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Pritzker thanks Apple for delivering 100,000 N95 masks to Illinois - Progress on testing - Positive tests level off for the last two weeks - Asked about process for reopening business - Asked what crisis has taught him about himself - Repeats that he didn’t have the constitutional authority to stop the primary - Asked why he isn’t wearing a mask while he speaks - Talks about abandoning most of spring agenda - Asked about nursing home spread prevention - US Department of Labor’s new gig worker rules inadequate - Asked about mail-in voting plans

Sunday, Apr 12, 2020 - Posted by Rich Miller

[Comments on this post are now open.]

* The governor began by wishing everyone a happy Easter and then made an announcement…

I want to thank Tim Cook and Apple. His team and he delivered 100,000 N95 masks this weekend to support our health care workers, and our first responders here in Illinois. We are very grateful for their generosity and of the generosity of so many companies, near and far, for stepping up to support their fellow Americans, and especially supporting our heroes here in our state.

As always, please pardon all transcription errors.

* Some progress on the testing front…

I do want to point out on this Easter Sunday something of a blessing in the numbers that I’ve reported today.

First, the number of tests completed for today has reached its highest number ever at 7956 for the last 24 hours. That’s almost halfway between the 6000 that we’ve been averaging lately, and the 10,000 that I have set for our next goal. That is great news on the testing front.

* More positive news…

I’ve spoken before about a stabilizing or a bending of the curve, and today is one more piece of evidence that it may indeed be happening. The percent of those tested that came up positive is almost exactly the same as it has been for the last two weeks, and the death toll today is lower than it has been in six days.

The governor then said the state needs to “stay the course” to keep those results from rising.

* On to questions for the governor. Could you put into perspective the new numbers today compared to yesterday and where are we in this fight in terms of how close are we to this peak? Are we on a downward tide or we’re going up still? [Um, the governor just went over this, but weekend reporters are gonna weekend report]…

You don’t really know until you start going down, you know whether you’ve peaked. And what I look for is a leveling because the numbers had been going up exponentially. And then they were going up arithmetically. And you’ll see this number today is higher than other numbers, it may be our highest number yet, but we also tested more than ever before and that’s how you end up with a higher number.

* What is it going to look like when the state is going to open back up?…

Yes, you know, frankly, weeks ago, I began conversations with people to understand how would we do that. It’s a question of how and when. Now the when will be frankly determined by when that curve starts to turn down and we see significant drop off in these numbers.

And then we have to ask the question okay well after that happens, you still will only have had a certain percentage, a relatively low percentage in my opinion, maybe less than 20% of the public will have been exposed to COVID-19 will have had it and recovered from it. So you wouldn’t have herd immunity at that point.

So the question is how do you operate society when we begin to bring down the level of infection and make sure that people are able to begin to go back to work in various industries. So I’m talking to industry leaders about that. I’m talking to economists about that. I’m also, very importantly, listening to the scientists and the doctors to make sure that we do this right because what we don’t want, the last thing we want is to begin to open things up and then have a big spike in infections. And then and you know unfortunately all the spikes that come with that including a spike in deaths. So we want to make sure we’re not doing that while we’re also looking at how we can get people back to work.

* What has this crisis taught you about yourself and your leadership style?…

Well, I mean it’s taught me a few things. I’m not sure it’s so much about me, but I have terrific people who work for our government that that I’ve brought on to in the governor’s office and in the agencies, across the agencies, and I’m very, very proud of them.

I have a philosophy about who you want around you when you’re running anything. And it’s a philosophy that says that you want people who are, carry with them the values of honesty, integrity, loyalty and respect. And if you have people around you who can’t fulfill those, they’re not worthy of being in your team. Now, most importantly, you want people who also meet all those criteria.

