[This post’s time stamp has been altered for Friday visibility.]

* The governor focused today on unemployment insurance claims. We’ve covered most of this already. Click here and scroll down to the update about how IDES has processed 1,006,925 initial unemployment claims from March 1 through May 2. And click here for some of the upgrades done by the administration.

More from the governor…

That’s over 1 million claims in just the first nine weeks of this crisis. Compare that to the first nine weeks of the Great Recession of 2008, when there were 180,000 claims in Illinois.

This historic number of claims has also lead to historic levels of benefits being paid out in the first four months of 2020, Illinois has paid out over $2 billion in claims. That’s $500 million more than what was paid out in all 12 months of 2019.

Remember to pardon all transcription errors.

* On to questions for the governor. Some business owners are wondering who is going to be making the final decision on when regions may move through the five phase plan. Is it county board chairpersons, mayors, teams of leaders or your office?…

Actually it’s a healthcare determination. As you saw each of the criterion for meeting the regional reopening is a healthcare measure, so it will be done by the Illinois Department of Public Health.

* Whenever you are asked about enforcing executive orders, you slough it off to the locals. You make it sound as if your orders are merely suggestions. What gives?…

Well first of all, that is how laws are enforced across the state of Illinois, by local law enforcement. We have state police, but there are 2000 State Police, and there are many many 10s of thousands of police officers all across the state that work for local and county governments, as well as sheriffs. And so it is true that laws are enforced at the local level. We expect that they will be enforced. That’s the responsibility of law enforcement officers of State’s attorneys and others at the local level.

* We hear of large businesses seeing outbreaks of COVID and reporting that information in numerous counties. In Champaign and Sangamon counties the health departments will release the names of businesses, stores where confirmed cases are at, but the Macon County Health Department refuses to provide that information, saying it is IDPH guidelines. [The rest was garbled, but it was essentially what the governor made of this.]…

I think that it is important for the people who work at those locations, and people who patronize those locations to know if there’s been an outbreak so I think it’s a responsibility to local public health department to make that known. […]

There is a mandated reporting to IDPH regarding outbreaks. And so, I think people are reporting that information to us, we are capturing the information, all the information you have regarding outbreaks is what has been reported obviously from the locals. Regarding putting out information regarding manufacturing. I don’t know if we have specific guidance related to that. So I think people are using their discretion to do what they think is appropriate in their accounts.

* A growing number of police and state’s attorneys say they will not enforce your order even if complaints are made. Have you considered utilizing state police and state licensing agencies to hold people accountable?…

Yes, and I’ve talked about that before

* The NFL is announcing its 2020 schedule this evening. If Chicago is not at phase five will even a reduced number of fans be allowed to attend games at Soldier Field?…

Well, again, we want to make sure that everybody’s safe all across the country. If the nation isn’t in a state where we can have 10s of thousands of people together in a stadium, then I don’t think you’re going to see football opening up to having fans in the stands. However, you may know that many of the leagues and teams, and I have spoken with many of them, are considering opening their seasons, or continuing their seasons without fans in the stands, so that people can enjoy sports online on TV.

* A valet for President Trump has COVID-19. Given the President’s reluctance to wear a mask, do you believe he should quarantine for 14 days and can you outline when you and your staff wear masks at the office? What’s the status of your staffer who had covid?…

Yeah I think as a leader you should set a good example for people, you should follow the rules. You can get tested after you’ve been exposed to somebody to determine whether you have COVID-19 and I would hope that the President of the United States has been tested after finding out that he’s been exposed to somebody with COVID-19. But I think that wearing face coverings in public and in offices where you can’t keep social distance, and where it may be required by the IDPH in its guidance is appropriate and we do wear face coverings in the office, it’s something that we began doing not that long ago but a number of, maybe two weeks ago, where we when we have meetings or anything else everybody is encouraged to and asked to wear a face cover.

