Pritzker expands student-loan relief, food stamps
Steps taken to ease economic impact of coronavirus crisis as state reports 1,551 new cases, 119 deaths
Gov. Pritzker announced expanded student-loan relief and food stamps to help out state residents in the coronavirus crisis. (Illinois.gov)
By Ted Cox
The governor moved to expand food stamps and provide relief for student loans in the midst of the coronavirus crisis as the state reported 1,551 new COVID-19 cases Tuesday and approached the single-day high with 119 deaths.
Touting several steps the state has taken in “mitigation of the economic impacts of this pandemic on our residents and on the small businesses that employ them” — including moratoriums on evictions and car repossessions, delayed tax payments, and small-business loans — Gov. Pritzker said a recent congressional aid package had provided relief to those with federal student loans, “but that federal action left out the millions of people nationwide who are repaying private and nonfederal student loans.” The governor credited the Illinois Department of Financial & Professional Regulation with negotiating the same sort of loan forbearance and delayed payments with 20 major private lenders, expected to provide relief for 138,000 Illinoisans repaying student loans. An IDFPR website has details on the program.
Pritzker also said a proposed expansion of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as SNAP benefits or food stamps, “has now been approved,” allocating $112 million in additional funding for children across the state. “No child should ever have to worry about where their next meal is coming from,” Pritzker said, adding that the money would be automatically added to family Link cards. The expansion will also streamline application for food stamps for families already getting reduced-price or free meals for students at schools. He said the expansion would provide relief to 300,000 Illinois households that “will have a little less to worry about when they go to the grocery store.”
The 1,551 new COVID-19 cases reported Tuesday at the daily briefing at the Thompson Center brought the state total to 33,059, while 119 new deaths pushed the state toll to 1,468. After two days in the double digits, that also approached the single-day high of 125 deaths reported last Thursday and equalled on Saturday.
Yet Illinois Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike added that barely more than half of all the occupied beds in Intensive Care Units and the state’s ventilators in use were currently devoted to COVID-19 patients, and that 30 percent of ICU beds and 60 percent of ventilators remain open and available for use.
“We have had ample resources, ample beds,” she said. “We have not exceeded capacity throughout the state.” Ezike cited that fewer than a dozen COVID-19 patients had thus far had to be shifted to the McCormick Place Alternate Care Facility in Chicago.
Ezike also reported that a survey of COVID-19 patients had found that 54 percent had recovered in two weeks, and 77 percent had recovered over four weeks. “This is encouraging news,” she said, “and I hope it will strengthen our resolve to continue the very tough sacrifices that we continue to make. We must continue to stay at home. We must continue to wear our masks if outside. We must continue building on the progress we have made and sustain it.”
“You don’t need to have an official mask,” Pritzker emphasized. “You do need to cover your mouth and nose.” He said some people were using T-shirts to cover up in public.
Pritzker confirmed that some models show that the state coronavirus outbreak may not peak until mid-May, but he did not as yet extend the stay-at-home order beyond the current April 30 deadline, and he hinted that he was mulling the reopening of golf courses.
“We’re working hard to make some changes in the stay-at-home order,” Pritzker said. “The peak is yet to come, so we have to be careful.
“It’s true that it is working,” he added. “To remove it entirely is to open things back up to infection.”
Ezike said worries about a possible second wave of the disease in the fall are legitimate. “We should be concerned,” she said. “We know that the fall is already traditionally an established time for flu outbreaks.”
Although Pritzker has stated he might adopt a “region by region” approach to reopening parts of the state to economic activity, he was quizzical about a question from a reporter asking about the “punishment” inflicted on parts of the state that aren’t suffering as badly from the outbreak as Chicago and Cook County.
“‘Punishment,’ that is an odd word to use,” he said. “We are in a global pandemic. When this broke out, nobody, nobody knew how fast this would travel. Nobody knew who was most susceptible to it. Nobody knew how to counter its effects. And much of that information — although we’ve discovered some — is still unknown to experts. So, in all due caution to protect all of the people of the state of Illinois, we put orders in place that would keep people healthy and safe and hopefully prevent people from getting COVID-19 who otherwise might.”
Pritzker pointed to how there are rural areas of the state that might not have as many cases as Chicago, but where cases are doubling faster, indicating an exponential spread that could produce a hot spot. “So there’s no punishment involved here,” he said. “The goal here is to do the right thing for everybody.”