Pritzker rebuffs GOP rep. on letting COVID-19 run wild
‘We have to be operating as if COVID-19 is circulating not just in every county but in every community,’ says governor
Gov. Pritzker speaks at the daily coronavirus briefing Tuesday at the Thompson Center in Chicago. (Illinois Information Service)
By Ted Cox
The governor utterly rejected a suggestion from an Effingham legislator Tuesday to let the coronavirus pandemic run wild across the state in a move to promote “herd immunity.”
At his daily COVID-19 briefing Tuesday at the Thompson Center in Chicago, Gov. Pritzker was asked about an article state Rep. Blaine Wilhour of Effingham published the day before through the Illinois Review, which calls itself the “Crossroads of the Conservative Community.” Making reference to “Draconian repressive measures that have far-reaching negative effects on our lives and livelihoods,” clearly meaning the governor’s stay-at-home order, Wilhour went on to cite another conservative publication in saying, “The longer we quarantine the entire population, the more we delay herd immunity which could lead to more people succumbing to the virus in the long run.” He added that the article “suggested that a more targeted approach to quarantining might be the better solution.”
Pritzker rejected that in no uncertain terms. “Let me just point out that Great Britain went by this theory, that perhaps if we just let everybody get it then everybody will have herd immunity faster and everybody will be OK,” he said. “Well, guess what, if you let everybody have it all at once, which is what happens when you just let it go, you overwhelm your health-care system and more people die — a lot of people can die. And so the suggestion that we should just let it happen so that herd immunity occurs faster is an invitation for us to just let people die. And I won’t do that. I will not do that.”
Earlier in the daily briefing, Pritzker announced that Illinois now has 13,549 confirmed COVID-19 cases in 77 counties, and it recorded 73 deaths in the previous 24 hours — the largest single-day increase yet in Illinois, bringing the state toll to 380.
“Let these numbers today be a terrible reminder that this pandemic is deadly serious,” he said. “Stay at home. Wash your hands many times a day. Wipe down surfaces that you use with any regularity. If you must leave your home, wear a mask or a bandana or a scarf to cover your nose and mouth.”
He reemphasized that many COVID-19 carriers show no symptoms and that testing in the United States is nowhere near the levels needed to detect all those transmitting the disease. “Nowhere in this country, in not a single state, does anyone currently have the capacity to test at the rate that they’ve deployed in places like South Korea, rates that would allow us to pick up on an asymptomatic COVID-19 carrier,” Pritzker said. He called the 380,000 cases reported thus far across the country “a significant undercount.”
The national death toll reached 10,000 Monday, doubling the first first 5,000 registered over a month in just five days.
“We have to be operating as if COVID-19 is circulating not just in every county but in every community,” Pritzker added. “We need to maintain the course, and we need to keep working to flatten the curve,” meaning the rise in infections.
“And it’s growing,” he said. “And the number of cases is growing and the number of deaths is growing now. So it’s hard for me to see that just because you haven’t had a case in your county or in your community that you’re not going to see cases developing and growing. And we see hot spots that are happening all over the state. Look at areas like Champaign and Metro East. We need to get much further along here before we start talking about a regional or statewide stand-down of these orders.”
The governor spent much of Tuesday’s briefing laying out where the state stands on hospitals and capacity. As of Monday, 3,680 known COVID-19 patients and suspected COVID-19 patients were hospitalized. COVID-19 patients in an Intensive Care Unit totaled 1,166, and 821 patients are on a ventilator. More than 43 percent of the state’s more than 28,000 hospital beds were available, along with 35 percent of ICU beds, and 57 percent of ventilators. But he pointed out that varied widely by region, with hospitals in the northeast suburbs of Chicago almost at capacity, with 17 percent of ICU beds available, while more than three-quarters of the ICU beds in the Marion area were available.
He praised California Gov. Gavin Newsom for sending 100 ventilators to Illinois overnight, saying, “It is truly incredible to work with elected officials across the nation who are providing true leadership.” He pledged that Illinois would “pay it forward” by passing those ventilators on to other states and hot zones “when we can,” and he also cited 600 ventilators sent to Illinois by federal agencies, with 300 going directly to Chicago.
But he took issue with President Trump saying he had been “happy” on a recent teleconference with Vice President Mike Pence. Pritzker admitted he’d praised the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency for their work aiding in the conversion of Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center to an alternate care facility for COVID-19 patients, but he pointedly added, “I have expressed my displeasure on a number of those calls. Look, I’m happy when they make promises and then deliver upon those promises. I am unhappy when they don’t deliver on promises or when lies are spoken.”
Asked about any regrets he had about the Illinois efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic, Pritzker praised the state’s relatively early action to limit public gatherings and order people to stay at home, adding, “I wish I knew about this in January when the intelligence agencies seemed to know about it,” and reportedly passed their warnings on to President Trump. “We could have begun building ventilators ourselves.”