Illinois On 'Dark Path' As Coronavirus Rate Surges, Pritzker Says

CHICAGO — Gov. J.B. Pritzker warned that Illinois is "headed down a dark, dark path" if local governments, businesses and residents fail to take steps to curb the increasing community spread of the coronavirus across the state.

Without changes to current trends, the governor said, the state is trending toward a return to restrictions on non-essential businesses he ordered ahead of its spring peak in coronavirus infections. Even with indoor dining now banned across every region the state, infections are continuing to rise.

"We're looking for the curve to bend," Pritzker said. "Right now, it's in a linear fashion, heading up."

At a news conference Thursday, Pritzker said the number of patients with COVID-19 in the state's hospitals rose by more than 120 percent last month, and positivity rates are now in double digits in each of the state's 11 Restore Illinois coronavirus mitigation regions.

Regional positivity rates range from a low of 10 percent in Region 6 in East Central Illinois — when excluding the University of Illinois' comprehensive saliva testing program — to a high of 15.8 percent in Region 1 in northwest Illinois, according to the latest rolling averages from the Illinois Department of Public Health.

"In some areas of our state, that will mean that you'll run out of hospital beds, and nurses and doctors who can treat you," Pritzker said. "If the current trajectory continues, if our hospitals continue to fill up, if more and more people continue to lose their lives to this disease, we're going to implement further statewide mitigations, which nobody — and I mean nobody — wants."

Pritzker was asked how soon the state could run out of hospital beds, which regions the administration is worried about and whether state officials planned to build any alternate care facilities. The governor did not answer directly, instead pointing to the hospitalization metrics on the state's website.

Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike warned that travelling, inviting people over or attending crowded events during the upcoming holiday season is risky.

"There is significant potential for harm and death, let's be very plain," Ezike said. "And it's not just to yourself — for the people who feel nothing could ever happen to them — but it's to other members of your family, and other people that you may not even know, that you could unwittingly spread the virus to."

Ezike said several of the latest deaths reported by public health officials were under the age of 60. The 97 deaths linked to COVID-19 reported Thursday included a Cook County man in his 20s, a McClean County woman in her 30s, a Madison County woman in her 40s and four people in their 50s. The state's death toll from the pandemic stands at 10,030.

"Ultimately the decision to travel or to have an event or to have a large Thanksgiving feast is yours to make," Ezike said. "But I want to make sure that you can't say you didn't have all the information and the knowledge that COVID-19 in a serious disease. It's led to millions of hospitalizations and hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide."

Pritzker suggested local governments are not doing enough to enforce his administration's public health mandates to reduce rates of community transmission across the state.

"The only way that's going to happen is if mayors and City Councils and county boards across this state stand up and say, 'This needs to change,'" he said. "Far too many local governments across this state are failing to enforce any mitigation measures, allowing this continued rise in positivity to balloon out of control."

Some local elected officials have refused to take enforcement actions against restaurants that defy the governor's ban on indoor service at bars and restaurants. Some restaurant owners have sued over restrictions on indoor dining.

"It's time to take some responsibility," Pritzker said. "It's the only way we will get out of this without having to implement more and more restrictions across more industries and across the entire state. Because frankly, I can tell you these numbers are drastically increasing, and I can tell you until I'm blue in the face, but if local leaders don't step up, if high-risk industries don't act accordingly, if families don't put off that gathering or dinner party, if people don't wear a mask, we're heading down a very dark, dark path toward where were last spring."

Local authorities who are failing to enforce coronavirus mitigations are "moving the state backwards," the governor said, "which is bad for every industry and bad for every individual in the state, frankly — other than it's going to bring down these metrics and these positivity rates and cases, which will be good for everybody. But if you want to keep the economy moving forward, they ought to go enforce the mitigations that we put in place."

Pritzker warned local officials who refuse to enforce indoor dining bans, gathering size limits and mask mandates would be responsible for people's deaths.

"They're supposed to enforce state law. That is their job," he said. "And when they don't enforce them, people die."