* Gov. JB Pritzker began his briefing today urging Illinoisans to fill out their Census forms online. He then went on to plug the state’s Call for Calm hotline. The governor also singled out several local groups to praise them for stepping up during the crisis. “Today marks the last day of National Volunteer Week,” the governor said. “And I want to honor the thousands of volunteers across the state,” including Kimee Armour of Auburn, who was profiled in the SJ-R yesterday.

Dr. Ezike…

Following the governor’s charge to make sure that we have more and more testing in the state of Illinois, Riverside Healthcare has stepped up and is offering free COVID-19 testing to residents of Pembroke township in Kankakee County on Tuesday, April 28, and Sun River Terrace on Friday, May 1.

Pembroke township and sun river terrace residents can contact Riverside healthcare to make an appointment and get themselves tested.

Remember to pardon all transcription errors.

* And then Ezike went on to say this…

I hate to have to do this, but I’d like to address some of the myths, rumors and general misinformation about how to protect yourself from COVID-19 injecting, ingesting, snorting household cleaners is dangerous. It is not advised and can be deadly.

In the past two days there’s been a significant increase in calls to the Illinois Poison Center, compared to this same time last year, associated with exposures to cleaning agents. Some recent examples include the use of a detergent solution for a sinus rinse and gargling with a bleach and mouthwash mouthwash mixture in an attempt to kill coronavirus. […]

Please do not try home remedies that involve ingesting cleaners or disinfectants.

* Hospitalization and testing numbers…

As of midnight, 4699 individuals were hospitalized with COVID-19. Of those roughly a quarter or 1244 patients were in the ICU, and of those in the ICU there were 763 who were on ventilators. […]

Over the last 24 hours we ran 11,985 tests. We have been ramping up testing. This will allow us to make more informed decisions moving forward. So for now, let’s continue to join together, not literally, of course, and follow the science that shows that social distancing or physical distancing does work.

* On to questions for the governor and Dr. Ezike. The first one is based on a couple of rumors: We received a tip today that a nurse at UIC hospital has died from COVID-19 complications and that another nurse is now in the ICU who works there. Also, the tipster said that 35% of hospital staff inside UIC has tested positive. Have you heard anything about the situation?…

Dr. Ezike: I don’t know about these recent developments that you shared. My heart is going out to the family of those who have recently lost their struggle, especially people who have put their lives, to try to save others. We know that we’ve had thousands of healthcare workers who are among the positives and we’ve had deaths in our healthcare workforce.

It’s a sad and sobering truth that the people who are doing the most to protect the society as a whole are also falling victim, and so we think we thank them and we also be praying for the family members who are going to be affected by this loss as well as the whole medical community.

* A patient at alexian brothers Medical Center, I believe it’s Hoffman estates. We were told that he was part of a new trial of the convalescent plasma therapy and that the doctor said that he really had a big turnaround. What are your thoughts at this point on using plasma as a potential treatment and if that goes well, how would we implement something like that on a broad level?…

I think all of us are just hoping that we can find a cure sooner rather than later. We know that that will help limit the amount of lives lost, the morbidity, so we’re supportive of all the trials that are going on whether it’s IV medicines, oral medicines or whether it’s going to involve plasma and the antibodies from people. So, again we have recommended and we still recommend that people go to a blood center. If people who feel that they had the disease or maybe confirm that they have this disease, if they can go to a blood donation center and are willing to donate their blood that will help more studies and more research to be done on on their on the plasma to see if these antibodies can be an important part of our treatment arsenal.

* The Illinois Business Alliance is urging you to pull the graduated income tax off the November ballot saying that, you know, businesses being shut down now that once they’re allowed to reopen they’ve been hit so hard that implementing that graduated tax would hurt them even more. What are your thoughts on that? [That group is not an established organization, by the way.]…

They don’t fully understand how income taxes work. You only pay income taxes based upon getting net income. And so it is certainly true that people have much lower net income this year as a result of the economic challenge that COVID-19 has brought to everybody. Companies included. And so, that’s my response. People are not, you know people who are either going to break even or lose money this year won’t pay any income tax and people who make less than they would normally would pay a lower income tax. And then I finally would say that actually I think as I said before now more than ever, we need to have a fair tax system for the state of Illinois.

* Yet another question about summer activities and sports…

I’m anxious to find out the answers to those things, but those answers just aren’t clear yet. And I know that everybody would like a definitive answer. Believe me I wish I had one, even if I brought the two doctors behind me, and others here I don’t think that they could fully answer that question. But I’m working very hard to try to move us forward with testing and contact tracing so that we can begin to open things up.

* We had heard some people wanting clarification on the boating, that’s going to be allowed starting May 1, two people per vessel, people were wondering. Is that two unrelated people what if it’s say husband wife and kids that all live in the same home, can there be more than two people in the boat if they are direct family members?…

[He answered and then went back to clarify.] It is restricted to two people per boat You can’t have five people or 10 people in a boat. It is restricted to two, but not necessarily restricted as to whether they’re related to one another.