* How does the general election fit into the new phase plan?…

Well I think you’ve heard me say this, many, many times. We need to have a mail balloting for everybody in the state of Illinois, so that we can make it much, much easier for people to vote, who otherwise may not be able to leave their homes. It’s especially true for those most vulnerable populations.

So it’s very important that we pass up a law, the legislature when they get together to make sure that we have the ability to do that in the state. Obviously, there will be in person voting as well. And so, you know how we implement that will be important, but I think that’ll be again with a lot of guidance from the Illinois Department of Public Health.

* Was everyone given the phase three green light on May, 1, or will historical data be used for some of the regions to push forward towards reopening, is historical data back to march 20 being used at all?…

Not for the purpose of the Restore Illinois plan.

* Would you respond to complaints from the convention industry that putting them in phase five will just force them to meet in another state?…

First I would tell you that, once again, just like we were talking about large gatherings for sporting events. This is all dependent upon where we are at the time if we have a very effective treatment. And, or we have a vaccine available. Then I can’t wait to welcome people back to large gatherings to conventions and so on. I’m the first person that wants to bring business to the state of Illinois and put people back to work. So I’m looking at that, I mean in terms of when we will get to stage five, I don’t know. And, you know, we’ll be evaluating that as we go. I think, you know, again we’ve talked about the treatments that may become available before a vaccine. And I think we’ll all be watching very closely.

* You explained that your Restore regions are in part about hospital availability. Are you also looking at available beds in neighboring states that people are most likely to utilize like in Southern Illinois that includes the Paducah, St Louis, Evansville?…

Dr. Ezike: No, that’s a very good question and a very astute point that we have many different communities, both in the Quad City area in East St. Louis, other areas that border other places. We of course, know that as well as the fact that there are people who could travel into another state. There are also individuals from the other state that could come into our state so you potentially could say that that’s a wash in terms of trying to figure out what extra amount of beds, you could either add or take away based on the added population of neighboring states versus our people going to that. So they were not outside of our Illinois, all the lines were drawn within the state borders, and we did not add beds from neighboring states.

[I don’t that’s true of the area north of Paducah, however.]

* Running Central, a clothing and running store in Peoria, has filed a lawsuit against the governor for the extended stay at home order and is seeking an exemption. How do you respond?…

Once again, everybody has a right to take your case to court to file a lawsuit. But the fact is that the goal here is to keep everybody healthy and safe in every community, even in that community. And I certainly would encourage the people who might patronize, who might be patrons of that store, not to do so, and the local officials to enforce the executive order that’s in place. And again, the goal here is for us to keep everybody safe and healthy and to reopen the economy in phases. So the opportunity for that store to open may arise just in three weeks or so.

* When will the state start reporting COVID-19 recovery numbers?…

Dr. Ezike: So, I have been trying to do that on a regular basis once weekly here from the podium, and we will work to get that on the website that’s not a problem to give our percentages.

* A new study from Harvard shows Illinois among the 41 states that fall short of benchmarks for adequate testing. Is it realistic that Illinois will be able to reach the suggested target of 64,000 tests a day, what specific steps are you taking to get there?…

Every state in the country, let’s be clear, is trying to ramp up testing. We’re doing it better than most indeed, we’re, you know, number two among the top 10 most populous states in the nation. Even now, and we continue to ramp up our testing. So all I can say is that with a worldwide shortage of all of the supplies that has existed for so many weeks and with the challenge of not having any coordination of testing from the federal government or ability to gather supplies only recently, some swabs from the federal government I’m grateful for. But yeah, I mean we’re all trying to get to the you know a sense of adequacy. I don’t think 64,000 is adequate for the state of Illinois. I think we’re going to need many more tests than that. We want people to be safe when they go to work, we want to be people to be safe when they go to school. We want people to be safe in all their activities and they want to know that others have been tested around them, so that you know nobody is is without an opportunity to get a test.

