Guv clamps down on recreational sports
‘It’s time to defend our progress,’ Pritzker says, warning of renewed COVID mitigation in Metro East
Saying, “The toughest choice is also the safest choice,” Gov. Pritzker announced new restrictions on recreational sports Wednesday. (Illinois.gov)
By Ted Cox
Saying, “The toughest choice is also the safest choice,” Gov. Pritzker announced new restrictions on recreational sports Wednesday, including school athletics, in a bid to stem the spread of COVID-19.
Pointing to sports-related outbreaks in Lake Zurich and in Knox County, as well as professional leagues “struggling to protect their players” from the coronavirus, Pritzker said, “It’s obvious that there won’t be enough protection for kids on our school playing fields.”
In a coronavirus briefing held at the Thompson Center in Chicago, Pritzker announced what a news release labeled as “guidance for youth and adult recreational sports, including, but not limited to, school-based sports, travel clubs, private leagues and clubs, recreational leagues and centers, and park-district sports programs.” He made clear it does not apply to major professional sports leagues or major college athletics.
Basically, the guidelines categorize a sport as promoting a higher risk of coronavirus infection, a medium risk, or a lower risk, with football, hockey, lacrosse, and wrestling among the higher risks; basketball, soccer, and volleyball among the medium risks; and baseball, track and field, cross country, and golf among the lower risks. On introduction Wednesday, the guidelines call for higher-risk sports to limit themselves to “no-contact practices and trainings,” while medium risks can add intra-team scrimmages, with parental consent for minors, and no competitive play, and low-risk sports add intra-conference games and state- or league-championship games. No sport is currently authorized for a fourth level including “tournaments, out-of-conference/league play, multi-team meets, out-of-state play” and championship games.
“This virus is unrelenting,” Pritzker said, “and it spreads so easily that no amount of restrictions seems to keep it off the playing field or out of the locker room.” In light of that recognition, he added, “The toughest choice is also the safest choice.”
The governor acknowledged, “Kids want to play sports. Parents want to cheer from the stands.” Teens, meanwhile, might be looking ahead to scholarship offers from colleges and universities. But Pritzker insisted, “For right now, this is the best thing that we can do for the health and safety of our families under the current circumstances.”
According to Pritzker, the Illinois High School Association, which governs school athletics statewide, was meeting to lay down other specific guidelines, and he lauded the organization for taking “difficult but prudent steps to protect our young athletes.” The IHSA was to announce additional guidelines for fall sports on its website, including moving the football season to the spring, starting in February, which will complicate things for multi-sport lettermen.
From there, the governor renewed warnings about a statewide rise in COVID-19 cases — perhaps not the spikes recently seen in Sun Belt states, but worrisome all the same.
“We are far from out of the woods,” Pritzker said. “We’ve made progress in Illinois, but we’ve also seen that it can be fleeting, and right now things are not heading in the right direction. I want to remind everyone that it doesn’t take long at all for a trajectory of success to turn into rising hospitalizations and deaths. And, if things don’t change, a reversal is where we’re headed.”
Newly confirmed daily cases of COVID-19 in Illinois have remained stubbornly above 1,000 over the last week, and on Wednesday Illinois Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike announced 1,393 new infections, pushing the state total to 175,124, while 18 new deaths brought the statewide toll to 7,462. Hospitalizations for COVID-19 and patients under intensive care also were on the rise.
“These are clearly indicators that we are headed in the wrong direction,” Ezike said. “We can’t continue to increase back to where we were.”
“Folks, this is serious,” Pritzker said, citing the outbreaks raging across Sun Belt states from Florida through Texas and Arizona to California, where in some areas hospitals were in danger of reaching capacity. “That was once where we were just 10 weeks ago.”
The governor again singled out the Metro East area across the Mississippi River from St. Louis as a hot spot, approaching an 8 percent positivity rate on testing. Three straight days above 8 percent would call for renewed mitigation efforts, he added, including bars being closed. But it wasn’t just Metro East, as Pritzker said six of the state’s 11 regions have positivity rates above 5 percent and on the rise.
“It’s time to defend our progress,” Pritzker said, “and put us back on the right trajectory for a healthier and safer Illinois.”
Pritzker said he is not considering a statewide two-week quarantine for people coming to Illinois from others with larger outbreaks, as Chicago has now adopted for 22 states, including the neighboring Missouri, Iowa, and now Wisconsin, added just this week. Pritzker said there are too many Illinoisans in border areas who commute to work out of state — and vice versa out-of-staters commuting to work in Illinois — to make that feasible. But he pointedly added, “This is exactly the example of why we needed national mandates” to address the pandemic, never really instituted by the Trump administration. Nonetheless, he said that, as a Chicagoan, he’d be following the city’s guidelines and would not be visiting family properties in Wisconsin.
The governor said he was waiting to see the federal ComEd investigation play out, which has already implicated House Speaker Michael Madigan, but he is not at this point calling for the speaker to resign, although he added, “There is genuinely a problem that needs to be addressed with ethics legislation in this state.” Pointing to historic corruption among both Republicans and Democrats, including President Trump’s “swamp” in the nation’s capital, he said he did not expect it to affect public support for the Fair Tax Amendment on the ballot in the fall.
“The truth is that we have an unfair tax system in the state of Illinois in which wealthy people pay the same rate in state taxes as people who are middle class or people who are working class,” Pritzker said. “That’s not fair. There ought to be a higher rate for people who are millionaires and billionaires, and there ought to be a lower rate for people who are working-class, middle-class families trying to make ends meet. That’s what this is about. I think that’s what people understand about it. It’s why it is doing well in general in people’s minds, and I think why it will succeed.”