When voters elected Lori Lightfoot to be Chicago’s 56th mayor, she expected to have her hands full with a yawning budget deficit, labor battles with the city’s teacher and police unions, and federal public corruption probes inside City Hall.
But nearly a year into her first term, Lightfoot and her administration instead are consumed with battling the coronavirus, a fast-spreading global pandemic that’s drastically changed daily life for Chicagoans and forced the mayor to take the previously unimaginable step this week of shutting down the city’s lakefront in an effort to save lives.
While dealing with a crisis unlike any faced by her recent predecessors, Lightfoot said she’s driven by a desire to do what’s right, relying on science and lessons learned from other cities across the world “where they haven’t taken the steps that are necessary to keep people safe.”
“Popular or not, you have to do what’s right. … I’m not aspiring to my next political job. I’m not putting my finger in the air and testing the political winds. I am focused on making sure I do everything I can to keep people in this city safe,” Lightfoot told the Tribune in a wide-ranging interview. “So that frees me up in a lot of instances to make what seem like really tough calls, maybe unpopular calls. But what I’ve tried to do is be very clear and very, very transparent in the way that I communicate and communicate the sense of urgency that we all have to have in this moment.”
The city’s response to the coronavirus pandemic could define Lightfoot’s first term if she seeks reelection. She’s also seen her profile elevated with appearances on cable news shows where she’s criticized President Donald Trump for bungling the crisis.
Lightfoot said she’s willing to take criticism of her decisions, including the lakefront closure.
“Some people will say, ‘Well mayor, why do you need to close the lakefront? Just tell people stay off it. What does it matter if I go for a jog along the lake?’ It’s not about ‘I’m going for a jog.’ It’s about gathering and congregating in spaces that are, the lawyer in me would say, attractive nuisances,” Lightfoot said, referring to a legal concept for tempting risks most commonly illustrated by a child drowning in a neighbor’s unfenced pool.
So far, the city has recorded 1,489 COVID-19 cases while state officials have reported 3,026 across Illinois and a rising death toll that on Friday hit 34. Schools around the state remain closed, and bars and restaurants are off-limits to dine-in customers. Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued a statewide stay-at-home order that took effect last weekend requiring people to remain in their homes except for certain exceptions such as going to work or the grocery store. And now, Lightfoot has shut down the lakefront and major parks.
Public health Commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady also has warned of the possibility that mobile morgues may be needed to handle huge numbers of bodies if the city doesn’t manage to get the virus under control soon. City officials this week also 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.
How long the city’s new reality will last, Lightfoot said, remains unclear.
“Duration, I don’t think anybody really knows,” she said. “We have some projections on when we think we will hit our peak. It’s not a secret that most of them put them sometime in April, but what precise date, what date range, varies depending upon the model and the assumptions.”
The city, state and hospitals are all doing modeling on how the disease will spread. Arwady warned the public on Thursday that the city could face more than 40,000 hospitalizations in the coming weeks if citizens don’t change their behavior.
“When you look at the projections about what our worst case scenario is that could happen if we don’t take drastic steps, (us) having a hospital system that is completely overwhelmed and incapable of responding to the needs of residents in our city, not having enough beds period, not having enough ICU beds, not having enough ventilators, on and on and on, the parade of horribles, it’s very sobering,” Lightfoot told the Tribune. “We know that if we don’t take these drastic steps, and we don’t insist that people stay home, that that’s our future and not far off.”
She added: “We have a sense of best case and worst case scenario, but a lot of it is caveated 20 ways from Sunday because a lot of it depends on our ability to keep people off the streets.”
Even once the city reaches its peak number of cases, Lightfoot said Chicago will need to remain vigilant.
“We’re concerned about not only getting past the peak that is coming, the incline, but there’s a valid worry about, will it repeat itself?” Lightfoot said. “We’re not thinking this will get over and it’ll be done. We’re thinking we’ll survive this wave, but we’re worrying about the potential for a second wave. And what we need to do in between those times to minimize the possibility of a second wave or at least mitigate it significantly.”
Lightfoot said she realized the coronavirus would be a major problem for the city shortly after an early February visit to Chinatown, where she attended the Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade and tried to assure residents that the city was safe from COVID-19.
Lightfoot called on the federal government to provide U.S. cities with clear guidance for dealing with the coronavirus and asked for assurances it would pay for costs related to dealing with the public health emergency.
At the time, there were just 11 confirmed cases of the virus in the U.S., including two in Illinois: a Chicago woman in her 60s who recently had traveled back from China, where she had been caring for a sick relative; and her husband, also in his 60s, who marked the first confirmed case of person-to-person transmission in the U.S.
But then cases began to multiply.
“We started to see what was happening on the coast, San Francisco and King County in Washington state,” Lightfoot said. “Seeing the rapid spread, the intensity of the efforts and how quickly and easily it could be to be overwhelmed definitely caught our attention.”
The most pressing problem going forward, Lightfoot said, “is making sure that our health care system can sustain a surge of cases.”
“That means both limiting the surge but also making sure that we’ve got enough coordination, beds and capacity to sustain what will come our way, because it’s coming,” Lightfoot said. “It’s just a question of how high will the peak be and over what period of time.”
City officials are keeping a tally on the number of available hospital beds, people in intensive care units, the number of ventilators being used and hospital capacity, she said. Public health officials are in contact with hospitals about collaboration and coordination, Lightfoot said, to help things run smoothly.
“Keeping in mind that hospitals are normally in competition with each other, to say that they’re the best, they offer a cure for whatever ails you, but now is the time when they actually have to be really seamlessly coordinated,” she said.
One good thing, Lightfoot said, is that Chicago hospitals generally have a lot of capacity. In ordinary times, that’s a problem for the medical centers’ bottom lines because they’re underutilized. But it’s been a benefit during this crisis because of available space, she said.
Broadly, Lightfoot said, the ramifications of coronavirus are bigger than anything seen in decades.
“The human toll, the death toll, the health care toll, it’s of a magnitude that’s far greater than I think anything that we’ve experienced in our modern times other than world wars,” Lightfoot said.
Throughout the crisis, Lightfoot acknowledged that balancing the need to keep citizens informed without panicking residents is a fine line and a daily concern.
“You don’t want to send people off in a panic, and particularly not send them off in a panic and have no concrete ways in which they can help themselves and in which you are also going to help them,” Lightfoot said. “So I’ve been very, very conscious of that and looking at, I think, some unhelpful things that have come at the federal level that have panicked people without concrete solutions and tools that you can use everyday to help yourself, help your family, help your community.”
Asked whether she’s seen a viral video showing Italian mayors yelling at citizens for not obeying public health orders, including one who threatens to send police to crash graduation parties with a flamethrower, Lightfoot laughed.
“I’ve watched it probably 15 times and I’ve sent it around to a lot of people,” Lightfoot said. “I feel their pain, I definitely do.”