* A very long question about drive-in movie theaters…

Dr. Ezike: We’re still looking at that. I actually have been thinking about that and we’re trying to find ways that people can get some level of normalcy back. We know that the hardship that this really necessary measure, and the extension of it, what it has done to people. So we’re working really hard trying to think through, trying to take creative solutions in terms of how we can make things available to people without putting additional people at risk and so we’re not actually done thinking about tha,t because potentially there is a way to do this, you know maybe with no concession stands, nobody coming up to the window. So I’m really still trying to think about that and really trying to see how we can make people have a little bit of the comforts that they’re used to while keeping everyone safe.

* The Illinois State dental society has sent you a letter asking to be considered an essential business. Since you need a dental exam before some elective surgeries are you considering letting them reopen?…

We actually never closed dentists or doctors offices in the EO. They have the ability to operate but, I know that many dentists have chosen not to open because the challenge, as I understand, having talked to a dentist about this is that the aerosolization of someone’s saliva when they’re being worked on makes it very difficult to protect the dentist and therefore, many dentists have just been open only for emergency dentistry.

* On May 1 you’ll allow Illinois to fish classical open golf courses, does that mean parts of the lakefront will reopen, can voters use Lake Michigan and can people golf at Waveland?…

That entirely will be up to the city of Chicago, to the mayor.

* Greg Bishop says a memo to the appellate prosecutor says their deputy director says is less than confident in your order to close businesses, block church services and other restrictions without legal muster. [That’s actually not true. The letter was simply telling state’s attorneys what they might expect in lawsuits. I’ll get to it tomorrow.] Are these restrictions and the coming orders things you’ll enforce with criminal penalties or are these guidelines?…

Well they’re part of an executive order, they are enforceable although as you have heard me say time and time again, Greg. I have suggested that people should simply self police and that certainly law enforcement officers have the ability, and I would encourage them to remind people of what their obligations are

* Under what circumstances would you consider a county by county or regional approach to reopening?…

Remember, the coronavirus does not have boundaries that it follows. So, therefore, this idea of saying county by county isn’t a, it’s a sort of a false narrative.

Instead what I would say is that infection rates, how fast is the virus moving, what’s the doubling time, these are all things that need to be looked at because you could have a sparsely populated county where infections are doubling very frequently and in fact there are in Illinois infection rates in certain counties that are at a higher rate than in urban areas of the state.

So I just want to keep people safe, obviously when we look at you look at what we did with regard to elective surgeries. It’s going to be more available in some areas than others based upon hospital bed availability, because what we don’t want to do is fill hospital beds with elective surgeries and find out that there’s an outbreak that you can’t manage because there are no hospital beds or ICU beds available so we’re trying to manage all those things.

But I absolutely recognize the difference between rural areas and the number of infections that are happening there versus urban areas. But again,this virus knows no boundaries, it isn’t saying to itself ‘I’m going to go after people in an urban area,’ it simply can get transmitted anywhere.

* William Bryan at the Department of Homeland Security pointed to a new study that heat, humidity and sunlight could considerably shortened the viruses half life. Have you given some thought as to how that could help congregate settings?…

Dr. Ezike: We’re trying to find out as much as we can about this novel virus and so as we learn more that will play into some of the rules or restrictions that we promote.

I also want to add just for our testing sites. We are in attempt to liberalize and in appreciating the the new information that’s been coming up with COVID-19, we also are trying to identify people who are in that pre symptomatic or asymptomatic phase. So if someone is an especially high risk environment where they’re a healthcare worker or they work in a nursing home, and we know that they have been exposed, we are trying to get those people tested as well so we really want to promote testing. We’re trying to ramp up our capacity as much as possible, so that we can offer testing to as many people as possible and see if we can catch people who are in those high risk settings, even before they start manifesting symptoms

* Is the state pursuing more than the 15 initial Abbott rapid testing machines we got several weeks ago or any other quick test to be deployed for staff at more congregate care facilities? What can they do to mitigate false negatives from those rapid tests. Would you recommend having staff arrive extra early to a shift at a prison or a DHS facility and have them do multiple tests just to be sure?…

There’s nothing we can do to mitigate the false negatives or false positives, so that’s a challenge.

I would also point out that we were given very few of the testing supplies that are necessary which are unique for the Abbott rapid test. So it makes it more difficult to use those machines, even though we got 15 of them, they’re difficult for us to really operate because we don’t have the supplies which are unusual as compared to the other less rapid testing. But there are other companies I might add like Sufyan that I understand have rapid testing capability we were not given those by the federal government. And so, you know, we’re going to look into all of those but what we try to do whenever we get some new fangled tests that gets proposed and and in this case, the Abbott test is we try to verify the test on our own by doing a test through the Abbott machine, and then doing one through our normal methodologies, the swab of that’s taken the specimen doing running in two different ways so that we can verify the test that obviously would negate the speed of a rapid test. But, we want to make sure that we get the proper number of of positive and negative, or the proper results rather of positives and negatives.

And by the way, running it twice through the same machine does not actually help. If you have a low positive or very low verification level. So that’s a challenge but, but, you know, but we certainly want to be able to rapid test people. And we certainly want to be able to use those machines to keep people safe, especially in those healthcare environments that you’re referring to.