And so, you know, when I did that, when I came into government and hired people that met all of those criteria, there were people who criticized me because I didn’t hire enough of the kind of the political types, the usual folks who come in and out of government when the the parties change hands. And instead I was just looking for very high quality people who could do the job extremely well. And I think now in this moment when we have this enormous crisis upon us and there are so many things that we need to do to serve people across the state, now is when you begin to see the quality that we have across our government and so I’m proud of that.

I’m not sure that’s something I learned about myself, but I wanted everybody to know that whatever work I’m doing, that is helpful to the people of Illinois really because we have terrific people in government doing the job.

* The Chicago Board of Elections sent out a letter today warning some people who voted at a local precinct that they might have come into contact with someone who had COVID. Was holding the primary during this crisis a good idea?…

Well let me begin by making sure everybody understands that the Governor of Illinois, whoever that may be and now it’s me, does not have the constitutional power to shut down an election.

So that’s number one. Number two, we relied upon the local election authorities and then back them up in this effort that they would have hand sanitizer PPE and all the things that would protect the people who were working in those facilities where people are voting. And if there were electronic screens and people were touching that those were being wiped down.

And lastly, as you know, for the several weeks before the election we thought that that was a much better way for people to vote to make sure they weren’t getting together, or to vote early, there are many fewer people who vote on each day of the 45 days of early voting before election day that allow people to go in and do it in a way that where they’re not around a lot of other people.

So, I, as far as I’m concerned when we look at the general election, we ought to be looking at allowing everybody in the state to vote by mail and making it easier for people to do that, so that we have fewer people that would want to show up on election day at a particular precinct.promoting heavily voting by mail.

* You and others routinely walk in wearing masks, then take them off to speak, the optimal time to project droplets on the lectern or others. Why wouldn’t people think the messages wear a mask until you speak to someone?…

First of all, we’re very careful when I come down to this room. I’m wearing a mask the entire time when I leave my home and come to work. I wear a mask, the entire time in the event that I would come in contact with others. And when we get to the lectern I think it’s important for people to see my face and for me to be able to project properly. We all know this is a single lectern we’re all touching it in various ways, you would see that none of us are touching our faces during the time that we’re speaking, and that we wipe down, you may not see this, but we wipe down this lectern and this microphone before everybody gets here and after we all leave. So we’re doing it I think in the safest possible way given all the circumstances.

* With all the attention paid to coronavirus, what has not gotten done over the last several weeks?…

Well, I think there is so much that we had intended to do and I could not possibly list everything. I will tell you this that I have a whiteboard that I keep in my office. I had made a list of all of the things that I thought we needed to accomplish big thing this spring and this year, including on the administrative level, improving our GRP systems across the state, making sure that we’re upgrading the workings of government, and legislatively, the important things that we all were talking about in January, leading up to a legislative session.

So I think it’s clear that that many of those things are not going to be able to get done this year. We’re going to try very hard to, but as you know, between the challenges of the budget and the challenges of trying to overcome something that is truly life threatening to everybody in the state of Illinois. It is likely that many things will have to be put off until next year.

* As of today, the number of COVID related deaths that US nursing homes has now surpassed 2600. Is the state planning any specific measures to stop the spread of Illinois long term care facilities?…

We’ve been working hard across the state from the very beginning to not only set standards for our own long term care facilities that the state runs including our veterans homes, but also for the privately run nursing homes to set protocols for them, make sure they’ve got the proper amount of PPE, and that they’re doing the following the you know the kind of the rulebook that we set up for them. It is very difficult in these congregate settings for there not to be some spread, that’s occurred, but I want you to know that very early on. I don’t know the exact date but about middle of March, we indeed I think earlier than that we shut down. Having visitors come into these facilities, we made sure that we were checking people on a medical basis who work at the facilities every day before their shift and doing everything that we could to keep the virus from getting into a facility and then if it showed up in a facility, first of all, getting the right medical attention for people, if they should need an outside medical attention. And then, if anybody has it inside a facility to separate them for people who don’t have it. So that’s been going on for some time now where are we in almost the middle of April and that was about the middle of March, which was, you know, very shortly after we all became acutely aware of what we needed to do as a state.

