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/2020/12/02/cor…

Pritzker: "Today marks a solemn milestone, with 238 lives lost to COVID-19 reported in the last 24 hours. We have far surpassed our previous single-day high report of 191 fatalities in mid-May." It's likely some are from a data lag from the holiday weekend, but we also know ...

"higher case numbers and hospitalizations "do lead to, tragically, even more lives lost. And we've surpassed the spring records by the thousands in recent weeks."

Pritzker: "This pandemic stole someone from your lives too soon."

Pritzker: "This virus is a killer. Let's honor those it has taken by doing everything we can to prevent more people getting sick and dying. Wear your mask. Keep your distance. Stay home whenever you can. We'll get through this."

Pritzker: Let's honor health care workers, including housekeeping workers, administrative staff, etc.

Pritzker highlighted various health care workers who aren't doctors/nurses but who have saved lives and protected people from becoming ill.

Dr. Ngozi Ezike, head of the Illinois Department of Public Health: "Dr. Fauci said toward the beginning of this pandemic the truth opposing force to the coronavirus was us."

Ezike: "But recently, he said there's a new opposing force to this deadly virus, and that is the vaccine. Outbreaks of diseases like polio, like smallpox, measles, those have been eradicated due to vaccines. Vaccines are the best invention in medicine of the 20th century."

Ezike: Wash your hands, wear your mask, keep your distance. Those mitigation measures work.

Ezike: "Let's not make this holiday season anyone's last holiday season. Let's stay the course and fight for everyone's life. ... Let's make the holidays less harrowing, not just for the people who might end up sick and in the hospital with COVID or non-COVID illnesses, but ...

"also for the staff that will tend to all those COVID as well as non-COVID patients. ... We've already lost too many lives. Yes, we've lost our normalcy, but we shouldn't lose hope."

Dr. Christopher Farrar of Anderson Hospital: They've seen a large spike in cases, which has translated into increasing hospitalizations and deaths. It's a "terrible disease" that causes pain and suffering.

Farrar: Because of COVID-19, people aren't able to visit their families in the hospital. They have to have phone calls where they discuss end-of-life care.

Farrar: "I have the honor and privilege of working with extraordinary people, caring and compassionate providers."

Pritzker: "It's hard to tell right now" how many deaths reported today, if any, were from the weekend. "It's very hard to tell with the initial information that we get."

Pritzker: "It's just a fact of life that hospitals don't all report exactly the same" or at the same time.

Ezike: Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. "We do know that there are people that may exhibit symptoms maybe from day 10-14, but I've always said the majority ... of infections are detected" at Day 7.

Ezike: Even if you stop quarantining before 14 days, you should still take safety precautions.

"We're foregoing the possibility of missing a few infections," but maybe people will better adhere to the quarantine guidelines if they don't have to do all 14 days.

Ezike: "If everybody does the 10 days ... we will get 90-99% of those infections. Would I like to get 100%? Of course. But if we can get 90-99%, we're still ahead of the game" if people will actually quarantine.

Ezike: "We do know that you have a much better chance of surviving COVID-19 in the hospital now as opposed to wave one. So I've looked at the difference between wave one and wave two. The average length of stay was about nine days, nine to 11 days in wave one. And it's about ...

"seven, seven to nine for wave two. So we've cut some time off." Some stays are multiple weeks, even months; but the average has dropped.

Ezike: We know better treatments. Now we have another tool with the monoclonal antibodies.

Ezike: "The idea, again, is always prevention" and avoiding getting sick in the first place.

Pritzker: The recommendation from ASIP, which came yesterday, is to include in the same category the congregate category, long-term care residents and workers with health care workers.

He's learned we won't need to divide the number of doses to give people a second dose.

Pritzker: If they get 109,000 from Pfizer, as they expect, they will be able to put that into 109,000 people. And they'll get a second dose a few weeks later.

Ezike: "The numbers I have for extra deaths, I don't have numbers that high; I think from the beginning of the year, I have the excess death total at about 13,000-17,000. So, 26,000 is a little bit higher. ... We have deaths that we can attribute to COVID, and then we have ...

"these excess deaths. These excess deaths, what are they? They could be — maybe, he's combining the COVID deaths with what I'm calling the excess deaths. So we're on the same page. ... Maybe, early on in the pandemic, those were COVID deaths that were not recognized ... .

"Maybe those were deaths of people who delayed care because of the fear around COVID. There are a lot of things that have to be sorted out, but we do know that we have had a lot of excess deaths. Can't all be explained by COVID. And, again, this pandemic has caused all of ...

"this, and it is a tragedy."

COVID has resulted in many more deaths than just people who died from COVID.

Pritzker: "I talk to Midwestern governors very frequently. We have a regular set of calls not just between the governors, Republican and Democrat, across the Midwest, but also our chiefs of staff have regular calls with one another." Dr. Ezike talks to health leaders.

Pritzker: "I will say there is a commonality of the challenges and somewhat a commonality of what it will take to deal with those challenges, even though certainly from one state to another you see a lot of differences." The governor of Wisconsin, for example, has had his ...

ability to impose mitigations taken away by the Republican-led Legislature and Supreme Court there.

Pritzker: "I think that the Senate — the House voted it down, as you know. The Senate put it in its rules to allow them to have virtual hearings."

Pritzker: "Because we have a widespread problem of community spread and infection across the entire state of Illinois. There are no boundaries for this virus. So you may think that you live in a county that is less susceptible, somehow, to the virus, because you may have a ...

"lower number of cases or lower number of deaths in your county or your city. The reality is, the virus, as we saw early on in the pandemic, there were rural areas of Illinois that felt like they were immune ... . We were saying all along, this thing doesn't know any ...

"boundaries ... . And, of course, now we see that rural areas are more likely to have high infection rates" and deaths than other areas.

Pritzker: He'd be willing to get a vaccine early to assuage people's fears, but he'd rather not cut in line ahead of people who need it more.

Pritzker: "I do believe it will be safe. We'll be able to review the data to confirm that." And he hopes people will get the vaccine.

Pritzker: "What I think is that our — I want full transparency. The whole idea here is what's figure out what went wrong so we can not only hold people accountable ... but also because we want to make changes if there are changes that need to be made at our long-term care ...

"facilities across the state or specifically at our veterans homes. It's my job to make sure we act on those; certainly I want to make sure the public is aware."

Pritzker: "I have spoken with her, and the most important thing that we've directed Director Chapa LaVia to do, which she already does," is to take care of veterans in their care.

Pritzker: They've already found some issues, like there were some hand sanitizer dispensers that were using dispenser not as effective against COVID-19.

Ezike: She'd like to say she doesn't have a projection of deaths by the end of the year because she wants people to change their behavior and take safety measures, which will change the trajectory of the virus.

Ezike: "... But again, it takes every single person." People hold the power of life and death in their hands, with their masks, etc.

Pritzker: "Obviously, more time is always better, but we're not asking for an extension from the federal government."

Pritzker: He believes public service is a high calling. When you serve in office, you should be willing to answer questions from the public, reporters, etc.

Press conference over.