For nearly a week, Mayor Lori Lightfoot has been warning Chicagoans what would happen if they didn’t heed a statewide order to stay at home. On Thursday, the repercussions started.
The state announced 673 new coronavirus cases, the biggest spike since the daily announcements began.
Lightfoot ordered Chicago’s iconic lakefront and other high-profile public areas closed off, a day after crowds flouted social distancing rules to pack beaches and parks on a warm afternoon.
City officials met with the Army Corps of Engineers at McCormick Place to plan how to convert the giant convention center into a makeshift hospital with beds for thousands of people in case there’s nowhere else to put them.
And city Health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady painted a picture of mobile morgues possibly being needed to handle huge numbers of bodies if the city doesn’t manage to get the virus under control soon.
Nationally, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator warned that Cook County could be one of the next COVID-19 hot spots.
All of it represented an intensified effort to slow the disease’s spread before sick people overwhelm hospitals and push the city “to the brink.”
“The numbers indicate that this will affect all of us, or someone that we know,” Lightfoot said. “And what’s more, it has the potential to break the back of our health care system if we don’t act decisively. We’ve spent days studying the research and tracking numbers in Chicago, and I want to let you all know that we could be expecting upwards of 40,000 hospitalizations in the coming weeks. Forty thousand hospitalizations. Not 40,000 cases, but 40,000 people who require acute care in a hospital setting. That number will break our health care system.
“That is why, if you don’t act responsibly and stay at home like you’ve been ordered to do, we will be headed for a situation like we’re seeing play out catastrophically every day in New York,” the mayor added. “This will push us to the brink.”
Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Thursday said he would leave additional moves to enforce his statewide stay-at-home order to local officials, but he backed Lightfoot’s closure decision.
“I think the mayor was right, in reaction to what she saw on a sunny day, on a warmer day, frankly people seem just to not understand what we’ve said over and over again at this podium and elsewhere — we’re going to try to get the message further out to people to make them understand,” Pritzker said. “I think that the decisions about how this will be enforced are going to be done at the local level, but I have encouraged law enforcement to remind people.”
“Right now, hosting a party, crowding down by the lake, playing a pickup basketball game in a public park – if you’re doing these things, you are spitting in the face of the doctors and nurses and first-responders who are risking everything so that you can survive,” the governor said. “We are quite literally in the middle of a battle to save your life.”
Pritzker meanwhile announced the creation of a statewide donor support fund for nonprofits to assist residents. Chaired by his sister, Penny Pritzker, who served as commerce secretary under President Barack Obama, the Illinois COVID-19 Response Fund had raised $23 million, including $4 million from the billionaire governor and his foundation.
Also on Thursday, President Donald Trump approved a major federal disaster declaration for the state of Illinois as officials awaited final congressional action to provide billions of dollars to government operations and individuals affected by the coronavirus. The presidential disaster declaration provides additional governmental assistance in dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, including emergency funding for increased hospital capacity and telehealth, the governor said.
But Pritzker also said the state was waiting for Trump to act on another disaster declaration to access federal programs to assist individuals, including additional unemployment benefits as well as shelter, food and emergency supplies. Despite Trump’s action, Pritzker criticized the president’s efforts to seek an easing of personal distancing measures, potentially by mid-April, to stoke an economy falling into recession.
“I’m concerned about the desire of the president to ignore potentially the science to try to do something that I know he has a desire to do,” the governor said. “But people will die. People will get sick. We need to make sure that we’re operating on the same playbook together to save people’s lives.”
The state’s 673 new cases and seven additional deaths brings the total statewide known case count to 2,538, and 26 coronavirus-related deaths, Illinois Department of Public Health Director Dr. Ngozi Ezike said.
Ezike did strike a slightly optimistic note about the number of cases.
“Of course we know that we’re in a period of exponential growth, and so we know that the numbers are going to have these giant rises. When we looked at our initial predictions and forecasts, it did predict these large numbers. We’re fortunately a little bit under some of the predictions from the very beginning,” which she attributed to statewide limits on gatherings and school closures.
“And then we’re going to see hopefully still more improvement from the shelter-in-place as we get through an incubation period following that, so we know that these numbers were really going to grow like this, they’re slightly under predictions, which is good,” Ezike said.
After warning Wednesday that the closures could be coming, on Thursday Lightfoot said they were effective immediately. Chicago police would aggressively be ramping up patrols around trails, bike paths, green spaces, facilities and parks adjacent to the lakefront, and violators would be subject to a single warning before a ticket and possible arrest if they don’t listen, the mayor said.