* What is your opinion of the new rules issued by the US Department of Labor for 1099 workers?…

You’re talking about the unemployment insurance for them. Look, I wish that they had a system that would allow each of the states to immediately stand up an unemployment benefit process for independent contractors, but they didn’t do that. And so each state is now struggling to put something up that will work for those independent contractors, we’re doing the same while simultaneously dealing with the hundreds of thousands of new Unemployment Claims coming in under the regular system, which was not built for what it is today where we’re doing multiples and multiples of unemployment applications than we ever have done before even now as we built up the system and it’s doing much better. So, you know, I wish the federal government had given us a system that we all could use in common, but that didn’t happen.

I’ll have more on this tomorrow, but it seems like the governor may not have been fully informed about what the USDOL actually did on Friday.

* What steps are you taking to plot out allowing non-essential businesses to reopen?…

Um, that’s a kindred question to one I got earlier and I’ll just say that I’ve been talking to business leaders, industry leaders, association leaders to try to figure out for example in various manufacturing, businesses, you know, how do you get your manufacturing process to a point where people can be socially distant from one another when maybe they weren’t doing that before? And I think that’s going to be industry by industry, maybe even company by company, something that needs to be worked on. So, this is going to be a little bit complex, you know, can’t just open everything up and say, ‘do what you like’ because we’ll have a big infection rate spike in the state. We want to make sure that we’re doing the best we can, we’re making real progress. I think this is a moment when everybody should be hopeful that that progress is going to lead to a downturn in the number of new infections per day, which leads to a bunch of other very positive outcomes.

* How are you going to be able to ramp up mail-in voting to a level that everyone in the state could participate if they wanted to?…

Well, we have the ability to do it. Remember that everybody has the right now to make an application. I think many people don’t know that. And I think we should make it even easier many other states have just made it mandatory that every voter gets an application to get a mail in ballot. And so that’s one way to do it. Another way to do it certainly would be to, to make it better known to have PSAs for example, to encourage people not to go in in-person and instead to use a mail ballot. But other states have done this, we would not be the first and we could follow the lead of, of those states in order to get a situation where we’re keeping people safe when they want to go vote. But shouldn’t be leaving their home. Thank you. Happy Easter.

Then again, the White House has rejected a bailout for the USPS, so that might not even be an option.

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Pritzker announces emotional support text line - New digital patient monitoring program - Virtual town hall for kids - Will hold brief presser tomorrow - Dr. Ezike: “Please cancel” Easter church services - Dr. Ezike: “We must endure with patience” - Addresses IDES backlog - Not satisfied with PPE supplies - Opines that Pekin country club should not reopen golf course - Recover rate numbers next week - Why aren’t people at the podium wearing masks? - Questioned about antibody tests, but no firm response - Ending stay at home orders “up to governors” - Yet another question about when and how it will end

Saturday, Apr 11, 2020 - Posted by Rich Miller

* From the governor’s press briefing today…

Although there are reasons to see hope and a lot of examples of people helping one another, all of which should lift us up. There are also circumstances that may cause you to feel despair. To find yourself swimming in the stress and uncertainty of it all.

First I want to say to all of you feel all of it. We are living in a deeply unprecedented moment and holding the emotional ramifications of that inside will only be harder on you. It’s okay to feel. And please know that you don’t have to feel it all alone.

I want you to know that we’re here to help. And here’s how

The Illinois Department of Human Services Mental Health Division has launched a free of charge, emotional support text line for Illinois experiencing stress related to COVID-19. Call for calm.

This isn’t a crisis hotline, but a source of support. Once a resident texts, the hotline. They receive a call from a caring counselor from a local community mental health center. Let them be a listening ear for the challenges that you are experiencing.

If you would like to speak with a mental health professional, you can text talk to 552020.

As always, please pardon all transcription errors.

