'Truly alarming': Officials order shutdown over virus spike

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By Dan Petrella and Gregory Pratt 
 CHICAGO — With neighboring Indiana and other states pausing their reopening plans or even moving backward as new cases of the coronavirus surge, officials in Chicago and Illinois said Wednesday they have no plans to alter loosened rules that took effect statewide last week.
 When Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced his “Restore Illinois” reopening plan in early May, he acknowledged that surges in hospitalizations or the percentage of people testing positive, or shortages of intensive-care unit beds or ventilators could lead him to tighten restrictions once again.
 Pritzker spokeswoman Jordan Abudayyeh said in a statement Wednesday that the governor and medical experts at the Illinois Department of Public Health are watching the data closely to see whether the looser restrictions in the new phase have any effect on the state’s health care system.
 “The governor has been clear that he will follow the guidance of medical experts and if they advise reinstituting previous mitigations he will not hesitate to do so,” Abudayyeh said.
 Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the city tracks its data closely and will “not hesitate” to take action if they see an upward swing.
 But, she said during an unrelated news conference, Chicago is in a good position right now.
 “Every single day, we look at a very specific set of public health metrics. We look at hospitalizations. We look at ICU beds. We look at number of people on ventilators. We look at the amount of testing we’re doing,% positivity,” Lightfoot said.
 “These are the metrics we’ve now been talking about for weeks, and what we see in Chicago, and I can’t account for the rest of Illinois, is we continue to be on a downward trajectory day over day, week over week,” she said.
 “If we weren’t,” Lightfoot added, “we wouldn’t be opening up. Now we’re looking at this literally every single day, multiple times a day. If we see that we’re heading in the wrong direction, I’m not going to hesitate to take action.”
 As the pandemic nears the start of its fifth month, state officials on Wednesday announced 828 new confirmed cases of COVID-19, bringing the statewide total to 144,013 since the outbreak began. With 30 additional fatalities also announced, the death toll stands at 6,951, officials said.
 The seven-day rolling average of new cases, which officials look at to smooth out day-to-day fluctuations in the numbers, was 782 as of Wednesday, according to an analysis of Department of Public Health data. That figure has been trending upward from a low point of 596 cases on June 18, but it remains well below the high point of 2,565 average daily cases on May 4 and 7.
 The number of newly confirmed cases is largely a function of how many people are being tested for the coronavirus, and the state has vastly expanded its testing capacity since the early days of the pandemic. When cases were peaking in early May, fewer than 20,000 people were being tested per day on average. Over the past seven days, the average has been nearly 30,000 per day.
 Even as newly confirmed cases have ticked up over the past two weeks, the percentage of tests returning positive results — known as the positivity rate — has remained relatively stable, with the seven-day rolling average hovering between 2% and 3% statewide.
 The state entered on Friday phase four of the plan, which allows restaurants and bars to open for limited indoor seating and in-person instruction to resume at schools in the fall, among other changes.
 During her news conference, Lightfoot took exception to the question about the possibility of the state going backward, accusing reporters of scaring people.
 “You can see this for yourself, real time, every day, just educate yourself and ask the right questions. The information is right there. … It’s not hard to figure out,” Lightfoot said. “But whipping people into a frenzy over speculation about other places when you’re not bothering to actually look at the data in Chicago, that’s not helpful.”
 Asked last week about states that were seeing surges of new cases, Pritzker said those states had “opened things up completely or done it in a not measured fashion.”
 “Of course when I look at states that are moving backward and at such a rapid pace, I always think, are we doing this right, are we handling this right, are we measured in our reopening? And I think we are measured in this reopening, we’re being careful,” Pritzker said.
 “You can’t turn on the television and see what’s happening in Arizona, Florida, Texas, South Carolina, etc., and not ask questions — are we getting it right?”
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 PHOTO (for help with images, contact 312-222-4194): Lightfoot and Pritzker

Illinois, Chicago officials watching COVID-19 metrics but say they have no plans to tighten restrictions