to ban gatherings of more than 1,000 people for 30 days and discourage gatherings of more than 250. “Having the general public stay home one day at a time will have a massive effect on bending this curve.”
In fact, he asked Illinoisans to stay home this weekend as a precaution, saying, “Everyone will make a sacrifice.”
Countries around the world have been unable to stop the pandemic, but some have had more success than others at slowing its spread by limiting social contact, and that’s the goal to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.
Pritzker said the state is “ramping up” testing, “but we need the federal government to step up,” pointedly adding, “Make no mistake, we have long since passed the moment when we thought we could count on the federal government to lead in the face of this unprecedented situation.”
To that end, President Trump declared a national emergency on the coronavirus Friday, including measures allowing states to authorize their own testing at hospitals and research labs, which is expected to help alleviate a bottleneck. But Pritzker said that, even with the “homegrown tests,” health officials would still need to prioritize testing for those most at risk.
Although Trump reportedly cut a pandemic team put together by the Obama administration, and was slow to back additional testing over fears that it would show an increasing number of cases, the president said, “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the nationwide crisis.
Trump also said testing would be limited and prioritized, adding, “We don’t want people taking a test if we feel they shouldn’t be doing it.” He claimed 5 million tests would be available by the end of the month, thanks to the government opening up the testing process, but “I doubt we’ll need anywhere near that.”
Pritzker said simply, “They didn’t plan well enough.”
U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth issued a blistering response, saying, “The Trump administration botched its response to the COVID-19 outbreak from the beginning by eliminating the office that could have helped our country prepare for this pandemic, rejecting the World Health Organization’s proven COVID-19 test, and then failing to efficiently develop its own complicated test kit on the first try. The Trump administration’s failure to widely distribute a functional test kit to public health officials across the country has set our response back — while Donald Trump’s spewing of misinformation has only sown chaos and confusion at every turn. While today’s action should have been taken much sooner, I’m glad President Trump has finally heeded my call for him to declare a national emergency under the Stafford Act to combat the spread of COVID-19.
“I hope today marks a turning point for Donald Trump,” she added, “and urge him to do more to take this pandemic seriously and work with Congress to make sure we can support all Americans and mitigate the spread of this virus.”
Pritzker said he would welcome additional measures making their way through Congress, potentially expanding unemployment for workers idled by the outbreak and its economic fallout, and he said he was working in tandem with Attorney General Kwame Raoul to halt any shutoffs in utility service for those unable to pay their bills for as long as the state’s emergency declaration is in effect. That declaration already served to expand some state unemployment benefits.
He also counseled against citizens buying surgical masks for protection, saying, “Leave the masks for those who need one,” such as doctors, nurses, and others treating patients. “It will protect you more in the long run.”
The Illinois Department of Public Health has a coronavirus hotline at (800) 889-3931, and Ezike advised residents to get updates online at the department website.