…Adding… Click here to read the press release announcing these programs.

* More news…

Today I’m announcing a remote patient monitoring program specifically to serve those potentially infected with COVID-19 will be able to recover from the safety of their homes. Through this program health workers will digitally connect with you when you’re experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, but do not require an emergency or inpatient care.

Patients will receive daily virtual visits and receive wellness kits that include things like thermometers and oximeters blood pressure cuffs and alcohol wipes. This program serves to reduce barriers to physical health and mental health services in all communities and income levels, especially underserved communities, and those most at risk. During this pandemic. And because patients are served in their home. This program will also help limit the spread of the virus and safeguard hospitals from being overwhelmed by keeping those who can recover at home, staying at home.

* Virtual town hall for kids…

It’s important that we engage our children in these discussions and make sure that they know we’re thinking about them constantly. To begin to address this, I’m co-hosting a special event today with Lurie Children’s Hospital for children’s childhood resilience. The Illinois children’s mental health partnership and mikvah challenge at 5pm today I will be hosting a virtual town hall meeting for kids of all ages. It’s being hosted on Facebook Live at the Lurie children’s hospital’s Facebook page. I’ll repost the link on my Twitter and Facebook pages to help guide people to the site. I hope that kids from all across Illinois, will join us there.

Pritzker said he will hold a brief press conference tomorrow and Dr. Ezike will not be attending so she can have some time off with her family.

* Dr. Ezike…

Let me be clear, if there are churches that were planning to convene tomorrow, please cancel now. We can’t risk spreading the virus through this church congregation. We do have evidence of people who got sick through attending church, and other similar gatherings. Let’s not do that. […]

We have to stay the course. There’s no doubt that we will get through this pandemic, but it is a long marathon. We can’t grow tired of washing our hands. Despite the cabin fever, we still need to stay at home. We still have a long road ahead, and we must endure with patience until we get to the other side.

* On to questions for the governor. Do you know how many of these cases are requiring hospital care and do you see the curve flattening at all? [The governor and Dr. Ezike have been saying just this for days, by the way, so another weekend reporter asks another repetitive question. I really do not like these weekend pressers for that very reason.]…

So I will tell you a few things to watch in the numbers, and we’ll be talking about the hospitalization numbers and the ICU numbers again as we have each week.

But what we’re seeing is a flattening of the curve and what that means is a lower rise in hospitalizations than was originally anticipated. That’s a really good sign. Hospitalizations, ICU bed use and ventilators, are the most real way you can track the way that the the virus is moving, and what effect it’s having on our communities and whether it’s increasing exponentially arithmetically or otherwise. And what we’re seeing is a flattening of that same thing, when you talk about cases, and the death toll is these numbers will bounce around each day, and you’ve seen you know we’ve had higher numbers than we had today in previous days we’ve had lower numbers. But if you look at a kind of a moving average of days. You can see that the, the rate of ascent has significantly diminished. Again, it’s not flat, exactly. But, it’s not going up the way that it was before. So we’re pleased by that but but by no means do we think that that is determinative of what tomorrow will bring or the next week we’ll bring again as we look at other models of variety of models you can see different peaks and different moments in which we need to bring more or less resources to bear.

* Yet another question about when it will end. Short answer: Nobody knows yet.

* You mentioned earlier this week that you were looking at a third party vendor to help with the IDS website in order to help people get benefits faster and smoother. Has there been a vendor selected, are they Chicago or Illinois based and when will they start?…

Yes, yes, and they have already begun.

There are several things going on and when we talk about an IDES vendor, there are two things that we’re adjusting for, one is the massive numbers of people who are applying for unemployment in the traditional system. I mean, we’re talking about multiples of what has ever been applied for an IDES and so that’s something that the system just wasn’t ready to handle. And that’s why we brought in outside help, we did that, you know, very soon after it was clear that we were getting overwhelmed.

