State and city officials are winding down the alternate care facility they set up at McCormick Place, saying the extra space to treat patients is not needed now that the growth of COVID-19 is slowing in Illinois.
McCormick will no longer accept new patients, and after the last of the current patients leaves, officials will take down half of its existing 1,000 beds — those meant for people who are mildly ill. Dr. Nick Turkal, executive director of the McCormick Place alternate care site, declined to say how many patients were at McCormick on Friday.
Officials plan to keep the other 500 beds standing for the time being, though without staff, Turkal said. Those beds were to accommodate sicker patients.
“We are pleased to report that the curve is flattening, and our local hospitals and health care systems continue to operate with capacity; therefore, the McCormick Place (alternate care facility) will stop operating in its clinical needs testing phase,” Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in a joint statement Friday.
“The McCormick Place Alternate Care Facility was originally developed out of an abundance of caution and based on data projections of over 40,000 hospitalizations in matter of weeks,” the statement said.
Though the number of COVID-19 cases in Illinois continues to grow, it has been increasing at a slower rate. Around the beginning of April, confirmed cases were doubling every 3.6 days, but as of mid-April, that had stretched to about 8.2 days. State leaders have said they believe Illinois is reaching the peak of the pandemic’s rate of growth.
As of Thursday, Illinois hospitals still had nearly 11,000 beds available out of 32,006 beds total, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health. About 904 intensive care unit beds were open out of 3,658 total ICU beds, though some individual hospitals and regions have been running lower on ICU capacity than others.
McCormick began accepting patients about two weeks ago. The last of its current patients is expected to leave in the next week, and the 500 beds for mildly ill patients will be taken down at that point, Turkal said.
“We’ve worked with hospitals, we’ve talked with them on a daily basis, and what we’re finding at this point is there just isn’t adequate demand to keep that low-acuity model open,” Turkal said, saying that McCormick has been like an “insurance policy” for the state.
The facility was originally to include 3,000 beds. The announcement Friday followed news last week that officials planned to scale down the facility to 1,000 beds.
Medical workers hired to staff McCormick are being redeployed elsewhere “where they are needed,” Turkal said, though he declined to say specifically where.
While the last 500 remaining beds will remain available for now, “we’ll have to revisit that in several weeks and see what’s happened in Chicagoland during that time,” Turkal said. The city and state plan to keep those beds standing as they monitor hospital capacity amid plans for Illinois hospitals to restart elective surgeries May 11.
The Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, the agency that runs McCormick Place, was authorized to spend up to $13 million on construction of the medical center. It was built by workers from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Illinois National Guard and local contractors. The majority of costs related to McCormick Place are being reimbursed by the federal government, city officials have said.
Other facilities in Illinois, including the former Advocate Sherman Hospital in Elgin, Westlake Hospital in Melrose Park and MetroSouth Medical Center in Blue Island also have been designated as alternate care sites. Pritzker said last week that those sites had not been “turned on yet because it does not appear, at least at the moment, that we need them in the near future.”
A spokesman for the governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on those sites Friday afternoon.
lschencker@chicagotribune.com
