* The governor was asked today what would happen if a region is put into mitigation…

There’s a menu of things that I talked about, some of them in my remarks, for example, and I mentioned yesterday bars as an example of something that would certainly be, you know, two thing we look at ,we’ve seen studies of the spread transmission that can take place. If bars are overcrowded, and often even though there’s been a capacity limit of 25%, put on bars, they are not following the rules in many cases and there’s transmission. That’s one example. Another example is youth sports . We’ve seen this summer, just some examples I talked about.

And so those are among the menu of items you’ve heard me talk about. But let’s not focus on the 8% failsafe number. This could happen much before that. In other words, the menu of items that are mitigations beat are about the numbers moving the wrong direction in a sustained period of time that doesn’t mean it got all the way to 8%. It could be that a region is moving very quickly upward, but doesn’t reach 8 percent but over a sustained period of seven days of 10, the seven day average positivity is moving up. That is a trigger along with the availability of hospital beds or the increase in hospitalizations, so those are I mean I know it’s complex but we wanted to lay out for you and be very transparent about what the triggers are what we’re looking at. You know I’ve said to you all every day I wake up and look at these numbers on a daily basis. I look at the rolling averages of these numbers, and so does Dr. Ezike and we’re constantly evaluating and making decisions about what is it that we may need to do, but long before we ever get to those points. As you heard, I call local officials or Dr. Ezike speaks to the local health department to say, there is a problem in your county, what are we doing, how can we be of help to you? What are you doing about it?

Local governments have the ability, more immediately to do things than state government does, and so we encourage that. But where state government needs to step in, we do and we will.

Please pardon all transcription errors.

* A question about the impact of other states on Illinois…

It’s an excellent question you’re right on. We asked that question of ourselves too because when you look at areas like St Clair County and Madison County right across the river from St. Louis, Missouri has a, I forget the exact number for Missouri, but I think it’s around a 7% positivity rate. Ours is three.

So, if you live in that area and you’re traveling across the bridge to Missouri, you’re essentially doubling the possibility that you could contract this or at least the number of people tthat you’re end up in front of. It’s very important for people who live in those areas to be aware of following mitigations that we’ve suggested in Illinois.

* Infection rates among young people…

Dr. Ezike: I will say that we’ve made tremendous, tremendous progress with our long term care residents which are obviously a much older population. So that used to be a very significant driver, but in the recent weeks we have seen that the 20 to 29 and again we have so much data when you break it out, it might be the case for, I think, non Hispanic whites 20 to 29. That’s the largest group. Then you also had that in blacks 20 to 29 but then you just you’ve never seen this high rate for the 10 to 19, that is new in terms of the numbers climbing over time they’re now at the highest rate that they’ve ever had from the beginning of this pandemic.

* Kids 10-19 can’t be in bars, so where are they getting it?…

Dr. Ezike: I have teenagers, right, they’ve been on lockdown but they are complaining that their friends are out and about and so kids are congregating, yeah social action social gatherings, home get togethers, trips that are not in schools that are not involving, you know, masking and distancing. … We know that if schools are to happen there has to be masking and distancing, but to get there we have to not have widespread community transmission at rates that are not sustainable to even safely do school. So that’s why our actions today, right now, will determine what school even looks like. And so we need to get the gains that we have achieved. We can’t rest on them, but we need to aggressively and fiercely protected and that will involve universal masking and distancing.

* New IDES phone system. Call-backs aren’t happening in a week or ten days…

This is an enormous challenge. IDES as you know was overwhelmed, there’s just no doubt about it. And I’ve talked about some of the reasons for that. But that’s less important than, you know, how can we overcome the challenges? We have more than 500 additional people answering phones. That’s in addition to the people who are already working at IDES that were in charge of answering phones to begin with. And we’ve moved people from back of the house to sort of front of the house to answer phones phones are absolutely in this ridiculously enormous wave of filings. And don’t forget people have to refile every week you have to recheck in every week.

And to the extent that people are using the phone to do that, or to, you know, in any way to avoid being online I would say, if you can go online if you can work online to get your filing to re-verify, for example, or just to file originally, that is absolutely the best way to do it. Not 100% of people are successful at doing that, but quite a lot because we see the numbers and literally hundreds of thousands of people, much easier for them to have done that online. As to the calls and again this is where there’s no doubt about this is where the big challenge has been. I want to solve this as much as anybody.

The challenge has been even with additional people answering phones that in order for them to deal with your specific case, they have to meet a federal requirement that is about 10 months of training. We haven’t even been in this pandemic for no more than five months. And having said that, we’ve tried to take any goal that doesn’t require that federal level of expertise and move that into a different category and try to get people there.

You’re asking about callback systems, it’s a new callback system. When you’re talking about maybe eight days instead of a few minutes, remember that at the very beginning here, you know, it’s very difficult to get, you know, a call in.

