* From Jeff Berkowitz’s recent interview with Republican gubernatorial candidate Paul Schimpf…

Schimpf: But the other mistake that Governor Pritzker made - and this goes back to the idea that we should have been focusing on either protecting our most vulnerable population and then also making sure that our medical capacity was not overwhelmed - is he used the positivity rate as his metric for deciding whether or not areas were going to be reopened, or whether they were going to have to shut down again. And the positivity rate should not have been the metric that we were using.

Berkowitz: What metric would you have used knowing what you knew in April of 2020?

Schimpf: I would say we needed to focus on the hospitalization rate. How are the are the number of people that are being hospitalized, is that increasing? […]

Berkowitz: And knowing what you knew then, not what you know, when do you suppose you would have made that decision to start relaxing as well started opening?

Schimpf: I wrote that letter and signed that letter in the middle of April.

Schimpf was referring to a letter that he and other Senate Republicans sent Gov. Pritzker on April 15 of last year.

* The claim about the importance of the positivity rate vs. hospitalizations is historically inaccurate. Here’s Dr. Ezike [it actually may have been Gov. Pritzker, but I’d need to go back and listen to make sure] on April 14 of last year…

Perhaps the most accurate leading indicator of our progress is our hospitalization data. Right now, if someone is sick enough with a respiratory illness to need hospital care, then it’s likely that that person has COVID-19, whether or not they have been tested.

On April 6, the number of known COVID patients and suspected COVID patients totaled 3680. On April 10, that number was 4020. On April 11, it was 4104. On April 12 4091. As of today, it was 4283.

Hospitalizations peaked last spring on April 28 at 5,027. Hospitalizations didn’t drop below 4,000 until May 21. They didn’t drop below 3,000 until June 4th - 53 days after Schimpf would’ve let off the brakes.

In other words, Schimpf would’ve eased up on mitigations while his supposedly most important metric was still rapidly increasing and at the tail end of an enormous spike. That clearly would not have ended well.

By the way, IDPH didn’t even include the positivity rate in press releases by mid-April last year (I found that above Ezike/Pritzker quote while looking through media briefing transcripts). I checked with the governor’s office this morning and was told the 7-day average positivity rate last April 15 was 22.7 percent.

So, skyrocketing hospitalizations, huge positivity rate (albeit with low testing numbers) and yet, let’s open it up.

Wonderful.