And we have more people answering phones and we have more people who are kind of keeping the system running. It has challenges, this is a 10 year old system that works fine if you have a normal number, normal range of applications on any given day. But when you have days when 100,000 people are trying to access the system makes it more difficult. So we brought in outside help, that’s one thing.

The other thing is this new program of unemployment for independent contractors, that’s something that never existed before and the federal government provided resources for that. Not for the building of the system necessarily, but for the independent contractors. We need to put that system up and in place, no state had anything like it because it didn’t exist ever before. We’re now building that system, again, with an outside vendor building it. We have a terrific team at our own department of innovation technology that’s working alongside them and making sure that as they stand it up that it will work properly for people here in Illinois.

* Satisfied with number of people wearing masks? [Most people at the podium are not wearing masks, by the way, and I have a question submitted about that]…

As I came out of my own home this morning, there were people walking along the street, I would say two thirds of the people that I saw were wearing a mask or a bandana or a scarf. And the other third we’re not, I want to encourage everybody to do so.

Pritzker, of course, lives in a very upscale neighborhood.

* What is the latest with PPE needs, ventilator needs, is the state caught up?…

Every day I asked the question you know if we have an unused something out there. Why is it unused and you know, when do we need, you know, do we need fewer of them or do we need more because the peak might be higher than we expect on the subject of PPE. Let me just say that we are going to continue to need more, even at the hospitals and everybody is being supplied properly for a roughly a seven to 10 day period, at a minimum for each hospital, and then behind them backing them up are their local county public health departments, which we’re supplying also so we’re supplying directly to hospitals, and we’re supplying the public health departments who can also give to the hospitals what they need, not to mention all the other institutions that may need them. And the first responders so we’re the backup system for everybody we’re also the direct deliver to many of them.

And I would say we’re in constant need we’re trying to acquire millions of pieces of PPE gowns and goggles and masks and everything else. And we’re going to continue to need that, but the flow seems to be coming. I can never say an adequate pace because I won’t feel like it’s adequate until we’re, you know we have big stores of it to back everybody up.

On the subject of ventilators, we have looked across all of our hospitals and in nearly every hospital, there is there is ventilator availability and certainly in every region. So if there ever is a hospital that might run out and use their last ventilator. There are ventilators within that region we watch that closely so that we might be able to move those ventilators around or the patients. So, we’re out in the market trying to acquire more ventilators, we don’t know exactly what we need what we know is that the range of models tend to tell us what to indicate to us that we don’t want to be wrong. And I’d rather have too many than too few I’d rather be wrong in that way. At the end, and just say, you know, we overestimated and we saved a lot of lives.

* The Pekin Country Club decided to open their golf course to members and many residents are concerned. Should they be shut down like golf courses across the state?…

Yeah, I would suggest that this is not a time to loosen up the standards that you’ve set under this COVID-19 crisis that we are just beginning to bend the curve here. This is a good sign. But this is not an indication that we should be letting up on those standards. We want to make sure that everybody is abiding by the stay at home rules that they’re in fact continuing even more so strenuously to follow the advice that’s being given by the CDC as suggested a mask for example, and not gathering in public places in in groups. So I would discourage people from using a golf course or from opening a golf course.

…Adding… More info on that development is here.

* With this new at home monitoring program will IDPH be able to report the recovery rate, what’s the best current estimate for the number of Illinois who have recovered from COVID…

Dr. Ezike: We did put out two different surveys, asking people to give if they were recovered seven days after their positive test, and then the first, first time that we sent out the survey I think we had a 48% recovered rate seven days post a positive test, and the second time we ran it it was 43 for the next reiteration which will we can do next week we’re going to extend it to have it 14 days after the positive test and we’ll be happy to extend and share that information as well.