We’re, there’s no doubt, we have a lot of progress that needs to be made. It’s one of the reasons why we reached out and got somebody who’s been working at Employment Security for a lot of her career to come in and be the director of IDES. She’s already providing great ideas for us.

One last thing, and you may have seen this in a Washington Post article just a couple of days ago. Many many states are plagued with challenges in their Employment Security Department and unemployment claims. I just heard from a Senator about a meeting that the Secretary of Labor had at the very beginning, letting everybody know that most state systems are not capable of handling what’s probably coming.

And so this challenge has been, you know, vexing. That’s the best I can say about it. And so we’ve thrown everything that we can think up to throw it out, we’ve gone to outside providers we’ve hired more people we’ve moved people from the back of the house to the front of the house. It’s not that we do it, that we take the applications over the phone less efficiently. There’s only one way to do those. It’s just that the numbers that come in every day and every week, I mean, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of calls and it’s just, if you think about the amount of time it takes to take an application, or even to just answer a series of questions, and how many you could do in a single day. If you were working at IDESs it would be impossible to have enough people to be able to to answer every call as it comes in.

* Social equity applicants for cannabis…

No new licenses are given until these social equity licenses are given. So, you know, we want to make sure that we’re getting accomplished as fast as possible. The, you know, people of color, having the opportunity to enter this industry to own and to work in this industry. We believe that over the next six weeks that those licenses. I might I might say, by the way, that if I’m wrong I’m off by a week here or there. But that we believe that that there will be movement on this over the net over those weeks. But it’s a absolute goal of ours we see the opportunity this industry. Remember there’s an opportunity for 500 licenses in total, based on the legislation. About 55 of them were granted, or you know before. And now, there’ll be 75 that will be granted to retailers and then the numbers of people who will be transporters and grow cultivators and craft growers and so on. So I’m very, I’m looking forward to finally getting past that milestone.

* Confident he can do this new plan considering the case in Clay County?…

Multiple, multiple courts have issued rulings. This applies to one person, this ruling that has taken place by the way it hasn’t even been entered as a final order. Because the judge held on one of the three items he needed to rule on and then went on vacation. So I know that there may be a ruling in the next few days but suffice to say that even with the final ruling, it only applies to the one plaintiff, that was represented there.

…Adding… I asked the governor’s office about why the governor said the ruling only applied to Rep. Darren Bailey…

It’s not a class action suit, he didn’t ask for it to be and it wasn’t treated as such so in our legal view it only applies to the person who files it. And he did not get an injunction and it’s not a final order.

* President Trump said today he will announce unspecified federal action next week to quell violence in cities, including Chicago. He compared the cities to a war zone…

Well, it’s a sign of desperation by the president to try to improve his own standing somehow by making these declarations. Look, if he really wants to help, we have violence prevention programs that need funding. We have programs that are intended to provide mental health, that are intended to help kids get jobs during the summer, that are funded by federal dollars. We would love to get that kind of help. I fear that the President is really thinking about other things and not thinking about what really would help. In Washington DC he brought out the National Guard when there was a peaceful protest. That seems you know like irrational to me, and you know he’s acted irrationally all along. So that’s, I can’t imagine, frankly on a day to day basis it seemed, everything seems irrational.

* The White House has ordered hospitals to report data directly to it rather than the CDC…

Pritzker: The President has tried to politicize every aspect of this pandemic. This should not be political This is about saving lives. CDC is something that public health departments all across the nation rely upon. They’ve been a trusted source of information, advice, help, and to go politicize it by by interrupting the flow of data. I don’t know what is the purpose of interrupting the flow of the data to CDC, where the data really belongs and where the experts really are. It can only be political. And that really concerns me greatly. Because I’m focused on the health and safety of our people in Illinois, I want to get the best advice that we can get. I reach out to epidemiologists, we have some of the best in the world in Illinois thank goodness, but I also talked about, you know, to get to get the right kind of advice to keep people healthy and safe. But CDC is one of those places that you want to rely upon. And then when you see a president politicizing interrupting data intervening, it gives one pause.

Dr. Ezike: CDC is our foundational public health entity, not just in this country but serves as a leader throughout the world. I’m on the call with representatives from the CDC on a regular basis. Dr. Redfield has reached out to me, has taken my calls consistently, we’ve had dozens of people come from the CDC to help us right here in Illinois, to support us with this effort. We send our hospital admissions data directly to through syndromic surveillance directly to the CDC. And just last week I had a call with people who are looking at that data and telling us things other ways that we can look at the data so that we can make sure we have additional clues to identify outbreaks or anything that may escape detection. I would be very concerned and fearful to move into a new situation where the CDC does not have that ability to intervene and support the states, as it has been. We also want to make sure that we have data that we can trust and that we can use to make sound decisions going forward and there’s never been a question of that when we share all that information with our public health foundational champion, which is the CDC. Ao we will continue at the state level, and all of our state departments will continue to work so closely with CDC, and we are hoping that we will come to a point where we’re all working together for the same goal of trying to achieve the health and safety of the people of this country.

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