* Background is here if you need it. Center Square…
[Rep. Mark Batinick, R-Plainfield] wrote the governor a letter detailing a proposal with regionalized metrics to give assurances things like school mask mandates aren’t open ended.
“I think you’re able to actually maybe pick out breakouts sooner, and maybe put in some mitigations sooner but that also allows mitigation to be taken off sooner if you’re successful,” Batinick said.
He noted the governor’s economic restrictions last year imposed unilaterally that kept restaurants from having indoor dining was throttled with regionalized metrics triggering different phases and tiers of mitigation for different regions of the state. That’s not the case with the school mask mandate in place now. […]
In a letter to Batinick Wednesday the Republican shared with The Center Square, the governor said he does have some metrics in mind for relaxing the school mask mandate.
“That could include a significant reduction in transmission, the availability and utilization of vaccines for school-aged children under 12, an improving vaccination rate for children 12 to 17 and for adults that interact with the school community, and/or additional guidance from the CDC,” Pritzker’s letter said.
But using localized data “would be inaccurate, unfair and unworkable for example to tell kids that masks can be off on Tuesday only to put them back on by Thursday – and that chaos would be our reality until we might reach herd immunity as a state and as a nation,“ Pritzker said.
Batinick said of the letter: “It’s thoughtful.”
* The full letter…
Dear Representative Mark Batinick,
Thank you for your thoughts and proposals throughout this pandemic. Constructive discourse with other Illinois elected leaders has been very helpful, and I value your efforts to engage in it.
Regional differences have been a feature of the COVID-19 pandemic. We can see it even now nationwide – as the transmission of the Delta variant slows in some parts of the country and hastens in others – just as we have time and time again in the last 18 months. We also see it when we look at statewide vaccination progress, where communities with high uptake rates tend to conceal those that are struggling to keep their neighborhoods safe.
That’s why local considerations have been a very important part of Illinois’ pandemic response. As you’ll remember, regional metrics guided our state from the spring of 2020 into the season of widespread vaccine availability. As cases and hospitalizations dropped significantly in every region last spring, the entire state of Illinois entered the Restore Illinois plan’s Phase 5, marking the full reopening of all industries, on June 11th, 2021.
Unfortunately, every time we think we have become familiar with the R naught and the percent of cases that lead to hospitalizations, this virus mutates. By late July, large areas of the country were in the thrusts of one of the pandemic’s worst waves of new cases yet. With students and teachers preparing for the beginning of the school year, the Centers for Disease Control recommended universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status, later adding universal indoor masking recommendations in all areas of substantial or high transmission which the CDC tracks on a by-county basis.
For weeks now, and still at the time of this writing, every single county in Illinois falls into those categories.
When the Illinois’ statewide school masking requirement was announced, I made it clear that this requirement could change for the better as the situation evolves. That could include a significant reduction in transmission, the availability and utilization of vaccines for school-aged children under 12, an improving vaccination rate for children 12 to 17 and for adults that interact with the school community, and/or additional guidance from the CDC. As for the statewide indoor mask mandate, I have repeatedly said that once Illinois has established a consistent downward trend on this current wave, we could reevaluate what the current recommendations are from the CDC and return to mask recommendations instead of a mandate. The experts are still evaluating how Delta and other new variants impact the spread of this virus and what that means for this current wave of substantial new cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Creating rigid metrics in this changing landscape wouldn’t result in safer communities. While I wish I could provide a specific end date for the sake of convenience for all of us, this virus’ danger to people is diminished as our deterrence of it improves. The CDC as well as the leading epidemiologists, virologists, immunologists and other experts have been clear that vaccinations and masks are two of the most effective tools we have to keep each other safe during a surge of the virus.
In the short-term, it’s simply not feasible to operate using positivity rates on a day-by-day, county-by- county basis. As you yourself said, a county’s transmission rates are impacted by every county that borders it – and in the world of statistics, that means a few extra negative tests could throw a small population county in and out of mitigations on a whim. It would be inaccurate, unfair and unworkable for example to tell kids that masks can be off on Tuesday only to put them back on by Thursday – and that chaos would be our reality until we might reach herd immunity as a state and as a nation.
Specifically to your second suggestion: while many have proposed innumerable ways to slice Illinois’ 57,000 square miles — by townships, cities, counties or regions — given that pandemic is a health emergency, my administration has been guided by a focus on healthcare availability for all our state’s residents, specifically guided by the IDPH Emergency Medical Service regions, with some minor adjustments as suggested by members of the General Assembly last year. These are the same regions that set parameters for ambulance drivers and hospital collaborations. Using the existing medical regional breakdown allows our public health professionals when necessary to manage and monitor capacity in an existing framework. The state has tried to set a baseline of pandemic mitigations with the understanding that, as necessary, local governments can provide additional health mitigation measures that work best for each community. We continue to encourage them to do so.
Again, I appreciate your willingness to reach out and share your ideas and perspective. You’ve offered constructive thoughts during the pandemic, some have been workable and adopted. Working together will help us all make progress. With widespread vaccination as our greatest tool – we will find our way.
Sincerely,
Governor JB Pritzker
- PublicServant - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 6:39 am:
Pritzker is right. There would be chaos with the mandate being lifted one day, only to be reimposed the next…plus local data reporting has been sketchy at best. And covid doesn’t respect local borders.