* In Kentucky the governor ordered law enforcement to scan license plates of cars in church parking lots. In California, local authorities are allowing driving services,. Should churches in Illinois meet and driving parking lot style services?…

They should not. We’re recommending against that and I would suggest that this is just one holiday, it’s one time it’s one year, when I would ask people to do something that I know is unusual and uncommon for them, but it’s to please stay at home to if you’re going to attend services please attend them virtually online even telephonically, it’s much safer for you and just as importantly, it’s safer for the other parishioners for your neighbors your friends for your entire community.

* Shouldn’t everyone at the podium be wearing masks when they’re not speaking? [Only one person is wearing a mask]…

Thank you for asking that. We are all trying to be very careful to stay distant from one another. And it is not untrue that when you’re gathering in a group of people that everybody might want to wear a mask. It’s not a requirement, but I appreciate your pointing it out. I wear a mask coming from my office all the way here. As I’m leaving I put on my mask. I think all of us are doing the same. We want to protect each other in that regard. And so, I think it’s an excellent point and I just say it’s maybe an example to everybody else, or a point to make to everybody else that masks are a good idea wherever you may be among a group of people.

* Has the state purchased or received antibody tests? If so, how many is it administering? Are they being distributed to local health departments, and how soon until these tests will be widespread throughout the state to determine who has contracted the virus?…

Dr. Ezike: Thank you so, so again, to be clear, the current test that we’re using is to identify who has the virus now. But as we get, hopefully close to the peak and the plateau and hopefully start coming down off this curve. We have to be able to understand when we will be able to lessen some of the restrictions again.

Let’s be clear if we don’t know who is immune and we just open up the doors and we all head out that virus is still out there. And the people who have not contracted will still be at risk of contracting it, getting complications and dying. And so all that will happen is that we will have delayed people’s illness and complications and death. And so the idea is that we want to be able to identify what percentage of people in the community have actually had the infection maybe didn’t have a positive tests weren’t formally diagnosed, but have actually had the infection maybe they had mild symptoms to almost no symptoms and so it wasn’t recognized, but however have developed the antibodies which we think would be protective, and we think that when, when the person would not get the infection again.

And so, we are working on a very robust program we’ve, we’re working with some consultants and some university partners to try to get the antibody tests, and many are coming online we have one that’s approved now and then we’re waiting for additional tests have come online, because we are going to have to get hundreds of thousands, millions of tests in the state and have a very robust way to calculate and identify all the people that are tested so that we can identify the percentage of people in the state in various communities right from county to county community to community, what is the percentage of people who have been exposed to get at what would be as 10, essentially like the herd immunity. And so trying to figure out what percentage of people would need to have been exposed and have these antibodies and figure out if enough. If the communities actually have that requisite level of herd immunity, that, that is the important data that we need to collect in order to identify when we can start releasing restrictions and make sure that we’re not opening up the state, just to get further infection.

* The President said yesterday that he has to make a big decision about opening up the country. But isn’t that up to Governors?…

It is up to Governors. These are executive orders that have been put in place by governors, but it’s also maybe more importantly, up to the healthcare community and the scientists who advise us what the right thing to do is, and as Dr Ezike said it’s very important to recognize that if you just literally flung the doors open and said okay everybody head outside everything’s fine now, we would, what do you know head into exactly the kind of peeking that we’re, you know that had once more to a higher peak of people who are contracting COVID-19. So it’s very important for us to maintain, for the moment, the stay at home order to make sure that people are following it, that people are wearing masks, that they’re washing their hands doing all of these things for a period of time going forward, so that we can make sure that we’re coming down off of that peak.

And then this is the point about the prior question that I would like to reiterate, which is we do need to test for antibodies, because that’s part of the other side of this when we’re able to see a larger number of people who’ve had it and recovered who have antibodies will begin to end when you’ve got treatment, and you’ve got contact tracing along with testing on the front end. Those three three things, test, trace and treat, when we’ve got all three of those things going, that is the moment that we can begin to start to open things up.

And another question was asked about when and how the order will end. You can guess the answer since he’s said it a kabillion times already.