* I talked with former governor Jim Edgar who said he spoke by phone with Governor Pritzker this week. Governor Edgar said they talked about the stay at home order, plan to reopen the economy and about the criticism that will inevitably come as a pandemic wears on people are out of work and or have cabin fever. He said he also shared that in crisis he learned that doing the right thing supersedes politics and praised governor Pritzker for doing that. What was your takeaway from that conversation, any advice governor Edgar had that turned up and your plan to reopen Illinois?…

I have reached out to Governor Edgar on a number of occasions since becoming governor, indeed before that. He’s someone who has demonstrated terrific leadership capabilities. I reach out to people who I think have important things to offer me as advice in difficult circumstances and I would just say that Governor Edgar, you heard some of what he did say to me, and I think the most important thing that he said, which I already knew but it’s important to hear it over and over again which is doing the right thing is always the right answer.

* Have you determined any new guidelines for hair stylists and barbers to follow for example requiring salons to use disposable capes or dividers between stations?…

We are working with industry leaders and workers in industries even now to make sure that IDPH has all the information that industries would want to see considered as they open and that they are issued guidelines for each industry, so that they are safe and, and that includes our stylists and barber shops.

* The new call center that you had mentioned, is that just for the 1099 workers in those claims? Can you describe that for me?…

It’s not just for that purpose. Although, as you can imagine there will be a new set of claims coming in and so expanding the workforce, and the capability to answer phone lines is important.

* Why was it necessary to hire 50 call center workers from a Texas company to handle 1099 Unemployment Claims beginning next week, and are all those 200 call center employees trained and ready for Monday’s launch?…

Every one of the people that is hired in that call center is from Illinois, and everyone that will be hired will be from Illinois.

And they are all trained and ready to go … I just want to be clear that the training that’s required to take a full intake form is training that’s mandated by the federal government and takes quite a long time. So some of what’s happening in that call center is answering questions, making sure that people have the right information so that they know how to fill it out when they go online when they have trouble online, they can get advice about how to get it right. So that’s some of what goes on with those folks in the new call center which which is designed to take difficult technical questions but not personal information.

* Will high school sports be determined by local school districts, or by you? Say Central Illinois region moves to the next phase, but our region up here does not. How does that happen, do they have extracurricular sports but these regions up here don’t?…

These are certainly issues that need to be worked out. Over the next few months, and it will be done together with the Illinois State Board of Education, the local authorities as well as IDPH.

* And professional teams, you touched on this a little bit but in some other states they’re kind of starting to open this stuff up, not necessarily fans but just the sports in general, what does that mean here for Illinois?…

Well, again, I’ve had conversations with league commissioners and I you know I’m absolutely I’m listen I want to get sports up and go I think people need this as an outlet. No it won’t be in person. At least not in the next month or two. But, but I think it’s very important for everybody psyche. I think, you know, we’d have some terrific sports fans all across the state of Illinois that want to see this up and running and so there’s a desire to have it work. I think they’ve got to come up with a set of plans that there’s a, you know, when you’re talking I think they’re incentivized by the way the league’s are to do the right thing, partly they’re incentivized because they have players that are worth millions of dollars to them that are going to be on the field. So, you know, I think they want to protect their for lack of better term assets. And, you know, their people. So, I am looking forward to seeing the plans that the various teams are putting together.

You haven’t seen any of those plans, no one’s come forward yet?…

No one’s come forward yet. Not to me.

* What about places like Great America Six Flags a large waterpark, do they wait for phase five to reopen or possibly phase four?…

Well, again,under the current guidance that’s been provided and that’s again with a lot of input a significant amount of input from epidemiologists and doctors, as you saw at phase four, we would only have gatherings of 50 people or less, and that was the recommendation of the experts. So obviously, that would be difficult for a waterpark or, carnival or, they’re kind of a large venue. But again I’ve said this before that the hope I think we all have is that an effective treatment I know everybody sees a vaccine is happening. Who knows when, you know, but an effective treatment I think is potentially on the horizon and that will change everything. This plan can evolve I’ve said that, we’re going to change the playbook if we need to. Because things will change as we go forward. So I’m somewhat hopeful that we’ll be able to address things, think large venues like that.

