Thread by @BauerJournalism

Gov. JB Pritzker has his daily coronavirus update at 2:30 p.m. I'll live tweet.

Follow for updates and let me know if you have questions.

blockclubchicago.org/2020/11/23/cor…

Notable for people who like following this: Pritzker will not have updates Thursday and Friday.

Dr. Ngozi Ezike, head of the Illinois Department of Public Health: 8,322 new cases and 47 deaths from COVID-19.

Total of 664,620 confirmed cases and 11,552 dead.

Ezike: Let's lessen the burden on all our hospitals, and we can do this by not spreading infection over the holiday.

Pritzker: "It's no secret that the nation's current fiscal crisis is much worse than the Great Recession and more severe than anything we've seen in decades."

Pritzker: "... The 2020 recession has seen almost 3.5 times as many regular unemployment claims compared to the first 9 months of either 2008 or 2001 recessions, and it's not even close."

Pritzker: "IDES has been a rather small agency that had been slowly diminished over the last 2 decades ... but when the economic crisis came with the pandemic, IDES got to work. The department had to overhaul its website infrastructure, suit up an additional call center with ...

"hundreds of new agents, added chat bots and other features to its platform and launched a new callback system that entirely transformed the communication process for claimants. As a result, IDES has processed a historic number of claims since March, paying out over $17 ...

"billion in benefits to over 1.3 million individual statewide, more than 16 times the amount of benefits paid in the same period last year."

Pritzker: There are now more Illinoisans claiming extended unemployment than at any point in this pandemic. But programs from the feds expire the day after Christmas.

Pritzker: "I can't overstate the implications of this. Without assistance from Congress, five weeks from now, there will be no way to replace these benefits for the hundreds of thousands of Illinoisans impacted by" the pandemic.

Pritzker: "The clock is ticking." Without renewed action from Congress, millions of families will be plunged into far worse economic hardship than they're already facing — during the holidays and during the worst phase of this pandemic we've seen.

Pritzker: "We are extremely limited in our ability to alter unemployment programs, which are operated in partnership with the federal government. Only the federal government can produce the kind of stimulus we need in order to avoid disaster for many families here."

Pritzker :"Call your congressmen at 202-224-3121 and let them know you need them to stand up now and help working families across Illinois and across the nation."

Kristin Richards, acting director of IDES: "The unprecedented claims surge ... happened on top of a disinvested system." IDES handled more claims in the first 3 weeks of the pandemic than during all of 2019.

Richards: They've brought on additional permanent and contractural agents, raising their headcount by ~600%.

Richards: They brought back "dozens of highly-skilled retirees."

Richards: "... Our team is committed to finding new solutions for claimants."

Richards: At the outset of the pandemic, calls were answered on a randomized basis. They had 100 agents on the line. IDES received over 1.8 million incoming calls during its peak week in May.

Richards: "The system was unfair and unsustainable, and claimants needed something better." On July 9, IDES implemented the callback-only model. You call once and an IDES expert calls back on a first-in, first-out basis.

Richards: Our certification queue is now able to help more claimants, which dramatically lowers our outstanding calls.

Richards: In many cases, claimants can hear from us within 1-2 weeks or less.

Richards: IDES is experiencing fraud on a scale it's never seen before. It's an issue not unique to Illinois.

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul: "Just as we saw scammers attempt to take advantage of people by way of price gouging on PPE or peddling phony coronavirus treatments, tests and/or cures, we are now seeing widespread fraud aimed at taking advantage of the economic ...

"uncertainty the pandemic has caused. Since July, my office has received nearly 850 written consumer complaints and approximately 4,000 calls to our hotlines about unemployment insurance fraud."

Raoul: He also received a phony debit card. If you got one, it unfortunately likely means an identity thief applied for benefits using your name and/or social security number.

Raoul: Investigations can take time, and people need to act to protect their personal financial information now. Keep a close eye on your credit reports and financial statements.

Raoul: You should obtain your free credit reports. Report any unauthorized accounts or inaccurate information to credit reporting agencies.

Pritzker on why briefing is virtual: He asked everyone to start working at home if possible, so his office is working from home.

Pritzker on beds going from McCormick to other places: "Quite a number of beds were made available to use and we've provided them wherever they might be needed." But for many hospitals, it's more about staffing being limited rather than physical beds.

Ezike on monoclonal antibodies : The government has already provided Illinois about 8,500 doses. There are teams working right now to discuss the equitable distribution "of this very important resource." It's for high-risk people, older people, etc.

Ezike: "I have been trying to use that [harm reduction]. ... The truth is, I always give the safest methods to proceed and then, for people who are not gonna follow that, at least I try to give the 'harm reduction strategy.'"

Ezike: "Yes, I think we're trying to utilize that harm reduction principle."

Pritzker: Because we're the third-largest testing state in the country, it's difficult to significantly ramp up testing at a faster pace than we already are. "... I want to make tests available wherever and whenever they're needed. There has been a significant uptick in ...

"interest in getting tests just before Thanksgiving. So we've seen those long lines. Having said that, we continue to use our antigen testing on top of our PCR testing. We've tried to expand the number of lanes in the three testing drive-thru facilities that we've made ...

"available. And we continue to look for the expansion of our saliva testing. But I have to say, there is just a physical limit to the number of tests that can be done at this moment, and we're running up near the limits of that."

Ezike: No known cases in Illinois of documented re-infection, but across the country there have been "clear cases." It's not considered re-infection unless it's 90+ days outside the initial infection (among other things).

