Lightfoot threatens to kick COVID culprits to curb
Pritzker echoes concerns, especially on young adults, alters state regions for ‘surgical’ approach to stem surges
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot issued a stern warning Wednesday about the city potentially following southern and western states into large-scale outbreaks of COVID-19. (Chicago.gov)
By Ted Cox
Fully embracing the role of a stern mom, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot threatened to not only turn the car around to contain the spread of COVID-19, but turn it off completely and kick scofflaws to the curb.
In other words, the mayor and Chicago Public Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady warned Wednesday, the city threatens to return to restrictions on bars and restaurants if it does not halt an uptick in cases of the coronavirus — especially among young adults in their late teens and 20s.
Calling it “our moment of reckoning,” Lightfoot warned that new cases were approaching 200 a day citywide, and topping that figure would lead to considerations to close bars. If that number were to double to 400 a day, Arwady added, it could potentially lead to a return to the third phase of efforts to contain spread of COVID-19, including an end to indoor dining and the closing of fitness centers.
“We hope that we don’t have to take closure steps,” Lightfoot said. “We’ve explained to bars, we’re not messing around,” for instance with the recent shuttering of the Wise Owl Drinkery and Cookhouse in the West Loop over failure to maintain social-distancing and mask requirements.
Later in the day, Gov. J.B. Pritzker echoed those concerns, issuing a “renewed call to action” for residents to observe the three W’s — wear a mask, watch your distance, wash hands — and pledging, “When state government needs to step in, we do and we will.”
Lightfoot said 200 new COVID-19 cases a day “is a number we’re concerned about, which is why we’re doing this now.” In a news conference at City Hall, she told Chicagoans she was “alerting you to vital information before we have to take specific action,” and that “right now our priority is keeping the numbers of new cases as low as possible, especially among our young people.”
The mayor pointedly added, “Some of you have joked that I’m like the mom who will turn the car around when you’re acting up. No, friends, it’s actually worse. I won’t just turn the car around, I’m going to shut it off, I’m going to kick you out, and I’ll make you walk home. That’s who I am. That’s who I must be, for you and everyone else in this city to make sure that we continue to be safe.
“Some of you have joked that I’m like the mom who will turn the car around when you’re acting up. No, friends, it’s actually worse. I won’t just turn the car around, I’m going to shut it off, I’m going to kick you out, and I’ll make you walk home.”
“But I don’t want to be that person if I don’t have to. But I will if you make me. And right now we are on the precipice. We are dangerously close to going back to a dangerous state of conditions.”
According to Lightfoot, since June 15 young adults from 18 through 29 have accounted for 30 percent of Chicago’s new cases of the coronavirus. “That should be the proof that you need,” she said, to observe social distancing and wear a face covering.
She called for Chicagoans, but especially young adults, to minimize gathering in large groups, to “wear a face covering when you leave the house — everywhere, not just some of the time, but all of the time,” and to “spread the word, not the disease” about the need to maintain those mitigation efforts.
Later in the day, in a news conference with the governor at the Thompson Center in Chicago, Illinois Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike confirmed the same statewide, that people between 10 and 30 years old were seeing “higher cases than ever before in this pandemic.”
Calling newly reported daily cases “our best reflection of the burden of disease,” Arwady said the city had reported 192 Tuesday, uncomfortably close to the benchmark they set at 200. She acknowledged that was down from the peak of more than 1,000 new cases a day, and granted that it showed “excellent progress, but we’re a long way from done.” She praised the positivity rate of 5.3 percent over 3,643 tests Tuesday, but said the city’s goal is to reach 4,500 tests a day with a positivity rate below 5 percent.
Although Arwady cited four deaths citywide from COVID-19 Tuesday, and said she looked forward to a day without a single coronavirus death, she warned that rising above 200 cases a day — and that’s the national trend with the outbreaks across the Sun Belt — would lead to the consideration of additional precautions.