* Fox 32 wants to know about malls and specifically places like Orland Park the tax revenue comes from the mall area of town, about those kind of things…

Again, indoor venues with hundreds and hundreds of people who will be walking together,that’s an extraordinarily difficult circumstance under the epidemiological recommendations here. So, that’s something that will have to happen over the course of months and not in the immediate next phase.

* The Northwest Bible Baptist Church in Elgin, apparently your office has received a letter informing you that starting on May 17 they will resume in person services, while instituting a long list of safety and social distancing measures. Can you respond to this and what do you say to local law enforcement about making arrests?…

Well, I haven’t seen that letter and you know that I have discouraged local law enforcement from arresting people. I have not discouraged them from reminding them what their obligations are to each other and I would think that a house of worship, and a pastor would know better, and not encourage their parishioners to put themselves and their families in danger. […]

And I think that if people can just hang on a little bit longer as we bend the curve down. Yes, the curve has bent, but it has bent too flat. And as you may see in the Restore Illinois plan that we put together, we actually made it easier than the President the White House plan for regions to open up, because we essentially said as long as your hospital beds are flat or net new admissions aren’t going up over the course of this period of time and as long as your positivity rate is stable and under 20 and that there is a capacity availability, that you can open up. And I actually think that’s going to turn out to mean that some areas of the state will open earlier than the President’s plan would have suggested they could.

Is that because you think we’re going to be on this plateau for a long period of time?…

I don’t know, but I certainly am concerned that we’re going to be on a plateau for a long period of time because we all wanted,I think we saw the curves from very early on, but said you peak and then you’d head down the other side. I think I have said many times from this podium though that we don’t know. You don’t know until you see it in the rearview mirror whether you peaked. And so we could plateau, and then go up again after that, and so what I’ve said is if you can maintain a plateau for a period of time, and there is still hospital bed availability that that’s good enough, and that’s what the recommendations were, that’s the decision that I made, but I made it based on the science and data and recommendations were made to me by the experts.

* Dr. Ezike, what do you see when you look at this data, we’ve plateaued it appears. How many days have we plateaued and what do you see looking at all this?…

Dr. Ezike: I think we so successfully flattened the curve but it stayed flat for some time now and so where do we go from here is critical and effectively. May 1 did signal a change. I know in coming to work it seems like there’s quite a bit more traffic, it seems when I look about there’s a lot more people out again I’m just talking about this area and we’ve heard what’s happening in some other regions. So, the baseline has changed and so it’s very important that we look very critically at what effect that has on number of cases and number of hospitalizations so whenever we had two weeks ago, again was a result of people staying home pretty consistently. We now need to see what will happen with the new attitudes that are prevailing and the new behaviors that are prevailing and if it stays the same. That’s great, we’ll quickly move through the phases, but we have to be realistic. The more people are out, the more infections, there will be the more infections, there will be the more hospitalizations, there will be the more hospitalizations some fraction of those will go on to have severe complications and potentially die. […]

[Regarding how long we’ve plateaued] It depends on where you are. There are some places where, and again it depends on which geographic distinction you’re using, whether you’re dividing it up by counties, or by cities or by you know 11 EMS regions or but now the for Restore regions. There are places that they are still increasing the number of cases, but slowly, but they are increasing and then there are other places where it has been flat so it’s it’s different. It’s not uniform across the state, and we understand that and so that’s why we’ve looked, we’re looking very closely, every day multiple times a day just to figure out where we’re at and figure out who’s going up in what dimension who’s going down in the other dimension, at what rate, all of that and again if something, a game changer happens like a very promising cure comes out and it looks like it actually heals people not just decreases the amount of time that you’re in the hospital, they, we reset and we have to sit back down and figure out, okay, what can we lift up.