Ezike: "We have many connections of additional cases from weddings, from other large gatherings, which is the reason we are trying to just limit gatherings. That Sturgis bike rally is said to be connected to many, many, many thousands of cases by extension. It may not be that ...

"even a single person in Illinois was there, but through many people from many states were there who could have come back ... ." A single wedding in Maine resulted in 170 cases and 17 deaths. None of the individuals who died were at the wedding. "There's this extending effect ...

"where you can hurt people way downstream that you don't even know."

Pritzker: "We've put in place the preparations. Indeed, we're concerned, deeply concerned, about the rising number of infections and" of hospitalizations and deaths. "What we've done is make sure that we're doing everything we can to limit the spread with mitigations. We've ...

"been working with the hospitals to make sure they have whatever they may need to prepare for this uptick. I am concerned that people are not following the mitigations. I even saw a story about a mayor here in Illinois who flew to a wedding in Florida, didn't wear a mask at ...

"the wedding, had more than 50 people at the wedding and that's the kind of thing — that's precisely what we ask people not to do. So I'm concerned about people just thinking this doesn't affect them and, of course, it does, and we're going to see the effect of that after the ...

"Thanksgiving holiday. And I hope we are prepared." To prepare, follow mitigations: Follow the rules, wear your mask, keep distant.

Ezike: "Thanksgiving hasn't happened yet. People can still change their plans and change the outcome. We don't have to have superspreader events...

"throughout our state and throughout the country and then bring it back. Please, rethink your plans."

Pritzker: They don't need to make special demands of the IDVA director. She's concerned. "These infections, we have had very strong controls that have been put in place not just in our veterans homes that we've asked," but all long-term career facilities.

Pritzker: "You can't do that 100%. And the fact is even though we are testing very regularly the staff in facilities and testing everyone in a facility if there is even the smallest outbreak, even though you do that, the fact is when there is massive, widespread community ...

"spread, there's no way to keep it out of every facility. There just isn't. There are people who are asymptomatic who work at the facility, even though they might get tested, they might have COVID the next day or two days later ... and they can bring it in with them ...

"asymptomatically. Just getting two residents sick has the potential to spread to a larger, much larger number of people." They sent an infection control team to LaSalle. "There is no way to keep this out of every facility ... ."

Pritzker: "One of the big concerns that I have is making sure that we do this with an equity lens, and that includes not only people of color but rural communities, places that often are left out and left behind, forgotten. I want them to be significantly considered for the ...

"near term possibility of getting the vaccine. But this vaccine is gonna roll out over quite a number of months. We're not really gonna see the vaccine coming to the general public until perhaps March or April at the earliest. So the first rounds of it will go to health care ...

"workers and frontline workers, epople who are exposed to it potentially on a daily basis, and our senior citizens in long-term care facilities."

Ezike: That Phase 1A, that first group, will be health care workers — or, rather, hospital workers. It'll include sanitation ...

engineers, people who turn the bed over, etc. "A lot of those people in those jobs are our Black and Brown communities. We are going to make sure they are included in that first Phase 1A, but, of course, the governor has always been committed to equity."

Richards: If an individual has received a UI finding letter or a debit card and they haven't applied for unemployment, that's a sign they've been a victim of fraud.

Raoul: This is an ongoing investigation into these schemes. "As investigations do, it takes time for us to get to the bottom of these things."

Pritzker on lack of exposure warning app: "The University of Illinois has developed an app that they use on campus. There are apps that have been tried in other states. One of the challenges — we've looked at them. I don't want you to think we're ignorant to the idea we might ...

"use them. One of the challenges with them is there is potential for breaches of people's privacy. So we're concerned about that. Secondly, the adoption rate in other places of these has been relatively lower. I've seen adoption rates of 17 and 20%. Which is OK, but it doesn't...

"get you what you're really looking for in terms of sort of instant access to people who need to be contact traced. It's not to say there isn't any use for it." But he's been wary of it.

Ezike: It's something we're still looking at. Not out of the realm of possibility.

Pritzker: We've stood up a whole bunch of programs to support people who live in their communities. But if they choose not to go after local CURE dollars, obviously there are other ways in which the state continues to fund cities/counties.

Richards: We are, by and large, able to stop most fraudulent claims before they are paid. The state will continue to partner with various offices to work on recouping any stolen dollars.

Pritzker: "The fact is that many of the other indicators are lagging indicators, so you're right to focus on the cases and hospitalizations. I don't want to predict. I can't predict, I must say. What I can tell you is the recent moderation in the number of cases and positivity...

"rate certainly is good news. I think it is an effect that comes from the previous mitigations we put in place. We had Tier 2 and Tier 1 mitigations." The Tier 3 mitigations went into effect just days ago "probably have not born the fruit yet that we want to see. So I think ...

"that's good news. I think potentially counteracting that, though, is ... if people are not going to follow the mitigations when they're having their Thanksgiving, they're potentially gonna have more infections. I'm hoping that the work we're doing through Tier 3 mitigations ...

"and other people following them will perhaps offset those numbers. Look, what I really am hopeful for is that people follow the mitigations over this coming week and the weeks subsequent ... . Yes, the numbers have come down, but they're still double-digit numbers, these ...

"positivity numbers .... . We have to bring these numbers down. We have a lot of work to do. This is gonna take weeks, not days. But is there a glimmer of hope? There is. And I'm always looking for that glimmer of hope."

Ezike: The state's website has started including hospitalization staff number in its capacity data, and we have seen capacity go down.

Press conference over.

blockclubchicago.org/2020/11/23/cor…