[This post’s timestamp has been altered to allow for Thursday visibility.]

* The governor announced two new drive-through testing locations today…

As you know, more widespread testing is a key goal for combating COVID-19. It’s a vital feature of our long term path to building a new normal. Along that path we need to make testing more available and convenient to more people. So I’m pleased to announce two additional state run drive through testing sites, both of which are available to anyone who has COVID like symptoms and wants to test, even without a doctor’s order.

Today in Aurora, we opened a new drive thru at the Chicago Premium Outlets outdoor shopping mall, located at 1650 Premium outlet Boulevard in Aurora, that location can take up to 600 specimens per day.

And starting on Friday in Rockford, we will open a drive thru location at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Rockford, the address there is 1601 Parkview Avenue, and that location will be able to take 500 specimens, a day when fully ramped up between these two new sites, and our three existing sites in Markham, Bloomington, and in Harwood Heights, our five drive-throughs can run up to 2900 tests per day when the Rockford test site is fully up and running.

As always, please pardon all transcription errors.

* PPE…

We’ve now sent out more than 15 million items, including 7.7 million surgical masks, nearly 1.7 million N95 masks, over 30,000 gowns, over 6.4 million gloves and over 350,000 face shields to locations all across the state of Illinois.

We also have outstanding orders due to arrive in the coming days and weeks with an additional 25.5 million NK and N95 masks [I’m not quite sure of that bit because I wasn’t paying attention and was relying on the transcription], 25 million surgical and general medical masks, 8.4 million gowns and coveralls, 14 million gloves and 7.5 million face shields and goggles.

* Dr. Ezike…

At the end of yesterday, we had 4665 individuals in Illinois who were hospitalized with COVID-19, of those 1220 were in the ICU and 747 of those ICU patients were on ventilators.

* On to questions for the governor. Got a long list of questions from colleagues here but wanted to begin with one of my own. The argument has been made regarding the stay at home order that the intention or the goal was, was not to eliminate COVID-19 by April 30, that was never going to happen, but to buy time for the health care capacity to increase for the ICU beds to increase to get the ventilators and the PPE to get the alternate care facilities up and running, including McCormick Place and credit to the administration, a lot of that has been accomplished in a short amount of time. So the argument has been made that, because the healthcare capacity is in a much better place right now. and because of the curve and the peak may be coming later and lower than initially projected why not open things up after April 30 just in a slightly more robust way than you’d so far indicate now…

I appreciate that question and I think people need to understand actually the principal purpose of the stay at home order was to make sure that fewer people got sick and fewer people would die than would otherwise without a stay at home order. And as you’re suggesting in the last part of your comments, the curve gets pushed out when you do that push down, and that’s good because, as you’re trying to build capacity you’re trying to raise the line, you know that you don’t want to go above of how many beds, do you have how many ICU beds, do you have how many ventilators do you have. You want to raise the line so that you can fit all of the patients and the needs underneath that line of capacity, let’s say, and you want to continue to make sure that that wave of patients doesn’t go above the line. You don’t necessarily need to continue to build capacity right. If we can’t build out more McCormick places.

But what you want to do is make sure that the number of people who get sick is kept down. And so that’s really the purpose of a stay at home order, it was the purpose of the original, you know, canceling of, as you may recall canceling of the parades and St Patrick’s Day parade and then closing of restaurants and bars so that’s what I think people need to pay attention to.

Now, obviously, you know, the better we do with this, right, the better we do with this, the more likely it is that we can start to think about what are the safe ways to begin to reopen things, so that people can go back to work people could go back to school. Are there ways to do that that keep people safe.

Some of the things we’ve suggested already like everybody wearing a mask, are some of what’s one idea among a bunch, that will help us get to keeping under the capacity and making sure that few people as few people as possible get sick. I think most people understand the need for avoiding a resurgence of the virus.

* I mean, is there a scenario in which you can open up the economy without there being some increase in cases and fatalities or are you going to have to make a very difficult decision. In terms of balancing increase with in order to avoid creating dire harm…

Well I think I’ve foreshadowed for everybody and I think it’s widely understood that the things that you need in order to open the economy are things that we don’t quite yet have in place, nor does any state. Some states are reopening anyway, that’s their choice I think people might get sick, many people might get sick as a result of it.

But look, what have I said right, testing tracing treating and PPE. And while we’re working very hard on PPE and testing and spinning up a contact tracing effort that will be very large at the end. Those are three things that we have to work on we’re not there yet, you know we’ve talked a lot about testing. We’re just not there yet.

And so, having said that you can make tweaks and moves and you know as you move along here. And as we learn more. Remember the researchers are learning things as we go to. Nobody was saying, everybody has to wear a mask at the beginning, nobody was saying that. Now, that’s pretty common understanding among the epidemiologists and others that it makes sense if you’re going to be outside and, each of you wears them. And you don’t have to wear an N95 mask, you just need some face covering because it’s your droplets that you don’t want to convey to somebody else and you don’t want them conveying it to you.

So once again, all these things are going to be kind of the new normal going forward and allow us to do things to loosen things up and begin to as you’re saying reopen the economy.