Everybody wants us to get back to normal, we want to get back to normal. I think we are sending some of the frustration towards the wrong entities. You should be sending it towards the virus and then we should all see how we can support ways to find cures if people have had the virus and want to try to donate antibodies, tried to donate their plasma we can see if there’s a potential cure there. We’re hoping that scientists can come up with a pharmacological cure. So that’s where we’re trying to go. We are following the numbers closely, we’re trying to see the trends and we want to make sure that we don’t put the citizens of Illinois in a precarious situation where if there’s a surge, if we open up that we don’t just end up where we could have been. And we’re scared to be, you know, six weeks ago.

* Sometimes there’s discrepancies in what you say. For example, the number of deaths reported. I believe the site today says 137. You said 138. Is data changing that rapidly, are there other reasons?…

Dr. Ezike: It could be that somebody has found already an additional number that needed to be added or taken away. Again it is very fluid. We’re trying to put information really faster than I’m comfortable with. But in an aggressive attempt to make sure we put everything out there, we will see that there are things that need to be corrected and adjusted but we are putting it out.

We are also the stewards of all the cancer data. So when we put out all the cases of cancer and we have a world renowned cancer registry here at IDPH. When we put out the information about cancers that occurred for a year, it can sometimes can take eight months into the next year or longer to get that information out. It takes that long to deal with this much data. And so I beg people’s indulgence. No one’s trying to hide information. It’s just to get it right, it actually takes some time and we’re not being afforded that time.

* With projections showing lower state revenue in the coming year, will you consider reductions to LGDF or the school funding formula? If so, what will that mean for local property taxes?…

There’s no doubt we have a serious budget challenge for the coming year. And so we’re looking at virtually everything that’s in the budget. But with an eye toward protecting, particularly the services that are offered to people the support that people need in this very difficult time, children included.

So, you know, we’re considering, there’s almost nothing that I would say is off the table I mean, DCFS, just give us one example. I mean people asked me about, you know what, why aren’t you just cutting the budget in some massive way? And the answer is because I want DCFS, think about it. Think about the agencies that are now front and centerm the most important agencies right now in this pandemic right. The IDPH. Think aboutthe agencies that have been underfunded for many many years. IEMA is another good example. And then add to that, like I said, DCFS and others. It’s very difficult to say that that now in this circumstance, well, now’s a good time for us to cut DCFS or now’s a good time IDES. I told you how much smaller IDES is over the last 10 years and yet now everybody’s, you know, needs it to operate at peak efficiency and, and in a way that it’s never operated before and yet it’s 500 people, fewer than it was 10 years ago. So IDPH is just another amazing example, these folks are working night and day. Each person is doing the job of three people. And so anyway, these are the difficulties of looking at how we’re going to deal with a budget going forward.

* You said on Face the Nation that you hope there aren’t too many strings attached to federal funding for Illinois. Senator Durbin said today, he thinks it’s fair that federal funding be associated specifically with the pandemic, not for pension debt. Considering the toll the virus took on state tax revenues, can you make the argument that COVID-19 blew a hole in our ability to pay pension debt, and that the feds should fill at least part of that hole?…

That is not what I’m asking the federal government to do and I don’t know that there’s any governor in the nation attesting that. What I am asking for is help replacing the lost revenues that came because of this virus. Everybody’s experienced this, you can go to the most republican state the most democratic state. You know I like the term that Mark is using blowing a hole, it really blew a hole, and you know we had a balanced budget for this year this fiscal year, and we were on our way to having a mild surplus for the year. First time I think in quite some time. And we would have used it to pay down the existing bill backlog by some amount. And now all bets are off and all bets are off indeed for the plans for having a surplus for next year, as well, unless the federal government steps up to the plate. And I think Senator Durbin has it right, that these funds should not be used for something that has nothing to do with coronavirus COVID-19 and instead should be a replacement for the revenues that we lost.

And then Amy Jacobson asked a weird question.

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