- Inverted Pyramid - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 7:04 am:
Noted.
Sincerely,
JB
- West Side the Best Side - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 7:34 am:
This is the way people in government should communicate with each other. Not with 10 second sound bites or insulting tweets, but with well thought out ideas presented in a courteous manner.
- JS Mill - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 7:58 am:
Civil, genuine discourse in attempt to improve the situation between two public servants.
More of this please.
- ;) - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 8:24 am:
“Thanks, but no thanks. Sincerely, Anne. I mean JB.”
- TheInvisibleMan - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 8:43 am:
I doubt batinick expected anything to happen from his letter, especially considering his reasoning fell apart with even a few minutes of examining his proposals.
What he did have to do, is show the local crazies that he was attempting to do something with school masks. The absurdity in local social media groups forced his hand into this action.
The next school board meeting in the largest district within his district will be on the 13th of this month, and it’s going to be a cluster. The group I’ve been watching is already planning to show up to display their inability to read multi-syllable words. The last meeting saw one of the attendees arrested for trespassing for refusing to wear a mask at the meeting, and refusing to leave the meeting when asked by the board.
Buckle up.
- Moe Berg - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 9:07 am:
I hope Rep. Batinick’s letter to the governor helped to solve the former’s political problems, which is all it was intended to do - though, in truth, there is no point in attempting to seem reasonable to the unreasonable.
Put another way, you can’t appease crazy.
As @TheInvisibleMan indicated, Rep. Batinick’s letter did not survive first contact with logic or science.
- Norseman - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 9:10 am:
Great letter in response to political suggestions.
Again, we see why Illinois has been better served under Pritzker’s leadership than anyone from the GOP. Unfortunately, that leadership has been frustrated by the lack of enforcement in many areas of the state due to politics.
Perhaps we should go to the new Texas vigilante style of enforcement. Let anyone sue violators and give them a big bounty.
- Homebody - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 9:21 am:
The intended audience of Batinick’s letter wasn’t Pritzker. The intended audience of Pritzker’s letter wasn’t Batinick.
They both succeeded in their aims without resorting to name calling, so it was a net win for everyone at a political level I suppose.
- thechampaignlife - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 9:26 am:
===There would be chaos with the mandate being lifted one day, only to be reimposed the next===
A compromise here would be to model the regional mitigations. They are imposed when certain levels are exceeded, but they must be held under a different, possibly lower level for a week or so before they can be lifted.
===plus local data reporting has been sketchy at best===
Do we know where the breakdown is occurring? Is it an issue with test results, bed utilization, or something else? If we can identify the questionable data, we can track down problem and resolve it. For instance, if the smaller county health departments are having trouble tracking the positive test results or bed utilization, the state could help them partner with a neighboring county or regional group that could help them manage the data. The CDC and state are tracking data on a by-county level and using that to make decisions, so if the data is bad we should fix that.
===covid doesn’t respect local borders===
True, but lines must be drawn somehow. Batinick’s proposal to consider each county separately, but include the metrics of neighboring counties, is a reasonable way to establish boundaries. Some of those metrics may still be based on regional metrics such as bed utilization, but others can be more localized. Consider tiny Putnam County, the smallest county by land area and 9th smallest by population. It would include metrics from Region 2 hospital data as well as metrics from Bureau, LaSalle, and Marshall counties, taking Putnam’s tiny 5.6K population up to 160K in terms of how many people are included in the metrics.
- Thomas Paine - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 9:46 am:
What both Batinick and Pritzker’s letters ignore is that when the CDC lowered the requirment for physical distancing within schools from 6 feet to 3 feet, it was conditioned on a universal masking requirement. The science right now says if you want to remove the masks, the desks have to be six feet apart, and in most classrooms thats just not physically possible with 100 percent of studen5s in attendance. Schools would have to double classroom space.
Maybe this will change once students are vaccinated, but I dont hear Rep. Batinick or any other Republicans leading the charge for that to happen.
- Just Me 2 - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 10:54 am:
Everyone is going to have a different way to carve up the state based on what they want in their area, but tieing the boundaries directly to what hospitals they serve makes the most sense. If County X and Y uses the hospital in County Z, those three counties should be in the same region so as not to overwhelm that hospital.
- School Guy - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 10:56 am:
The public civil conversation between these two is very much appreciated. Both make reasonable suggestions. A compromise could be made to establish that a 7 day moving average of new cases or positivity in a region must be under a certain benchamrk for a certain number of days. For example, having the positivity under 2% for 7 consecutive days. This is more or less the way previous mitigation efforts were installed and lifted.
Yes, science is discovering more and more information every day. But plenty of scientists are saying herd immunity is a pipe dream. Yes, lives and health are paramount, but having a goal to look forward could improve morale and mental health too.
- RWC - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 11:40 am:
Echoing School Guy about appreciating the civil conversation, since I came to say something similar.
- RWC - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 11:56 am:
Homebody wrote:
>The intended audience of
It’s more than this, though. They both successfully established that the question is more complicated than the screamers among their own allies make it out to be. That’s a huge win today.
- Jason Bourne - Thursday, Sep 9, 21 @ 9:49 pm:
What’s the over/under on Batinick getting a primary challenger? The Trump GOP voters will never trust someone who is reasonable, seeks compromise, and writes/speaks in sentences with more than 3 multiple syllable words.