* At what point though, does the human cost of keeping the economy closed, the health problems that arise from joblessness etc. outweigh or commensurate to the health costs…

Obviously these are things that I weigh every day and I think about all the time because I understand that it’s challenging for people, there’s a mental health cost in addition to financial costs for everybody, this is going on, it’s having an effect on everybody. And so, I like everybody I wanted to be back to normal as fast as possible. I think we’re all recognizing that normal is going to look a little bit different going forward until there’s a vaccine, until the we can literally rid our state and our country and our planet of this scourge of COVID-19. Things are going to be a little bit different I think, we’re all going to have to be a lot more careful. And while we’re being careful, it allows us to begin to open things up more.

He went on for a while longer, but you get the idea.

* Yesterday during the White House briefing Dr. Birx mentioned New York, New Orleans and specifically Chicago, were doing quote much better. Do you agree with that assessment and how closely is your team consulting with federal government on modeling and determination of the peak?…

We are indeed doing better and I want to make sure everybody understands and look at New York right i mean they’re they’ve, they’ve seemingly flattened their curve, but it’s flattened at a very at a reasonably high level, but flat is way better than you know than the direction that they were going. And the same thing is true in Louisiana and the same thing is true in Chicago. So, I absolutely agree with things are better. And so that that’s a very good sign of, you know how the direction that things are going.

* To the second part of the question…

They don’t have, they are not using seemingly that data from Illinois as far as I know. And they have not offered to help with our data, or with our estimation of our curve. They in fact worked for a long time using that public one that people, others were using the IHME curve, which is inaccurate as regards Illinois, for example. They show a much lower number of hospital beds on their site than we actually have. So it’s very hard to, you know, they don’t have the data that we have, for whatever reason, so, you know, I would say what we have and the experts we have here are what we need I think to get good modeling and there are a number of institutions that have modeled Chicago. county, state and we are looking at those.

* One of our unemployed viewers says that she’s tried getting through to IDES quote hundreds of times without success. She finally reached out to the governor’s office and the matter was in fact quickly resolved. Would you recommend that other frustrated unemployed workers contact your office as a last resort?…

I certainly want to make sure that everybody gets what they need from our IDES and I will say that there’s been a vast improvement, I watched the numbers, I get a report every day. And we are processing gosh, I think 17 times the number. The last report I saw 17 times the number in a single day that we did a single day last year. So just to give you a sense of the magnitude of the problem. […]

Remember, the biggest issue is we can’t look at their private information, the governor’s office, right, we can’t process for them. And so, we have limited ability to really do anything except to hand it off back to IDES. And maybe get some attention to it.

* Summer camp business owners and parents said they say that they are waiting on official word from you to make a decision about whether summer camps will proceed or not, when can they expect that decision?…

Well, I’m not making decisions about summer camps. The summer camps themselves and I know parents will make those decisions and I feel terrible not having a perfect answer for them because as we’ve seen, you have to really watch all these numbers and see which direction we’re going to know to even begin to start to project when could you. And then, of course, is it possible to do social distancing in the context of a summer camp if people are staying overnight, for example, or even in a day camp, aren’t they often gathering in large groups in a summer camp. So I think these are all things that we’ll have to watch the numbers and see how things are going.

* Missouri’s governor has said that he intends to reopen most of the state as soon as next week, Missouri. Actually, May 4, he made a correction. Given that so many people in Metro East live and work in that same region, have you had any luck working with Governor Parson to convince him why that may not be a good idea?…

No, although I think I’ve been very vocal, I think all the governors know where I stand on what kind of a set of principles ought to be operated upon in order to think about reopening. It’s why we created this Midwest pact of states and we reached out to Missouri. They were not interested in joining that pact and similarly with Iowa.

* When will you allow elective surgeries to resume? Governor Cuomo is allowing them starting next week…

Yeah, we’re looking at that as we are in lots of other areas. […]

I’ve gotten suggestions from all across both sides of the aisle of elected officials as well as all across the industry so we’re considering a lot of different things

* Mitch McConnell said today that he’d be open to letting states file for bankruptcy to deal with economic losses from coronavirus, is that something you’ve considered or would consider addressing with state lawmakers?…

No.

* Back on April 5 you said that you had not had a haircut recently and that you were starting to get a little shaggy Have you gotten your haircut since then and if so who cut your hair?…

Does it look any less shaggy now. No… I was joking that I’ll end up wearing a ponytail at some point. We’re all looking forward to that.

* Rockford Mayor McNamara wants small retailers hard hit by big box stores to reopen with social social distancing or for you to ban big box stores from selling non essential goods. During the stay at home order. Are you considering his proposal?…

I haven’t seen that proposal and Mayor McNamara is a very thoughtful mayor. I certainly would like to look at how they are configuring their suggestion. But I spoke with mayors all across the state, about what’s of concern in their communities and I’m trying to take all of that into consideration as we make changes, not just now, but as we move forward, obviously. Even in the President’s plan for reopening there’s this contemplation of phases. And so we’re going to be looking at each of these things with regard to those phases.