Statewide, Ezike confirmed 1,187 new COVID-19 cases Wednesday, bringing the state total to 156,693. Eight new deaths took the statewide toll to 7,226. But with 38,161 tests conducted for the day — after the state had topped 2 million total earlier in the week — that produced a 3 percent positivity rate, less than half the rate in any neighboring state.
While the rise in cases in Chicago has thus far been less than a spike or even a surge, Arwady said infections were rising most rapidly in the age demographics of 18-29, 30-39, and 40-49, in that order. Racial disaparities persist, especially among Hispanics, but cases in young adults were rising most rapidly among Whites, especially in the Lincoln Park area, although also in New City.
“Unfortunately, there remain some of the young who are still not getting the very clear messages we have been sending now for months,” Lightfoot said.
“Young Chicagoans are not immune to serious complications from COVID,” Arwady added. She also said that asymptomatic carriers would inevitably carry the disease to older residents even more susceptible to complications and death.
Lightfoot and Arwady both pointed to current spikes in Sun Belt states from Florida through Texas to California and warned they are determined not to let the city follow the same course.
Pointing out that Chicago’s hospitalizations and deaths due to the coronavirus were both at low levels last seen at the start of the U.S. outbreak in March, Arwady said, “Now more than ever we need to do the things that have gotten us this far.” She said a self-enforced 14-day quarantine imposed on anyone coming from hot-spot states — including Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nevada, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah, with Iowa and Oklahoma added to the list just this week — “is about protecting our progress here.”
Without imposing a similar quarantine statewide, Pritzker said, “We have real gains here that haven’t been realized in other places.” He said easing restrictions to reopen the economy does not necessarily have to lead to a surge in infections, “but that requires vigilance on the part of all of us.” He chided those who are “sneering in the face of facts,” insisting, “This isn’t about politics or campaigns. It’s about the people we love and care about in our communities.” He said the issue was “a degree of personal responsibility people are just going to have to adopt.”
“This isn’t about politics or campaigns. It’s about the people we love and care about in our communities.”
Gov. Pritzker (Illinois.gov)
The governor also announced that the four state regions for determining local progress on the pandemic would now be divided into 11 statewide, with Chicago and suburban Cook County their own areas, and with collar counties separated into north, west, and south suburban regions, and with Kendall and Grundy counties shifted to a north-central region. The 11 areas will each be monitored for positivity rate, hospital admissions, and hospital capacity, with sustained backsliding or three straight days of an 8 percent posivity rate leading to “additional mitigation steps.”
Pritzker said that, with increased testing, it was giving state officials “a surgical ability to manage outbreaks and address problems locally.” He acknowledged, however, that “unfortunately outbreaks are taking place consistently, and in every region of the state.” He and Ezike both emphasized that controlling the pandemic now is critical to any chance of reopening schools this fall.
“Our actions today, right now, will determine what school even looks like” this fall, Ezike said.
Pritzker said the Illinois State Board of Education was giving local school districts guidelines, so they can make individual determinations on what measures are needed to retain classroom instruction, as “one size doesn’t fit all.” Yet he discouraged districts from “disregarding” those guidelines, saying, “This should not be controversial. Remember, the degree to which communities can mitigate risk and restore more normalcy to daily life in the months ahead is to a large extent in the hands of the people of our state.”
Pritzker reminded that early on in the pandemic he said, “We can and will make this smarter as we move forward, and we’re doing that today.”
Lightfoot credited steps taken by Chicagoans to wear masks, wash hands, and observe social distancing with making progress and creating “some semblance of a normal life.”
“So folks, we’ve got to do this right. We’ve got to continue to do the right thing,” Lightfoot said. “The last thing I want to do is take steps back. … But if we must, we must, and it depends on each and every person to do the right thing.”
“Not a day has gone by where I haven’t wished for a magic wand to rid our people of the pain, the loss, the trauma of the last few months,” Pritzker said. “But the virus is still here. Ignoring it, trying to wish it away, is not going to help us beat it. A quixotic rush to regain a shadow of our former lives today will just delay a real return to normal later on.”