Guv on test goals: 'We are not there yet'

Pritzker laments COVID-19 test snafus as state tops 15,000 cases, hits 462 deaths

Workers collect COVID-19 test samples at a Walmart parking lot in Northlake last week. (Flickr/Charles Edward Miller)

By Ted Cox

The governor lamented the failure to hit the goal of 10,000 COVID-19 tests a day Wednesday, as the state topped 15,000 cases and reported that the death toll reached 462.

“The buck stops with me, and we are still not where we need to be,” said Gov. Pritzker at his daily coronavirus briefing at the Thompson Center in Chicago.

The governor said 10,000 a day is “the number scientists and experts say that we need to understand more fully the virus’s presence in our communities across Illinois.” As it stands, the state just attained 6,000 a day.

But five high-volume Thermo Fisher Scientific RNA extractors capable of processing 200 tests an hour “when running effectively … are not producing valid results,” Pritzker said, adding that Thermo Fisher is working to “get this right.”

Meanwhile 88 newly developed instant-identification tests from Abbott Laboratories set for Illinois were “waylaid” by the federal government, Pritzker added, although the feds did return 15 to Illinois and the same number to all other states. They’re capable of running 88,000 tests a month.

The state is running round-the-clock shifts at one of its testing labs, and they produce results within two days, but private labs run through the federal government can take a week or 10 days to process a test. “People can end up on a ventilator before they ever get their testing result,” Pritzker said. “That’s just not a timeline that I want to bet on.

“No matter how much is beyond our control, the buck stops with me, and we are still not where we need to be on the testing front,” Pritzker said. Adding that Illinois was the first state to test on its own for COVID-19, with only the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention testing longer, he said, “We’ve already led the way on state-level testing in the United States, and we’re going to do it again.”

“No matter how much is beyond our control, the buck stops with me, and we are still not where we need to be on the testing front.”

Gov. J.B. Pritzker (Illinois Information Service)

With the global supply chain for test materials “in disarray,” labs at state universities are taking up the slack by providing their own raw materials, he said. Meanwhile, there are now 96 locations across the state collecting samples.

What those samples determined Wednesday, according to Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, was 1,529 new confirmed cases, bringing the state total to 15,078. Some 82 new deaths increased the state toll to 462.

Both those single-day totals were “the highest to date,” Ezike said, but “I will tell you that the rate at which they’re increasing is less, and that is a good sign” in potentially “flattening the curve” tracing the rise in cases. “We are not seeing the exponential growth that we were seeing before.”

Ezike added, “With guarded optimism we are hoping we are getting close to either the peak or the plateau. It’s not clear yet how long that would be. … But we think we’re heading in that direction.”

To maintain that trend, she urged people not to come together to celebrate Passover Wednesday or Easter this Sunday. “We don’t want to hurt the people we are intending to commune with,” Ezike said. “Find a way to hold the services electronically.”

Both Pritzker and Ezike cheered the development and expanding availability of a blood test to detect antibodies for the coronavirus. The governor said that would be a key to ending the stay-at-home order and “restarting the economy,” although both cautioned that it was not yet clear if someone already recovered from the disease could be reinfected, and if those people might still be contagious.

With California ordering residents to wear masks in public, Pritzker said, “We haven’t ordered it, but every day I wear my own mask when I go outside. If I’m going to the store or any other place I would wear a mask. I would suggest that for everybody.”

The governor said he was aware of shops and other businesses closing up, perhaps for good, as they try to weather the economic crisis stemming from the shutdown. “It’s devastating,” Pritzker said. “I hope that those shops will not close forever, that the small-business loans that we’re offering in the state of Illinois, that the small-business support that’s coming from the federal government will allow those businesses to survive, to reopen when it’s time.

“But we’ve got to stop the spread of this virus,” he added. “We’ve got to save lives so we can save livelihoods.”