* Is the withdrawal of the workers compensation emergency rule an acknowledgement that the workers compensation commission did overstep its rulemaking authority?…

No. I think what they are now looking to do is to simply revisit it and see what they can do, what they feel like you know is appropriate, and then they intend to reissue an order, but I don’t know the timing of that or what the results of that would be.

* Your expert spokesperson earlier this week said quote we don’t watch the President’s press conferences because they are not a source of factual information. Yesterday you said, what the President suggested yesterday is dangerous and he clearly wasn’t making any facial expressions and made it appear that he wasn’t joking in any way. How do you reconcile those statements. Are you actually watching Trump’s press briefings or aren’t you?…

You know I do watch the news, however. And so as you know they clip parts of the press conference and play them on the news.

* We reported yesterday on an outbreak at a Madison County long term care facility that has killed 12 and infected 54 people so far. The public had not been informed before yesterday afternoon and local officials did not make themselves available to answer questions. Should Madison County and others do more to let the public know sooner about outbreaks?…

I’ll just say that that it is true that the local County Department of Public Health is responsible for gathering information, reporting that information. The local nursing home is the first line of communication, however they are the ones who are required to let family members know.

And so I would be, I am surprised to learn if that’s the case that they did not notify family members that there was coronavirus in the facility.

Dr. Ezike: First and foremost, I think the role of, as the governor mentioned, is that we want the people in the facility to be taking care of the patients. So they were trying to have them take care of the patients. We know that even in the long term care facilities, their work force has been decimated or, more in terms of people falling ill, and so they’re trying to take care of the residents with fewer people.

But they do understand and it’s that they have to report to the family members what is going on that there’s a COVID case in the facility that their loved one has COVID. Sometimes I’ve run into that, where people have had us follow up on certain situations where you know there’s, there might be a next of kin that is identified that might not be every member of the family. And so sometimes you’ll have other members of the family that say they were not notified but maybe they weren’t the one designated.

But in terms of the first contact between a nursing home that’s experiencing an outbreak would be with their local health department and this is not an excuse, but we have to know that public health has not been seen as a priority. And so many of these public health departments at the local level, even at the state level, don’t have the full breadth of resources that they have for a pandemic, for sure. And so as the local health departments are assisting and doing what they can to support the nursing homes, their first priority is to try to give the nursing homes the support that they need. And then finally, they do have to report, through our electronic reporting system they need to put information in through the databases so that we at the state have that information. But again, you can imagine the normal process is that after you know an outbreak is over, then you’re updating all the information on the website. So, given how stretched every one of the local health departments arem even at the state level we’re completely stretched. We know that if between taking care of an acute outbreak, and then putting the information in, there might be a lag. And so I think people have to be patient and understand that people are caring for people, the reporting will happen but there definitely will be a lag. And in terms of at the state level, our information is only updated once a week so if we do get it and depending on where in the week that information came in, it might be another few days before it’s updated on our website. As we can’t spend all of our time with that part because we have so much that we are trying to do to actually affect all the different parts of this pandemic disease.

* Some hairdressers have been messaging clients offering to do house calls. Does this fit within the spirit of the stay at home order as it stands to the end of May?…

No.

* Governor Andrew Cuomo is signing an executive order to allow independent pharmacies across New York to become collection points for Cova tests. Any chance that could happen here?…

It’s possible. I think we want to make sure that we’ve got enough testing and swabs and specimen collection for that to be something useful, but absolutely possible for us to make that you know independent pharmacies a place where, you know, a vial of with a specimen is dropped off for, for sending I think that’s what’s being suggested off to a commercial lab

* Chicago-based Potbelly just said they are giving back stimulus money through the PPP program. Should other public companies in Illinois and elsewhere do the same, what is the state doing from a small for small businesses that have not seen PPP money yet?…

Yeah. So first of all I think companies that don’t need the PPP money should not accept it. And so I would encourage companies that don’t need it in order to keep their operations or their employees paid and on payroll or their operations going, that those entities, I think, should, that they have an obligation here as to what we’re doing.

It’s true that the Federal PPP program has been very difficult for small businesses to access and I frankly I’m very concerned about that. That’s something I’ve spoken with our federal representatives about, because it is really the small businesses in our state that create most of the jobs. And we want to make sure we support them.

And so at the state level we diverted we took $90 million at the Department of Commerce and made that available through programs to support in grants, not loans, but grants to companies across the small companies, small businesses across the state.

It’s not enough. I mean there’s no way that the state can do what the federal government can do, and that’s why those federal programs are so important. It’s why it’s important for the federal government to fund the state, because we know better than the federal government apparently, that small businesses under, you know 200 employees that don’t have an accountant and don’t have a lawyer on staff and so on, you know, to go get it that federal PPP money, those are the ones we need to preserve, right the ones under 200 are a very very important part of our economy. And so I am very focused on trying to keep those small businesses alive and support them and want to do it with state programs. And I’m going to be talking to the legislature, our legislature about implementing a program that will support them, small businesses but I also think the federal government needs to step up to the plate here.

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