* What specific metric has the multi state group come up with to determine when to reopen? Is it a downward trend of the number of positive cases the number of deaths, the hospitalization rates, is that going to be regionalised?…

We certainly talk about that as a group, we have shared our best ideas and that’s really the purpose of this pact. So I will look at the common interests that we have and then look at those common things that are good for Illinois, that come out of that pact. But that’s one of the reasons for that, we have a pact like that as we have a lots of things in common as Midwestern states. So I know that we’ll be able to kind of, let’s say, keep people safe and healthy. While we’re reopening things, in part because we share borders and ideas with one another.

* Responding to another question, Dr. Ezike said 2500 healthcare workers have contracted the virus “and we think that we know of potentially eight deaths.”

* Rep. Batinick said today that he expects restaurants would be among the last businesses to reopen. Is that also your thinking and what would it take to reopen restaurants for dining in safely?

All I can say is that I’ve read a number of the reports people have put together, including one that was done by AEI the American Enterprise Institute and a few others. And the suggestion, kind of the collective suggestion is that industries like restaurants and hospitality are harder to open than some others which are much easier to have social distancing, for example in a large warehouse, than it is in a restaurant where there might be booths and tables next to one another.

* Asked again about Mitch McConnell…

I think that Majority Leader McConnell is certainly important to the process of getting things done in Washington DC, but he’s not the only person involved. And there are an awful lot of Senators on both sides of the aisle that disagree with him. So, I’m hopeful that as a result of work that they’re doing those senators that believe that states and local governments deserve and need additional support…

* Asked about House Republican request that state parks be reopened…

It’s something that we absolutely have considered. I’ve heard a lot about it from people who live in areas where the state parks have been closed.

Remember that one of the biggest reasons that we closed state parks originally was the state workers who work there who have to work in close proximity. Even though you might think of a state park as being quite large. The state workers, how they work right is often in a building together, and in trucks, in which there might be multiple people that are in the truck as they travel around the park. And so that that’s obviously not at the beginning of this, that was not something that was acceptable to close proximity, and even now, and so we’ve talked a lot about you know how we might make changes that would allow people to use state parks.

* In suing your administration today, heads of major business group said that recent COVID related extension for workers comp benefits were pretty much unilaterally imposed on them without consultation or debate. Is that true?…

That is not true. And I don’t really want to comment any further because I know it’s a subject of litigation.

* The Association of Illinois Chiefs of Police is contending that felons convicted of violent crimes are being released due to COVID-19, is that correct?…

As you know I review applications for commutations of sentences as governor. It’s what every governor does, you can look back through, you know, I have the records of each of the governors Republican and Democratic so and and I do commute sentences so the contention that I’m looking at and actually do commute sentences, that’s an accurate depiction. I’m not sure what implication they’re making there.

* As you consider extending the stay at home order, a majority of the cases are in Northern Illinois. What’s your message to residents in downstate and Metro East where there are just a fraction of the cases and deaths?…

Well, you know, he mentioned Metro East. Actually there’s a hotspot in Metro east.

And that should remind you that nowhere in Illinois are people immune from COVID-19.

There are fewer cases it’s true, in some counties, but you heard me say at the beginning when there was only one county that had cases that this was likely to spread. We now have 96 counties with cases. What I would say to people who live in central and southern Illinois is, I’m taking into account the fact that there are fewer cases and fewer deaths in those areas. But we’re also looking at hospital availability and other factors to determine how we might think about changes that will be good for people who live in areas that don’t have as virulent a spread of COVID-19

* Today is the highest number of positive test results reported in one day. How do you explain the surge?…

Well, the most important thing that happened today that led to a lot higher positive test count is we tested more people. I think the testing number for today was 9300, and that’s the largest number yet, so that’s why you see a larger positive testing result.

* Are the early models predicting a peak in mid April wrong, and do you believe the public has a right to see the models you’re using to make these life altering decisions?…

So I think I’ve made clear but I’ll repeat that I’ve relied upon a variety of experts, you can reach them yourselves they’re the experts at Northwestern they’re well known in Northwestern U of C you have UIC. These are, [garbled] you know examples of folks who, some of whom have developed models.

And so, I look at all of the those and listen to those experts because I think one of the things that maybe isn’t widely understood as these models are they change literally every day. And the reason is because you’re projecting on one day, right, but about a bunch of days forward. And then as you move forward, you have actual numbers now to plug into the model. And guess what, that will be different than whatever you projected by its very nature.

So there’s nothing exact about these models and it’s really important for people to understand that, you know, I’m estimating. We all are. Even the modelers are estimating and the purpose for the estimating isn’t so much that we know exactly what date, some data, which you might peak, that’s not the purpose of the models.

The purpose of the models from my perspective is to understand what the capacity needs will be for us in our hospitals among our healthcare workers to treat people who might get COVID-19 on those dates where we might have a very high infection rate and a need for more hospital beds. So that I hope that gives a bigger picture of what we’re looking at.

But I think you should look at all of the online models, they’re worth looking at. We’ll be talking more about modeling tomorrow, to give you a better understanding of how we look at things.

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