“We can’t mess around with this one second longer,” Lightfoot said at an afternoon news conference.
Playing contact sports such as football, soccer and basketball is also banned under the order, she said.
Interim Chicago police Superintendent Charlie Beck said he was alarmed as he drove along the lakefront from north to south on Wednesday
“I saw thousands of people doing things that I personally love to do: walking, running, biking, but in such numbers that it did something I have spent the last four decades of my life trying to prevent,” Beck said. “What I really saw was thousands of people risking their own lives and putting other people’s lives in danger. This is serious business. This is not a game. This is not a time to think about your own physical strength and conditioning over public health. All of us have to make sacrifices.”
Police issued 56 warnings Wednesday, Beck said. Officers may start issuing citations immediately without warning to those not following the rules, though Beck said he would prefer not to be forced to take that harder line with violators.
Arwady cited the current number of cases in Chicago — 949 — as one of the reasons she’s comfortable with the shutdown.
She said the goal is to make it so that every patient with the coronavirus spreads it to less than one person on average, instead of spreading it to two or more.
“We have to get that down so that one person on average is spreading to fewer than one person,” Arwady said.
Arwady said she met members of the Army Corps of Engineers at McCormick Place on Thursday to begin figuring out how to set up thousands of hospital beds there for coronavirus sufferers. The exercise was not done “in a theoretical sense,” Arwady said. The United Center also will transform into a logistics hub for Chicago’s coronavirus response — used for food distribution, first responder staging and collecting medical supplies
At an unrelated news conference, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said she had no immediate plans to close the forest preserves, “and there has been no crowding to my knowledge.”
Ald. Michele Smith, 43rd, said she spoke with the mayor Thursday morning about the lakefront closure.
“Everyone regrets that we have to do this, but these next two weeks are critical to curb the spread of this disease,” Smith said. “Unfortunately, one person’s inadvertent contact, through no intentional fault of their own, is another person’s case of coronavirus.”
Ald. Scott Waguespack, 32nd, whose ward includes a stretch of The 606, said earlier in the day that it would be shut down. “The possibility of transmission increases by 20% when you have lots of people running and walking in close proximity like that, so it’s important we take this step,” said Waguespack, a key Lightfoot City Council ally.
The 606 trail was quiet Thursday afternoon, with just one or two bikers still passing through. Just before 3:30 p.m., a number of police officers pulled up to the trail at California Avenue and placed barriers on the ground in front of both entrances. There were no signs at California Avenue explaining why the trail was blocked off.
Twenty minutes later, there were still no barriers at the Humboldt Boulevard entrance to the trail, just west of California Avenue.
The mayor spoke directly to those stir-crazy Chicagoans who continued to hang around outside, ripping them for putting everyone else at risk.
“Over the past few days, we’ve seen crowds of a hundred or more congregating together, particularly around our lakefront, and along The 606 and other places,” she said. “This is a blatant violation of Gov. Pritzker’s stay-at-home order. Your conduct — yours — is posing a direct threat to our public health. And without question, your continued failure to abide by these life-saving orders will erase any progress that we have made over the past week in slowing the spread of this disease, and could lead to more deaths.”
Even before Lightfoot made the official closure announcement, police were shutting down the lakefront Thursday morning.
As handfuls of runners tried to enter the Lakefront Trail at Fullerton Parkway, police officers bellowed at people to turn around. Even though they couldn’t access the lakefront, dozens of runners and walkers made their way through the dirt paths in Lincoln Park throughout the morning.
“Runners, the lakefront is closed,” an officer said, using a microphone to amplify his voice.
The trail was closed off with a barrier, and a police vehicle sat nearby with lights flashing.
“She’s got to do what she’s got to do,” Lori Kloehn said, referring to Lightfoot.
Kloehn, who uses the path nearly every day, steered clear Wednesday after hearing reports of crowds there due to sunny weather. Instead, she tried to go for a walk Thursday but was turned away.
“I refused to go on the path,” she said of the day before.
Leigh Allan also was forced by police to turn back Thursday morning. He heard reports the day before that the mayor was considering closing the trail, but he thought he could get another walk in.
“I was surprised it came this fast,” he said.
Chicago Tribune’s Antonia Ayres-Brown and Sophie Sherry contributed.
