New one-day high for COVID-19 deaths
Pritzker, Ezike stress ‘invisible enemy,’ lay out regions, phases, requirements to ‘Restore Illinois’
Gov. Pritzker wears a mask at one point during Tuesday’s coronavirus briefing at the Thompson Center in Chicago. (Illinois.gov)
By Ted Cox
On a day that saw the state reach a new high for COVID-19 deaths, Gov. Pritzker laid out a plan to “Restore Illinois” by dividing the state into four regions and setting strict guidelines and requirements for them to proceed through five phases on what he called “a path toward normalcy.”
“Here’s the truth, and I don’t like it any more than you do,” Pritzker said at the daily coronavirus briefing at the Thompson Center in Chicago. “Until we have a vaccine or an effective treatment or enough widespread immunity that new cases fail to materialize, the option of returning to normalcy doesn’t exist.”
Illinois Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike reported 176 new COVID-19 deaths statewide Tuesday, a single-day high that brought the Illinois toll to 2,838. Some 2,122 new cases brought the state’s total to 65,962. Hospitalizations for the coronavirus also rose from 4,493 on Monday to 4,780, although COVID-19 patients in Intensive Care Units and on ventilators remained level.
Ezike acknowledged “an increased sense of cabin fever” as the state moves into May, but she sounded a persistent theme in Tuesday’s briefing, saying, “The truth is we’re still in a significant war with an enemy.” Urging residents to imagine if a war raging outside their doors had killed 2,500 people in two months, Ezike added, “This enemy is so different. It’s invisible, and maybe as a result of that we have underestimated the power and the destruction of this enemy.”
Repeatedly reminding Illinoisans, “You are responsible” to maintain the stay-at-home order and requirements for social distancing, Ezike said, “The fact is that we are still battling the same virus that we were all so united in fighting just two months ago.”
Calling it “an invisible enemy,” Pritzker called on Illinoisans to “pull together with the common mission of keeping each other safe until we can put this pandemic behind us.”
On that note, he explained “Restore Illinois,” a “framework for moving forward” that takes a “regional approach” advocated by Senate Minority Leader Bill Brady of Bloomington in dividing the state into four existing regions according to the Illinois Department of Public Health’s emergency medical system: northeastern including Chicago and the suburbs, north central extending beyond Interstate 80 to Peoria and Bloomington-Normal, central including Champaign-Urbana and Springfield, and southern including East St. Louis down to Cairo.
“We are one Illinois,” Pritzker said, “but we are also one Illinois made up of 60,000 square miles, and reality on the ground looks different in different areas of our state.”
The governor set five phases, saying the state had already completed the first with the original stay-at-home order last month. With the adjustments made this month — including reopening drive-ins, golf courses, and garden centers — Pritzker said additional phases would basically reward regions for keeping a positive test rate under 20 percent, without increases in hospitalizations and while maintaining a “surge threshold” in hospital capacity.
A third phase would see areas maintaining face coverings with “telework wherever possible,” Pritzker said, but would also open barbershops and hair salons and additional state parks, with a limit on gatherings of more than 10 people. A fourth phase would open restaurants, bars, spas, and cinemas, with “strict guidelines” set for schools and colleges, including new capacity limits, along with limits on gatherings of more than 50 people.
Pritzker insisted a vaccine or widely available and successful treatment for COVID-19 is essential to move on to a fifth phase fully reopening the economy.
The plan provided incentives to make gains against the pandemic, but also allowed for backslides should outbreaks occur. Speaking of last month’s strict stay-at-home order, Pritzker said, “We’ve been through this phase once, and no one wants to go backward,” later adding that adverse data “could also signal that we need to move backward.”
Pritzker said the state would share the metrics for moving forward on a daily basis but that, given the sustained progress that needs to be shown, the earliest any region could move forward to the third phase would be May 29, a day ahead of expiration of the current stay-at-home order.
Without formally ruling out Lollapalooza in Chicago this summer, Pritzker warned that large conventions and festivals would be on hold until reaching the fifth and final phase.
Pritzker and Ezike both said restrictions at any phase would be enforced through police and also through threats to revoke business permits and licenses, “but we’re trying not to,” the governor said.
“We’re not law enforcement,” Ezike said of public health officials. “It is not anybody’s goal to round up people and put them in jail. … We’re looking for people to take respsonsibility and do the right thing.”
Pritzker objected to remarks made by President Trump this week suggesting that Democratic states were looking for a bailout from the federal government in the next COVID-19 relief package to be considered by Congress.
“It’s just so sad that the president has made this political,” Pritzker said. “Revenues have fallen off a cliff.” Calling for states and local governments to get much-needed relief funding from Congress, he said, “Everybody’s got this problem. It’s not a Democratic or Republican problem.” He insisted the state is not looking for a pension bailout, just funding to address lost revenue like every state across the nation.
The governor lauded Illinoisans for their history of innovation and the way they’ve conducted themselves during the pandemic limiting the spread of COVID-19, and he suggested that “Restore Illinois” would prove to be a model for other states, saying, “Illinois will lead the nation in redefining what’s possible once again.”
He quoted from President Lincoln’s second inaugural address in saying, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.”
But he had a harsh warning for people who want restrictions lifted immediately and for the economy to be declared fully open, like the hundreds of protesters who gathered in Chicago and Springfield on Friday, saying, “I won’t open the door to overwhelming our hospital system and possibly tens of thousands of additional deaths by exposing everyone to the virus today just because a loud but tiny minority would like to indulge in that fantasy.”